OLEAN -- Let us presume for a moment, for the sake of argument, that President Bush's imminent war on Iraq is:
Realitygram to Washington:
Even if all these desirable rose-tinted outcomes occur -- and they are the longest of geopolitical longshots -- America, its federal government, and the military face a problem of staggering proportion, one that could last for eons, one that could alter humanity itself. The Pentagon is aware of the problem, but appears to believe it will go away if simply ignored.
If so, it will have to wait at least 4.5 billion years.
That is the half-life of depleted uranium (DU), the Pentagon's "new" wonder weapon and cherished au courant war toy.
A "half-life" in scientific lingo is the period required for the disintegration of half of the atoms in a sample of some specific radioactive substance. The Gulf War "sample" of DU left in the deserts of Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia in 1991 by American and British forces during the 43 days of Desert Storm and the training-buildup period preceding it amounted to about 320 tons -- more than 700,000 rounds of the dense and deadly metal weapon. Another 10 tons were fired over Kosovo in the mid-1990s.
Should we attack Iraq, DU will be the American weapon of choice from start to finish.
Douglas Rokke -- a nuclear health physicist, a 35-year Army veteran, the man who trained the troops in radiation safety technique during the Gulf War, and until recently the Army's top expert on the way DU ammo affects the human body -- calls this substance a "toxicological nightmare."
Rokke lectured last week at St. Bonaventure University here. What he had to say sent a crowd of about 150 students, faculty and residents out into a peaceful evening snowfall, muttering in depression and a sad kind of what-have-we-wrought awe.
Depleted uranium is assembled from uranium hexaflouride, a by-product of the uranium enrichment process necessary for making the reactor fuel that runs nuclear power plants. Over the years of our creature-comfort Atomic Age, the pesky leftovers of this utility process have piled up until the Department of Energy now maintains about a half-million metric tons of DU waste material in little-publicized sites around the country.
The federal government keeps saying it's going to clean them up, but that would cost scores of billions of dollars.
So, when munitions manufacturers discovered the DU material could be fashioned into superior anti-tank weapons, the Pentagon viewed this as a "winners all" situation. Good old American ingenuity, turning stupendous costly waste into stupendous costly weapons -- what more could a federal official desire?
DU projectiles come in several sizes -- all the way from 7.62 mm to 50-caliber to the 105 mm shells to the big 120 mm round to cluster bombs to gyroscope-guided "smart bomb" missiles.
Some are tipped or merely coated with DU, but most are solid masses of DU. The attraction to anti-tank armament experts is three-fold: They start burning furiously upon launch, they punch with metal-melting efficiency through the heaviest metal armor like a pencil through a sheet of paper; once inside the tank or similar target they explode in a firestorm of hellish heat that "cooks off" anything surrounding.
No one, not even Rokke, disputes that DU makes one helluva weapon. Those old enough to remember TV coverage of Gulf War One will recall the images of Iraqi tank turrets flying along with Iraqi tanker limbs high into the resulting arc of flame as tanks and armored personnel carriers were reduced to smithereens in a nanosecond. They will also recall the "Highway of Death" produced on the penultimate day of Desert Storm as A-10 "Warthog" jets and AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships blasted fleeing Iraqi convoys into charred dust on the road back to Baghdad.
The DU rounds were used in war for the first time during Desert Storm. American troops and American military doctors were not informed about the new super-weapon. Neither were they trained in cleanup procedures, nor radioactive material protocol, nor contamination management.
The Pentagon, in the decade of medical controversy that followed, claimed such internal secrecy was necessary to keep other nations from discovering this advantageous armament. It didn't work. Today, 17 known countries -- maybe more -- possess DU weaponry. DU rounds are the favorite armament in the international arms market. Four producing countries unabashedly peddle the DU weapons -- Russia, Great Britain, Pakistan, and, of course, the United States. So much for secrecy.
When a DU shell ignites and explodes, uranium oxide and other deadly dust particles are released in the tiniest of fractional micron dimensions. A cloud of invisible aerosolized powder lingers. Enter Rokke, who was assigned to lead American teams in cleaning up U.S. tanks blown apart by "friendly fire" in the chaos of war. Rokke, contrary to Pentagon predictions, discovered significant and dangerous radiation extended in a radius from the tanks of about a football field and a half.
It took his team three months to clean up 24 tanks for transport back to the United States. It took the Army another three years to decontaminate the same vehicles. It only took three days for Rokke and his crew to start getting sick. But Rokke and his team returned to the states to keep blowing up dummy tanks, videotaping the process, then measuring the radiation emitted by the resulting uranium oxide clouds, portions of which were inhaled and ingested by the team members -- portions of which contaminated small skin wounds incurred in the rigorous procedures. When Rokke had his urine tested five years ago in a Veterans Affairs medical center, it came back containing 5,000 times the amount of permissible uranium compounds.
About a third of the 100 veterans on his team, says Rokke, are now deceased. He has severe lung and kidney damage, muscle and tendon damage from fibromyalgia, and is prone to skin eruptions, breathing problems, and chronic fatigue.
About a fourth of the 697,000 troops sent to Gulf War One have complained in its dozen-year wake of these and many more symptoms of chronic illness. Rokke, and many others, believe DU had much to do with these sicknesses. He started speaking out. He started writing memos. He urged that DU be stricken from the American arsenal and those of other nations. He recommended DU weaponry be submitted for prohibition by international agencies. The Pentagon retaliated.
Rokke -- once the U.S. Army Chemical School project director for writing low-level radiation safety procedures, and only five years ago the director of the militarily prestigious Bradley Radiological Laboratories at Fort McClellan in Alabama -- was canned.
Placed on reserve duty, nearly broke, getting by through substitute teaching in Illinois high schools, his name and reports purged from all existing military Web sites and Gulf War computer links, his VA disability check garnisheed, Rokke does not seem bitter about the Pentagon's steadfast denial that DU rounds are dangerous to the troops or the civilians who rummage around destroyed vehicles and shell remnants for souvenirs long after a war. The prime purpose of a military, he reminds audiences, "is to kill and to destroy."
Rokke is not lonely in his crusade. Other former federal experts echo his accusations. Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine and radiology at Georgetown University, is credentialed up the ying-yang.
A fellow of the American College of Physicians, a medical consultant for Hadassah University in treating the children of Chernobyl, a U.S. medical team leader for the Nuclear Treaty Joint Verification component in the former Soviet Union, chief of nuclear medicine at the VA Medical Center in Wilmington, Del., Durakovic held the highest radiology credentials an official in Washington could hold.
Durakovic was the guy the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) designated to assess the White House for radiation -- and hopefully pronounce an all-clear -- in case some terrorist detonated a low-level nuclear suitcase bomb or similar device in Washington. A colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, Durakovic served in Desert Shield, the five-month preparatory run-up in combat theater to Gulf War One, as chief of a medical detachment. No one told him about DU weaponry either.
After the war, as a VA doctor, he assessed 24 soldiers from a New Jersey transportation and supply company who had briefly inspected and cleaned some tanks destroyed by DU. He sent his readings to two other VA doctors in Boston, who confirmed 14 of the two dozen troops had been contaminated. The VA asked Durakovic to refrain from publicly describing the effects of DU on the human body. He refused. He said that was akin to "lying." The VA fired him. Durakovic soon testified before the House Government Reform Committee. When investigators for that panel -- about the only federal group that showed real concern over Gulf War Illness -- met, the records of the 24 New Jersey troop examinations had somehow disappeared.
Durakovic has since fled to his native Europe. He says it's too dangerous trying to be honest in Washington. He describes use of DU in Gulf War One as a "Pentagon experiment Š one million human beings on the side of the U.S.-led alliance" and "three million humans on the Iraqi side." Durakovic says when scientists conduct experiments with depleted uranium, "we dress like astronauts -- our soldiers had no protection."
The Pentagon portrays DU as something only recently discovered useful as weaponry, and therefore a substance still under great study, so few conclusions as to health hazards can be drawn. This is pure bushwa. It was envisioned and acted upon nearly 60 years ago.
An Oak Ridge, Tenn. document classified "Secret" by the War Department -- as the Pentagon was then called -- shows three top scientists from the Manhattan Project, the group that developed the atomic bomb, reported on Oct. 30, 1943 to Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the famous head of that unit, that the newly discovered radioactive material would make an excellent "warfare instrument."
The secret report, declassified in 1974, continues that such material could easily be "ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person's body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty."
The report goes on to say such a weapon "can be distributed in a dust or smoke form so finely powdered that it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging."
Hey, if a little old country professor like me can find this scary stuff, the Pentagon's eight zillion intelligence experts and researchers should be able to come upon it.
The new gas masks the Pentagon is providing troops for Gulf War Two -- which the congressional watchdog General Accounting Office says are deficient -- strain out particles of uranium material 10 microns or larger. Rokke and his team measured DU particles as small as .3 microns.
You do the math.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | February 4 2003 |