American Free Press four-part series on Depleted Uranium (DU) by Christopher Bollyn

Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons! [link]

"Depleted Uranium:U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity"
2004-08-08 by Christopher Bollyn for "American Free Press" [http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/depleted_uranium.html], reposted at Mindfully.org [http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-War-Iraq8aug04.htm] [archive.org]:
America’s controlled press has failed to inform the public that, in spite of years of UN inspections and numerous international treaties, tons of banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—used and unused—remain in Iraq. Indeed, both chemical and radio active WMD have been—and continue to be used against U.S. and coalition soldiers.
The media silence surrounding these banned WMDs, and the horrendous consequences of their use, is due to the simple fact that they are being used by the U.S.-led coalition. They are the new “silver bullet” in the U.S. arsenal. They are depleted uranium weapons.
Depleted uranium (DU) weapons were first used during Gulf War I against Iraq in 1991. The Pentagon estimated that between 315 and 350 tons of DU were fired during the first gulf war. During the 2003 invasion and current occupation of Iraq, U.S. and British troops have reportedly used more than five times as many DU bombs and shells as the total number used during the 1991 war.
While the use of DU weapons and their effect on human health and the environment are subjects of extreme importance, the Pentagon is noticeably reluctant to discuss these weapons. Despite numerous calls to specific individuals identified as being the appointed spokesmen on the subject, not one would answer their phone during normal business hours for the purpose of this article.
(Dr. Doug Rokke, photo by Paul Goettlich)

Dr. Doug Rokke, [more on Doug Rokke https://archive.today/NWMss] on the other hand, former director of the U.S. Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, is very willing to talk about the effects of DU. Rokke was involved in the “clean up” of 34 Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles erroneously hit by U.S. projectiles during the 1991 gulf war. Today he suffers from the ill effects of DU in his body.
Rokke told American Free Press that the Pentagon uses DU weapons because they are the most effective at killing and destroying everything they hit. The highest level of the U.S. and British governments have “totally disregarded the consequences” of the use of DU weapons, Rokke said.
The first gulf war had the largest “friendly fire” disasters in the history of American warfare, Rokke says. “The majority of the casualties were the result of friendly fire,” he told AFP.
DU is used in many forms of ammunition as an armor penetrator because of its extreme density. The uranium used in these missiles and bombs is a by-product of the nuclear enrichment process. Experts say the Department of Energy has 100 million tons of DU and using it in weapons saves the government great sums to safely dispose of it.
This is why DU is shaped into penetrator rods used in the billions of rounds being fired in Iraq and Afghanistan. The radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons industry has, in effect, been exported and spread in Iraq, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Puerto Rico and elsewhere.

THE REAL “DIRTY BOMBS” -
“A flying rod of solid uranium 18 inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter” is what becomes of a DU tank round after it is fired, Rokke said. Because uranium-238 is pyrophoric, meaning it burns on contact with air, DU rounds are burning as they fly.
When the DU penetrator hits an object it breaks up and causes secondary explosions, Rokke said. “It’s way beyond a dirty bomb,” Rokke said, referring to the terror weapon that uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material.
Some of the uranium used with DU weapons vaporizes into extremely small particles, which are dispersed into the atmosphere, where they remain until they fall to the ground with the rain. As a gas, the chemically toxic and radioactive uranium can easily enter the body through the skin or the lungs and be carried around the world until it falls to earth with the rain.
AFP asked Marion Falk, a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore lab, if he thought that DU weapons operate in a similar manner as a dirty bomb. “That’s exactly what they are,” Falk said. “They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.”
According to Falk, more than 30 percent of the DU fired from the cannons of U.S. tanks is reduced to particles one-tenth of a micron (one millionth of a meter) in size or smaller on impact.
“The larger the bang” the greater the amount of DU that is dispersed into the atmosphere, Falk said. With the larger missiles and bombs, nearly 100 percent of the DU is reduced to radioactive dust particles of the “micron size” or smaller, he said.
While the Pentagon officially denies the dangers of DU weapons, since at least 1943 the military has been aware of the extreme toxicity of uranium dispersed as a gas. A declassified memo written by James B. Conant and two other physicists working on the U.S. nuclear project during World War II and sent to Brig. Gen. L.R. Groves on October 30, 1943, provides the evidence:
“As a gas warfare instrument the [radioactive] material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles or aerial bombs,” the 1943 memo reads. “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 accumulation in a person’s body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty.”
The use of radioactive materials “as a terrain contaminant” to “deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiation” is also discussed in the Groves memo of 1943.
“Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it’s not going to decrease very much over time,” Leonard Dietz, a retired nuclear physicist with 33 years experience, told The New York Daily News. “In the long run … veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem.”
Inhaled particles of radioactive uranium oxide dust will either lodge in the lungs or travel through the body, depending on their size. The smallest particles can be carried through cell walls and “affect the master code—the expression of the DNA,” Falk told AFP.
Inhaled, it “affects the body in so many ways and there are so many different symptoms that they want to give it different names,” Falk said about the wide variety of ailments afflicting gulf war veterans.
Today, more than one out of every three veterans from the first gulf war are permanently disabled. Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs said that of the 592,561 discharged veterans from the 1991 war in Iraq, 179,310 are receiving disability compensation, and another 24,763 cases are pending.
The “epigenetic damage” done by DU has resulted in many grossly deformed children born in areas such as southern Iraq, where tons of DU have contaminated the environment and local population. An untold number of American babies have also been born with severe birth defects as a result of DU contamination.
The New York Daily News conducted a study on nine recently returned soldiers from the New York National Guard. Four of the nine were found to have “almost certainly” inhaled radioactive dust from exploded DU shells.
Laboratory tests revealed two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the nine soldiers. The four soldiers are the first confirmed cases of inhaled DU from the current Iraq war.
“These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle,” said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the soldiers and performed the testing. “Other American soldiers, who were in combat, must have more DU exposure,” Duracovic said. Duracovic is a colonel in the Army reserves and served in the 1991 gulf war.
The test results showing that four of nine New York guardsmen test positive for DU “suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians,” Daily News reported.
“A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust,” Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium, said, “And the health impact is worrisome for the future.”

HOTTER THAN HELL -
“I’m hotter than hell,” Rokke told AFP. The Department of Energy tested Rokke in 1994 and found that he was excreting more than 5,000 times the permissible level of depleted uranium. Rokke, however, was not informed of the results until 1996.
As director of the Depleted Uranium Project in 1994-95, Rokke said his task was three-fold: determine how to provide medical care for DU victims, how to clean it up and how to educate and train personnel using DU weapons.
Today, Rokke says that DU cannot be cleaned up and there is no medical care. “Once you’re zapped—you’re zapped,” Rokke said. Among the health problems Rokke is suffering, as a result of DU contamination, is brittle teeth. He said that he just paid out $400 for an operation for teeth that have broken off. “The uranium replaces the calcium in your teeth and bones,” Rokke said.
“You fight for medical care every day of your life,” he said.
“There are over 30,000 casualties from this Iraq war,” Rokke said.
The three tasks set out for the Depleted Uranium Project have all failed, Rokke said. He wants to know why medical care is not being provided for all the victims of DU and why the environment is not being cleaned up.
“They have to be held accountable,” Rokke said, naming President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They chose to use DU weapons and “totally disregarded the consequences.”


"Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD; M.D. Says Depleted Uranium Definitively Linked" 2004-09-01 by Christopher Bollyn for "American Free Press" [http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html] [archive.org]:
A growing number of U.S. military personnel who are serving, or have served, in Iraq or Afghanistan has become sick and disabled from a variety of symptoms commonly known as Gulf War Syndrome. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been blamed for many of the symptoms.
“Gulf war vets are coming down with these symptoms at twice the rate of vets from previous conflicts,” said Barbara A. Goodno from the Department of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate.
A recent discovery by American Free Press that nearly half the soldiers in one returned unit have malignant growths has provided the scientific community with “critical evidence,” experts say, to help understand exactly how DU affects humans.
One of the first published researchers of Gulf War Syndrome, Dr. András Korényi-Both, told AFP that 27 percent to 28 percent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems, more than five times the rate of Viet Nam vets and four times the rate of Korean War vets.
Korényi-Both said his son had recently returned from Iraq, where he had been part of the initial Gulf War II assault from Kuwait to Baghdad. From his unit of 20 men, eight now have “malignant growths,” Korényi-Both said.
Korényi-Both is not an expert on DU but has written extensively about how the fine desert sand blowing around Iraq and the Arabian peninsula provides an ideal vehicle for toxins, increasing the range and effect of atomic, biological and chemical (ABC) agents, such as DU, that attach themselves to the particles.
Korényi-Both described how, during the 1991 Gulf War, he and others had inhaled large quantities of sand dust that could have been laden with ABC agents. The dust “destroyed our immune systems,” he said.

FULK’S THEORY -
Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore lab, is investigating how DU affects the human body. Fulk said that eight malignancies out of 20, in 16 months, “is spectacular—and of serious concern.”
The high malignancy rate found in this unit appears to have been caused by battlefield exposure to DU weapons.
According to Fulk, when DU, consisting mainly of uranium-238, decays, it transforms into two short-lived and “very hot” isotopes of thorium and protactinium, then undergoes further decay to another uranium isotope, giving off high-energy radiation at each stage of the process.
Scientist Leuren Moret said: “We can expect to see multiple cancers in one person. These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer,” she said, “a new phenomenon.”
Goodno questioned Korényi-Both’s report that eight of 20 recently returned soldiers from one unit had experienced malignant growths. Goodno and Korényi-Both did agree, however, that Iraqi ABC agents had not played a role in the 2003 invasion.
This is significant because three factors have generally been blamed for causing Gulf War Syndrome: Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, the cocktail of vaccinations given to coalition soldiers and DU. The absence of any detectable Iraqi ABC agents during the 2003 invasion of Iraq narrows the potential factors for delayed illness or disability among veterans to prewar vaccinations and DU.
While the number of disabled vets from previous wars is decreasing by about 35,000 per year, since the “war on terror” began in 2001, the total number of disabled vets has grown to some 2.5 million—“more than ever before,” Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs said. Asked if there are more disabled vets now than after World War II, Flohr said he believed so.
Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs told AFP that current statistics indicate that more than half a million veterans of the 14-year-old Gulf War I era are now receiving disability compensation. During this period, some 7,035 soldiers are reported having been wounded in Iraq.
With 518,739 disabled “Gulf War I era veterans” currently receiving disability compensation, according to Jemison, the number of veterans disabled after the war is more than 73 times the number of wounded, in and out of combat, from the entire 14-year conflict with Iraq.

DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS -
Last December, Dr. Asaf Durakoviae, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police Company of New York and found that four of the men had absorbed or inhaled DU.
Several of the men had traces of another isotope, U-236, which is only produced in a nuclear reactor.
“These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield,” Durakovae said.
“Due to the current proliferation of DU weaponry, the battlefields of the future will be unlike any battlefields in history,” Durakovae, then chief of Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Administration, said after Gulf War I, in which he served.
Since 1991, the U.S. military has used DU in munitions as penetrating rods, which destroy enemy tanks and their occupants, and as armor plating on U.S. tanks. When DU penetrating rods strike a hard target some of the radioactive and toxic uranium is vaporized into ultra-fine particles that are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
According to a survey of 10,051 Gulf War I veterans, conducted between 1991 and 1995 by Vic Sylvester and the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association, 82 percent of veterans reported having entered captured Iraqi vehicles. “This would suggest that 123,000 soldiers have been directly exposed to DU,” Durakovae said.
“Since the effects of contamination by uranium cannot be directed or contained, uranium’s chemical and radiological toxicity will create environments that are hostile not only to the health of enemy forces but of one’s own forces as well,” Durakovae said.
“Because of the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU, the small number of particles trapped in the lungs, kidneys and bone greatly increase the risk of cancer and all other illnesses over time,” said Durakovae, an expert of internal contamination of radioisotopes.
According to Durakovae, other symptoms associated with DU poisoning are: emotional and mental deterioration, fatigue, loss of bowel and bladder control, and numerous forms of cancer. Such symptoms are increasingly showing up in Iraq’s children and among Gulf War I veterans and their offspring, he said.
“Although I personally served in Operation Desert Shield as unit commander,” Durakovae said, “my expertise of internal contamination was never used because we were never informed of the intended use of DU prior to or during the war.”
“The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse,” Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in his March 25 article on DU weapons, “Silent Genocide.”
“DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code,” Koehler wrote. “The Pentagon’s response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator.”

"Another US war crime: the use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq"

Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons! [link]

2003-05-29 by Ben Nichols and Joe Lopez for "WSWS.org" [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/depu-m29.shtml] [archive.org]:
One of the war crimes for which the Bush administration should be prosecuted is the US military’s extensive use of weapons tipped with depleted uranium (DU) during the war against Iraq.
The Pentagon has repeatedly dismissed warnings from a variety of scientific and other bodies about the potential dangers of such weaponry. In the aftermath of the war, Washington has refused to clean up the residue left behind or allow UN experts into the country to assess the potential long-term environmental and health hazards caused by depleted uranium.
In its use of DU weapons, the Bush administration has acted with complete indifference to international law and convention. In January 2001, the European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution that took the modest step of imposing a ban on the use of DU munitions while investigations were carried out into the links between DU and cancer.
In August 2002, the UN published a report which cited a series of international laws and conventions breached by the use of DU weapons, including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the UN Charter; the UN Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 which all forbid the deployment of “poison or poisoned weapons” and “arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering”.
According to a recent CNN report, Pentagon and UN experts have estimated that US-led military forces used between 1,100 and 2,200 tonnes of depleted uranium during the invasion of Iraq. The amount far exceeds the 300 tonnes of depleted uranium used in the 1991 Gulf War and the 10 tonnes used by NATO forces during the bombing of Serbia in 1999.
Depleted uranium is a radioactive heavy metal, which is also chemically toxic. It is the waste product left over after the isotope uranium-235—used in nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons—has been extracted from naturally occurring uranium. What remains—depleted uranium—is composed almost entirely—99.7 percent—of the isotope uranium-238. While less radioactive than enriched or even naturally occurring uranium, DU is still toxic and its long-term affects on health are unknown.
The Pentagon has insisted on using DU munitions because they confer a significant military advantage. DU is 2.5 times denser than steel and 1.7 times the density of lead, enabling shells and bullets tipped with the substance to easily pierce most armour and concrete structures. It is also relatively cheap to manufacture—essentially being a waste product from the US nuclear industry and weapons program. DU bullets and shells emit almost no radiation prior to firing, but burn in mid air and vaporise after impact, spreading a layer of fine dust across a large area. Each DU tank shell is said to contain about five kilograms of depleted uranium.
Just days before the invasion of Iraq, Colonel James Naughton crudely summed up the reasons for using DU munitions and accused those warning of its dangers of falling for Iraqi propaganda. “The Iraqis tell us terrible things happened to our people because you used it last time. Why do they want it to go away? They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them—okay? I mean, there’s no doubt that DU gave us a huge advantage over their tanks. They lost a lot of tanks.”
Equally cynical was the response of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sigmon, the deputy surgeon for the US Army’s V Corps. Asked about the health risks of DU, he declared: “There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq.” He claimed that children playing with expended DU tank shells would have to eat and practically suffocate on the depleted uranium residue before incurring any health problems.
These comments fly in the face of considerable anecdotal evidence from battlefields where DU munitions have been used—including in Iraq during the first Gulf War, in the Balkans and at the US bombing range on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. In each case, significant increases in cancer rates, birth deformities and long-term health problems have been recorded.
A leading Iraqi specialist, Dr Salma Haddad, told reporters that several years after the 1991 Gulf War she began to encounter more and more children at Baghdad’s Al Mansur Hospital with an aggressive form of cancer.
Haddad said she was particularly alarmed since the disease—acute myeloblastic leukemia—is closely associated with radiation exposure and her suspicions pointed to DU munitions. She went on to explain that the number of cancer cases admitted to her hospital was five times higher than in 1991.

Vested interests -
But Pentagon officials continue to play down the dangers. Last month, spokesman Colonel David Lapan claimed that recent studies had demonstrated that DU was safe. Since 1990, he told the BBC “there’ve been a number of studies by the UK’s Royal Society and the World Health Organisation, for example—into the health risks of DU, or lack of them. It’s fair to say the 1990 study has been overtaken by them. One thing we have found in these various studies is that there are no long-term effects from DU.”
In fact, the Royal Society report entitled “The health hazards of depleted uranium munitions” says nothing of the sort. The body has been one of the most vociferous in calling for a cleanup of depleted uranium and for more comprehensive tests into its health and environmental effects. It recently called on the British government to carry out health tests on troops returning from Iraq.
The study does state that the known risks of cancer are low and may only be twice as probable for people exposed to DU in the worst-case battlefield scenarios. But it also points to the need for further research. Far from being harmless, the Royal Society report explains: “DU is radioactive and poisonous. Exposure to sufficiently high levels might be expected to increase the incidence of some cancers, notably lung cancer, possibly leukemia and may damage the kidneys.
“The key question is whether exposures to DU on the battlefield are such that the increased incidence of cancer, or the likelihood of kidney damage, are insignificant or are high enough to cause concern. This is a very difficult question to answer given the lack of good quality data on some of the parameters that determine the extent of the exposure or the subsequent risk of disease.”
Royal Society spokesperson Professor Brian Spratt commented last month: “The coalition needs to make clear where and how much depleted uranium was used in the recent conflict in Iraq. Although there are more pressing problems in Iraq ... the coalition needs to acknowledge that depleted uranium is a potential hazard and make inroads into tackling it by being open about where and how much depleted uranium has been deployed.”
But neither Washington nor London has shown the slightest willingness to provide the necessary information, let alone acknowledge the dangers. When the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) asked to be allowed to send a team to Iraq to make an assessment of the environmental and health threats posed to the Iraqi population, the Bush administration refused.
Previous UNEP studies on depleted uranium have indicated that the substance can attack the kidneys if ingested most likely through contaminated water or cause lung cancer if the dust is inhaled.
Further evidence of the dangers of DU munitions has been provided by Major Doug Rokke, a Vietnam and Gulf War combat veteran. Rokke has specialised in hazardous materials and emergency medicine for over 20 years and has campaigned in recent years against the use of DU. He was assigned to clean up depleted uranium after the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
In a speech in January published by the magazine In These Times, Rokke denounced the use of DU munitions declaring: “We have willfully spread it all over the place. We’ve refused to clean up the mess; we’ve refused to provide medical care; not only to the American ‘friendly fire’ casualties who survived, but also to the DU cleanup teams; and we’ve refused to supply medical care to all the thousands and thousands of other people, including women and children—which makes it an indiscriminate weapon.”
Rokke explained that indiscriminate weapons are banned by international law and that UN has issued several calls for a ban on the use of DU—which the US has rejected. Speaking from his experience in the first Gulf War, he warned: “When you leave all the contamination there, people are going to continue to get sick from just the uranium munitions alone... The army knows it’s a problem, and they just don’t care. They’re going to use DU... When you go to war, you use the best weapon you have, and you will not ever give it up.”
Washington also has other interests at stake. If DU is proven to have a long-term health impact, the US faces charges of criminal negligence and claims for compensation, not only from civilians in the Middle East and the Balkans, but from thousands of US veterans who have suffered debilitating illnesses.
Moreover, any cleanup of DU residue in Iraq and elsewhere would involve huge costs. According to an article in the US publication Newsday last month, the estimated cost of clearing a closed 500-acre military facility—the Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana—was between $4 billion and $5 billion. The firing range was thought to contain about one fifth the amount of depleted uranium used during the 1991 Gulf War and many times less than the tonnage used this year on Iraq.

Iraq War and Depleted Uranium

Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons! [link]

article 2002-10-06 by Helen Caldicott for "Baltimore Sun" newspaper:
Helen Caldicott, founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, has devoted 25 years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age. Her most recent book is The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex (The New Press, 2002).
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As the Bush administration prepares to make war on the Iraqi people—for it is the civilian population of that country and not Saddam Hussein who will bear the brunt of the hostilities—it is important that we recall the medical consequences of the last Persian Gulf war.
It was, in effect, a nuclear war. By the end of that 1991 conflict, the United States left between 300 and 800 tons of depleted uranium 238 in anti-tank shells and other explosives on the battlefields of Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The term "depleted" refers to the removal of the fissionable element uranium 235 through a process that ironically is called "enrichment."
What remains, uranium 238, is 1.7 times more dense than lead. When incorporated into an anti-tank shell and fired, it achieves great momentum, cutting through tank armor like a hot knife through butter. What other properties does uranium 238 possess?
First, it is pyrophoric. When it hits a tank at high speed, it bursts into flames, producing aerosolized particles less than 5 microns in diameter, making them easy to inhale into the terminal air passages of the lung. Second, it is a potent radioactive carcinogen, emitting a relatively heavy alpha particle composed of two protons and two neutrons. Once inside the body -- either in the lung if it has been inhaled, in a wound if it penetrates flesh, or ingested since it concentrates in the food chain and contaminates water -- it can produce cancer in the lungs, bones, blood or kidneys. Third, it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, meaning the areas in which this ammunition was used in Iraq and Kuwait will remain effectively radioactive for the rest of time. Children are 10 to 20 times more sensitive to the effects of radiation than adults.
My fellow pediatricians in the Iraqi city of Basra, for example, report an increase of six to 12 times in the incidence of childhood leukemia and cancer. Yet because of the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Statesand the United Nations, they have no access to antibiotics, chemotherapeutic drugs or effective radiation machines to treat their patients. The incidence of congenital malformations has doubled in the exposed populations in Iraq where these weapons were used. Among them are babies being born with only one eye and with an encephaly -- the absence of a brain. However, the medical consequences of the use of uranium 238 almost certainly did not affect only Iraqis. Some American veterans exposed to it are reported, by at least one medical researcher, to be excreting uranium in their urine a decade later. Other reports indicate it is being excreted in their semen. That nearly one-third of the American tanks used in Desert Storm were made of uranium 238 is another story, for their crews were exposed to whole body gamma radiation. What might be the long-term consequences of such exposure has not, apparently, been studied. Would these effects have surprised U.S. authorities? No, for incredible as it may seem, the American military's own studies prior to Desert Storm warned that aerosol uranium exposure under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neurocognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects. Do President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld understand the medical consequences of the 1991 war and the likely health effects of the next one they are planning? If they don't, their ignorance is breathtaking. Even more incredible, though, and much more likely, is that they do understand but don't care.