The Use of Depleted Uranium in Iraq
Fight Apathy Tomorrow | 27.01.2003 00:09
Depleted uranium (DU) is U238 (uranium-238), a toxic, radiactive waste. It is also used to make American (and British) ammunition, and has been used extensively in Iraq, Yugoslavia and probably Afghanistan. See www.wandsworth-stopwar.org.uk/du for full article, with more chapters.
In the 43 days of "conflict" in January/February 1991, estimates of DU munitions range from 300 (by the Pentagon's own admission) to 900 tonnes (CADU's estimate), with tanks and planes having fired over a million DU rounds. Greenpeace and the Laka Foundation go for a figure of 700-800 tonnes of DU. The discrepancies are largely due to the unknown extra DU in missiles and hardened bombs (eg. 5000 Maverick rockets were fired, and they are now believed to contain DU). About half the DU was shot in Kuwait.
14,000 D.U. tank rounds were fired during the Gulf war, while another 7,000 rounds were fired during training in the sands of Saudi Arabia.
The MoD claims that British tanks fired under 1 tonne of DU in Iraq, in the form of a total of 100 rounds. The RAF does not appear to have used DU munitions.
To put the quantity of DU usage in context of the scale of the assault on Iraq, the US launched over 120,000 tonnes of explosives (source), delivered by 110,000 aircraft sorties, 300+ cruise missiles and artillery, constituting over a quarter of a million bombs (3000 of which were dropped on Baghdad). This was America's first DU war, and the percentage of DU has grown with every bombing campaign since.
Before dealing with the human and environmental cost of DU, it must be pointed out that this wasn't a clean and surgical war on any level. Even by the Pentagon's own figures, barely 7% of the munitions were "smart".
These articles remind us how just how deadly America's conventional weapons proved to be:
Everyone has always agreed that the basic infrastructure was completely shattered - electricity, water supplies, sewage, bridges, communications. When Martti Ahtisaari, then the UN Special Rapporteur, visited Iraq immediately after the 1991 day Gulf war, he said:
Nothing we had seen or heard could have prepared us for this particular devastation - a country reduced to a pre-industrial age for a considerable time to come.
This then, is the context in which sanctions and DU began to do their deadly work, but this massive a priori destruction is still relevant to a discusssion of DU, because given the American doctrine of total warfare, such devastation will always be the prelude to the uranium nightmare that awaits all countries attacked by the US.
As for the effects of DU, its predictable twin legacy in Iraq consists of cancers and deformed births on a vast scale. The use of DU in the Gulf War didn't become common knowledge until 1993, but Iraqi doctors had already begun comparing the symptons they were seeing with the after-effects of Hiroshima.
All these problems are exacerbated by the health nightmare which bombing and sanctions have created in Iraq. Malnutrition and shortage of medicines compound the lethality of DU's toxic and radiological effects, and the former is also be responsible for a sharp increase in premature births. While cancer and deformities are the headline symptons, radiation also damages the immune system, and can have an indeterminate number of effects. Given the cocktail of disasters that have befallen Iraq, the effect of malnutrition from sanctions cannot therefore be disentangled from DU. This December 1995 report from the UN FAO captures the magnitude of Iraq's health crisis:
More than one million Iraqis have died - 567,000 of them children - as a direct consequence of economic sanctions ... As many as 12 percent of the children surveyed in Baghdad are wasted, 28 percent stunted and 29 percent underweight
As if that wasn't enough, there are persistent and credible reports of a low-level biowarfare waged by the US against Iraq - in 1999 there were epidemics of foot-and-mouth (inevitable, once the US inspectors destroyed Iraq's vaccine laboratory) and screw worm
The biggest act of biological warfare however, was of course the destruction of Iraq's water supplies (Felicity Arbuthnot - Sunday Herald, 17 September 2000).
The reported figures for the increase in cancers vary widely, and it will likely continue to be difficult to pin them down, as the incidence of new cancers is increasing rapidly, and some of the statistics that appear may only be counting certain types of cancers. Many reports speak of a quadrupling nationally, but for specific cancers such as leukemia, and in particular regions such as around Basra, the increase is much higher, while doctors also report a large incease in breast cancer, including women in their 20s. TFTT reports a 10-fold increase in cancer in the South.
Certainly, most Iraqi doctors consider there to be an epidemic of cancers.
The increase in deformed births is equally marked. Once again though, it's not possible to pinpoint an exact figure, and some stats distinguish between extreme deformity, and other cases - with no clear dividing line between the two. Claims of an overall 20-fold increase are common, along with a quadrupling of so-called extreme deformities.
In Basra General Hospital, Ground Zero of this unfolding disaster, there are 1 or 2 deformed births every day. In the absence of any foetal scanning equipment (due to sanctions), pregnant women live in terror of what will emerge after 9 months.
Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA
from May 1992 report, The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with Special Reference to Iraq, by Ross Mirkarimi of The Arms Control Research
The German physician, Dr Siegwart Horst-Guenther, Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute, was one of the first people to investigate the use of DU in Iraq, and was reporting a strange new disease amongst children as early as late 1991. In 1993, he tried to bring a DU bullet from Basra into Germany to analyse it, and was arrested at Berlin airport because he set off all the radiation sensors - even though the bullet was in a lead-lined box. So much for the continuing claims that DU is harmless ...
He is now also seriously ill with cancer, but has published a book - Uranium Projectiles - Severely Maimed Soldiers, Deformed Babies, Dying Children
In December 1998, Baghdad staged a major international conference on DU, Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium used by the US and British Forces in the 1991 Gulf War.
One case study found that 5% of babies were born with congenital deformities, and another 2% were stillborn.
Based on the observed exponential level of increase, Prof Mikdam Saleh presented a paper predicting that 44% of the population around Basra would develop lung cancer within ten years (NB: population of the Basra region is 2 to 3 million)
In 1999, the Iraqi Atomic Agency estimated that 48% of the population had been exposed to varying degrees of carcinogenic material.
This early 1999 article by Felicity Arbuthnot, captures the hopeless situation in Iraq's hospitals.
The Health of the Iraqi People
In July 1999, the Iraqi oncologist Prof Mona Kammas presented to the Roundtable Conference, regarding the results of Iraqi investigations into the scale and effects of DU contamination. Note that such Iraqi efforts have always been hampered by sanctions and a shortage of equipment. Her speech is archived here, on the Mariam Appeal website.
The initial part of this NI article probably belongs in the cover-up section, with its tales of an official campaign of burglary, intimidation and sacking (and the harassment of 2 British vets who travelled to the 1998 Baghdad conference, to find out more about their illness), but it also reports that radiation levels in Basra's flora and fauna have reached 84 times the WHO's recommended safe limit, while Mosul in the north has suffered "only" a 5-fold increase.
Poisoned Legacy: Felicity Arbuthnot - New Internationalist, September 1999 (issue 316)
NB: The Jassim link in that article is incorrect - should have pointed here, in issue 307
This 2000 photo-story in a Hiroshima newspaper reports a 300 to 400% increase in cancers. Their senior staff writer, Akira Tashiro, has published a book about DU, Discounted Casualties - The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium. Its online introduction reports that in Basra, there were 34 deaths from cancer in 1988, 219 in 1996 and 586 in 2000 - a 17-fold increase.
In late 2000, Dr Chris Busby travelled to Iraq, and reported a 20-fold increase in alpha activity in the air, in the southern desert battlefields. In Basra itself, it was already 10 times higher than it was in Baghdad.
See reports at the LLRC and in the Egyptian paper, Al-Ahram
In February 2001, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an Iraqi oncologist in a Basra cancer clinic, and a member of the UK's Royal Society of Physicians stated:
The desert dust carries death. Our studies indicate that more than forty percent of the population around Basra will get cancer. We are living through another Hiroshima
Three years earlier, he had told the Washington Post that cancer rates were up five or six fold since 1991, and remarked that Iraq had been exposed to eight years of war with Iran, without experiencing any such health effects. He also pointed to a marked increase in leukemia and lymphatic cancer, which he said are often related to radiation.
Andy Kershaw of The Independent reports on deformities and leukemias from Basra Maternity and Children's hospital, in a city which was hit by 96,000 DU shells, and whose fertile grasslands to the West, now DU-infested, are still being used to grow food and rear livestock.
This hospital saw 11 congenital abnormalies in the the first four years after the Gulf War, but 221 in 2001. It also saw a 4-fold increase in leukemia, and Dr Jawad Al-Ali, the UK-trained director of oncology in nearby Basra teaching hospital, reports a doubling of cancer cases every year, as well as an increase in their severity.
The successful treatment rates for leukemia when the right drugs are available is 95%, but in Basra the figure is only 20%, due to sanctions. Many patients suffer fatal relapses after an initially successful course of treatment, when the sporadic supply of drugs runs out.
A Chamber Of Horrors Next To The Garden Of Eden - 10 December 2001
Ramzi Kysia, a delegate from the US Voices In The Wilderness, points the finger of blame for the cancers at DU, and at its radiological properties, rather than its chemical toxicity.
If the source of the epidemic were chemical, there would have been a sharp spike in cancer rates following the Gulf war, followed by rapid decreases as the source of the contamination disappeared. In contrast, with radiation the strength of association increases as time passes. The fact that cancer rates are still increasing at an exponential rate in Iraq strongly implies a radioactive source.
Weapons of mass destruction - going nuclear in Iraq - 27 December 2001
A Seattle paper reports that 34 people died of cancer in Southern Iraq, 450 in 1998, and 603 in 2001, ie. a 17-fold increase. It also reports the incidence of deformed births per 100,000 rising from 11 in 1989 to 116 in 2001
Seattle Pi - 12 November 2002
In December 1998, the US/UK resumed the unrestricted bombing of Iraq with the 4-day offensive they called Desert Fox, in which the US fired 420 cruise missiles and flew 600 bombing sorties.
The bombing continues to this day, with varying levels of intensity (about 25,000 sorties flown since 1998), and it is probable that some of the new heavyweight bunker busters containing up to 1.5 tonnes of DU each (see Dai Williams report, in this article's section on Weaponisation of DU) have been used.
14,000 D.U. tank rounds were fired during the Gulf war, while another 7,000 rounds were fired during training in the sands of Saudi Arabia.
The MoD claims that British tanks fired under 1 tonne of DU in Iraq, in the form of a total of 100 rounds. The RAF does not appear to have used DU munitions.
To put the quantity of DU usage in context of the scale of the assault on Iraq, the US launched over 120,000 tonnes of explosives (source), delivered by 110,000 aircraft sorties, 300+ cruise missiles and artillery, constituting over a quarter of a million bombs (3000 of which were dropped on Baghdad). This was America's first DU war, and the percentage of DU has grown with every bombing campaign since.
Before dealing with the human and environmental cost of DU, it must be pointed out that this wasn't a clean and surgical war on any level. Even by the Pentagon's own figures, barely 7% of the munitions were "smart".
These articles remind us how just how deadly America's conventional weapons proved to be:
- WAR CRIMES: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal - Ramsey Clark (former US Attorney General) and Others
- Myth of Surgical Bombing - Paul Walker of MIT, 1991 (and a similiar article by him, in May 1991 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists)
- Homicide, not War - John Pilger, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 June 2000
- Massacre on the Basra Highway: The massacre of tens of thousands of retreating Iraqis (and fleeing civilians) on the infamous Basra "Highway of Death" in the final two days of the war, after Iraq had already accepted UN resolution 660 and the Soviet cease-fire proposal.
- Massacre at Rumaylah: The slaughter of uncounted thousands of retreating Iraqis (and once again, civilians) at Rumaylah by General Barry McCaffrey, 2 days after the ceasefire came into effect.
- Clean lies, dirty wars - Patricia Axelrod, Green Left Weekly (Australia), 30 October 2002 (an American veterans activist describes her 1992 visit to Iraq)
Everyone has always agreed that the basic infrastructure was completely shattered - electricity, water supplies, sewage, bridges, communications. When Martti Ahtisaari, then the UN Special Rapporteur, visited Iraq immediately after the 1991 day Gulf war, he said:
Nothing we had seen or heard could have prepared us for this particular devastation - a country reduced to a pre-industrial age for a considerable time to come.
This then, is the context in which sanctions and DU began to do their deadly work, but this massive a priori destruction is still relevant to a discusssion of DU, because given the American doctrine of total warfare, such devastation will always be the prelude to the uranium nightmare that awaits all countries attacked by the US.
As for the effects of DU, its predictable twin legacy in Iraq consists of cancers and deformed births on a vast scale. The use of DU in the Gulf War didn't become common knowledge until 1993, but Iraqi doctors had already begun comparing the symptons they were seeing with the after-effects of Hiroshima.
All these problems are exacerbated by the health nightmare which bombing and sanctions have created in Iraq. Malnutrition and shortage of medicines compound the lethality of DU's toxic and radiological effects, and the former is also be responsible for a sharp increase in premature births. While cancer and deformities are the headline symptons, radiation also damages the immune system, and can have an indeterminate number of effects. Given the cocktail of disasters that have befallen Iraq, the effect of malnutrition from sanctions cannot therefore be disentangled from DU. This December 1995 report from the UN FAO captures the magnitude of Iraq's health crisis:
More than one million Iraqis have died - 567,000 of them children - as a direct consequence of economic sanctions ... As many as 12 percent of the children surveyed in Baghdad are wasted, 28 percent stunted and 29 percent underweight
As if that wasn't enough, there are persistent and credible reports of a low-level biowarfare waged by the US against Iraq - in 1999 there were epidemics of foot-and-mouth (inevitable, once the US inspectors destroyed Iraq's vaccine laboratory) and screw worm
The biggest act of biological warfare however, was of course the destruction of Iraq's water supplies (Felicity Arbuthnot - Sunday Herald, 17 September 2000).
The reported figures for the increase in cancers vary widely, and it will likely continue to be difficult to pin them down, as the incidence of new cancers is increasing rapidly, and some of the statistics that appear may only be counting certain types of cancers. Many reports speak of a quadrupling nationally, but for specific cancers such as leukemia, and in particular regions such as around Basra, the increase is much higher, while doctors also report a large incease in breast cancer, including women in their 20s. TFTT reports a 10-fold increase in cancer in the South.
Certainly, most Iraqi doctors consider there to be an epidemic of cancers.
The increase in deformed births is equally marked. Once again though, it's not possible to pinpoint an exact figure, and some stats distinguish between extreme deformity, and other cases - with no clear dividing line between the two. Claims of an overall 20-fold increase are common, along with a quadrupling of so-called extreme deformities.
In Basra General Hospital, Ground Zero of this unfolding disaster, there are 1 or 2 deformed births every day. In the absence of any foetal scanning equipment (due to sanctions), pregnant women live in terror of what will emerge after 9 months.
Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA
from May 1992 report, The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with Special Reference to Iraq, by Ross Mirkarimi of The Arms Control Research
The German physician, Dr Siegwart Horst-Guenther, Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute, was one of the first people to investigate the use of DU in Iraq, and was reporting a strange new disease amongst children as early as late 1991. In 1993, he tried to bring a DU bullet from Basra into Germany to analyse it, and was arrested at Berlin airport because he set off all the radiation sensors - even though the bullet was in a lead-lined box. So much for the continuing claims that DU is harmless ...
He is now also seriously ill with cancer, but has published a book - Uranium Projectiles - Severely Maimed Soldiers, Deformed Babies, Dying Children
In December 1998, Baghdad staged a major international conference on DU, Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium used by the US and British Forces in the 1991 Gulf War.
One case study found that 5% of babies were born with congenital deformities, and another 2% were stillborn.
Based on the observed exponential level of increase, Prof Mikdam Saleh presented a paper predicting that 44% of the population around Basra would develop lung cancer within ten years (NB: population of the Basra region is 2 to 3 million)
In 1999, the Iraqi Atomic Agency estimated that 48% of the population had been exposed to varying degrees of carcinogenic material.
This early 1999 article by Felicity Arbuthnot, captures the hopeless situation in Iraq's hospitals.
The Health of the Iraqi People
In July 1999, the Iraqi oncologist Prof Mona Kammas presented to the Roundtable Conference, regarding the results of Iraqi investigations into the scale and effects of DU contamination. Note that such Iraqi efforts have always been hampered by sanctions and a shortage of equipment. Her speech is archived here, on the Mariam Appeal website.
The initial part of this NI article probably belongs in the cover-up section, with its tales of an official campaign of burglary, intimidation and sacking (and the harassment of 2 British vets who travelled to the 1998 Baghdad conference, to find out more about their illness), but it also reports that radiation levels in Basra's flora and fauna have reached 84 times the WHO's recommended safe limit, while Mosul in the north has suffered "only" a 5-fold increase.
Poisoned Legacy: Felicity Arbuthnot - New Internationalist, September 1999 (issue 316)
NB: The Jassim link in that article is incorrect - should have pointed here, in issue 307
This 2000 photo-story in a Hiroshima newspaper reports a 300 to 400% increase in cancers. Their senior staff writer, Akira Tashiro, has published a book about DU, Discounted Casualties - The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium. Its online introduction reports that in Basra, there were 34 deaths from cancer in 1988, 219 in 1996 and 586 in 2000 - a 17-fold increase.
In late 2000, Dr Chris Busby travelled to Iraq, and reported a 20-fold increase in alpha activity in the air, in the southern desert battlefields. In Basra itself, it was already 10 times higher than it was in Baghdad.
See reports at the LLRC and in the Egyptian paper, Al-Ahram
In February 2001, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an Iraqi oncologist in a Basra cancer clinic, and a member of the UK's Royal Society of Physicians stated:
The desert dust carries death. Our studies indicate that more than forty percent of the population around Basra will get cancer. We are living through another Hiroshima
Three years earlier, he had told the Washington Post that cancer rates were up five or six fold since 1991, and remarked that Iraq had been exposed to eight years of war with Iran, without experiencing any such health effects. He also pointed to a marked increase in leukemia and lymphatic cancer, which he said are often related to radiation.
Andy Kershaw of The Independent reports on deformities and leukemias from Basra Maternity and Children's hospital, in a city which was hit by 96,000 DU shells, and whose fertile grasslands to the West, now DU-infested, are still being used to grow food and rear livestock.
This hospital saw 11 congenital abnormalies in the the first four years after the Gulf War, but 221 in 2001. It also saw a 4-fold increase in leukemia, and Dr Jawad Al-Ali, the UK-trained director of oncology in nearby Basra teaching hospital, reports a doubling of cancer cases every year, as well as an increase in their severity.
The successful treatment rates for leukemia when the right drugs are available is 95%, but in Basra the figure is only 20%, due to sanctions. Many patients suffer fatal relapses after an initially successful course of treatment, when the sporadic supply of drugs runs out.
A Chamber Of Horrors Next To The Garden Of Eden - 10 December 2001
Ramzi Kysia, a delegate from the US Voices In The Wilderness, points the finger of blame for the cancers at DU, and at its radiological properties, rather than its chemical toxicity.
If the source of the epidemic were chemical, there would have been a sharp spike in cancer rates following the Gulf war, followed by rapid decreases as the source of the contamination disappeared. In contrast, with radiation the strength of association increases as time passes. The fact that cancer rates are still increasing at an exponential rate in Iraq strongly implies a radioactive source.
Weapons of mass destruction - going nuclear in Iraq - 27 December 2001
A Seattle paper reports that 34 people died of cancer in Southern Iraq, 450 in 1998, and 603 in 2001, ie. a 17-fold increase. It also reports the incidence of deformed births per 100,000 rising from 11 in 1989 to 116 in 2001
Seattle Pi - 12 November 2002
In December 1998, the US/UK resumed the unrestricted bombing of Iraq with the 4-day offensive they called Desert Fox, in which the US fired 420 cruise missiles and flew 600 bombing sorties.
The bombing continues to this day, with varying levels of intensity (about 25,000 sorties flown since 1998), and it is probable that some of the new heavyweight bunker busters containing up to 1.5 tonnes of DU each (see Dai Williams report, in this article's section on Weaponisation of DU) have been used.
Fight Apathy Tomorrow
Homepage:
www.wandsworth-stopwar.org.uk/du
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