[Mb-civic] Depleted Uranium is WMD

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0809-33.htm

Published on Tuesday, August 9, 2005 
by the Battle Creek Enquirer (Michigan)
Depleted Uranium is WMD
by Leuren Moret
 
My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin Joseph McAllister, was born in 
Battle Creek in 1895. He does not know that his first grandchild is an 
international expert on depleted uranium. I have worked in two U.S. 
nuclear weapons laboratories, and in 1991 I became a whistleblower at 
the Livermore lab. Depleted uranium is very, very, very nasty stuff:

# Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of weapon of 
mass destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal 
Code Title 50 Chapter 40 Section 2302.

# DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements, 
Hague and Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, 
U.S. laws and U.S. military law.

# Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity 
equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global 
atmosphere. That is 10 times the amount released during atmospheric 
testing which was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. 
has permanently contaminated the global atmosphere with radioactive 
pollution having a half-life of 2.5 billion years.

# The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars in Yugoslavia, 
Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since 1991, calling DU "conventional" 
weapons when in fact they are nuclear weapons.

# DU on the battlefield has three effects on living systems: it is a heavy 
metal "chemical" poison, a "radioactive" poison and has a "particulate" 
effect due to the very tiny size of the particles that are 0.1 microns and 
smaller.

# The blueprint for DU weaponry is a 1943 Manhattan Project memo to 
Gen. L. Groves that recommended development of radioactive 
materials as poison gas weapons - dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty 
bullets.

# DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators, but even 
more effective bioweapons since uranium has a strong chemical 
affinity for phosphate structures concentrated in DNA.

# DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war - it keeps giving and keeps 
killing. There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it off because 
it continues to decay into other radioactive isotopes in over 20 steps.

# Terry Jemison at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs stated in 
August 2004 that over 518,000 Gulf-era veterans (14-year period) are 
now on medical disability, and that 7,039 were wounded on the 
battlefield in that same period. Over 500,000 U.S. veterans are 
homeless.

# In some studies of soldiers who had normal babies before the war, 
67 percent of the post-war babies are born with severe birth defects - 
missing brains, eyes, organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.

# In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times higher levels of 
gamma radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive body 
burden daily of inhabitants. In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan 
are uninhabitable.

# Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One 
gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 
alpha particles per second.

Before my grandfather died, he told me that his generation had made a 
mess of this planet. I wonder what he would say to me now I would tell 
him to see "Beyond Treason" (www.beyondtreason.com), a new 
documentary about the history of treason by the U.S. government 
against our own troops: Atomic veterans, MK-Ultra, Agent Orange and 
DU. After Vietnam, Henry Kissinger said, "Military men are just dumb, 
stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. . ." (from Chapter 
5 in the "Final Days" by Woodward and Bernstein).

Leuren Moret is an international radiation specialist, with a B.S. degree 
in geology from University of California at Davis, a M.A. degree in Near 
Eastern studies from University of California at Berkeley and has done 
post-graduate work in the geosciences at UC-Davis. She is 
environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley, Calif.

© 2005 Battle Creek Enquirer
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