Special Yugoslavia Series
Depleted Uranium: The Invisible Weapon

by Marie Braun, WAMM

Despite knowledge of depleted uranium's deadly long term effects on life and despite warnings of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. attacked Yugoslavia with depleted uranium missiles, bombs, and bullets spreading radioactive matter into the atmosphere, soil, ground water, food chain, and solid objects. U.S. military action placed the Yugoslav population at risk of death, genetic damage, cancers, tumors, leukemia, and other injuries for generations.

In making my case, I want to go back nine years to Iraq and the Gulf War. I want to spend some time on Iraq because that is where the United States and Britain first used depleted uranium and that is where we can look for concrete information about the disastrous effects of this radioactive material. That is also where we can look for information about the secrecy, denial, and cover-up which have been a part of this barbarous crime.

Nine years ago, the message out of the Pentagon was that depleted uranium (DU) was a wondrous weapon. The silver bullet, the army called it. But there is a major problem with the Pentagon,s silver bullets. They are highly toxic, radioactive weapons.

DU is roughly 60 percent as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium and has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. To put that into perspective, that is the approximate age of our planet earth. When fired, depleted uranium combusts on impact and as much as 70 percent of the material is released as a radioactive and highly toxic dust that can be inhaled or ingested and then trapped in the lungs or kidneys. These silver bullets are capable not only of killing those targeted, but of killing civilians for many miles surrounding the battlefields and the soldiers who handle the weapons.

These weapons were used on a large scale for the first time during the Gulf War. They were used throughout Iraq with no concern for the health or environmental consequences of their use. And they were used secretly. No one was warned, neither Iraqi civilians nor our own soldiers, of the potential hazard of coming into contact with this radioactive material. Some Iraqis took empty shells into their homes as souvenirs of the war. UN personnel and aid workers reported seeing Iraqi children playing with empty shells and abandoned weapons, and on destroyed tanks.

It was in April 1991, one month after the end of the war, that a secret report by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was leaked to the London Independent. It described the potential problems of radioactive dust spreading over the battlefields of Kuwait and Iraq and getting into the food chain and the water. It warned that forty tons of radioactive debris left from depleted uranium weapons could cause over 500,000 deaths.

Now we know that by war,s end, roughly 300 tons of depleted uranium from spent rounds lay scattered in various sizes and states of decay across the battlefields of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

We have also learned that unexplainable illnesses, cancers, and genetic deformities are showing up in Iraq that had not been seen before. Birth defects rose from eight percent before the war to 28 percent after the war. People who have traveled to Iraq report seeing infants with obvious genetic deformities and wards of children wasting away from cancers such as leukemia, lymphomas, and Hodgkin,s disease. A Washington Report on Middle East Affairs states, "Health officials have reported alarmingly high increases in rare and unknown diseases in Iraq, primarily in children."

We also have learned that of the 697,000 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf, over 90,000 veterans are chronically ill. Symptoms include respiratory, liver, and kidney dysfunction; memory loss; headaches; fever; and low blood pressure. Veterans report fatigue, rashes, low resistance, and incontinence, symptoms similar to low-level radiation poisoning. There are also birth defects among the veterans, newborn children, and Dr. Siegwart-Horst Guenther of Germany, who carried out extensive studies in Iraq over a period of five years, reports that the similarities in birth defects in Iraqi children and in children of "Desert Storm" veterans are striking.

U.S. forces came into contact with DU on the battlefield in a variety of ways. Some were exposed during combat. An investigative report in The Nation in October, l996, reports that "Some soldiers inhaled it when they pulled wounded comrades from tanks hit by DU friendly fire, or when they clambered into destroyed Iraqi vehicles. Others picked up expended rounds as war trophies. Thousands of other Americans were near accidental explosions of DU munitions."

Dr. Michio Kaku, in the book Metal of Dishonor: Depleted Uranium, writes, "Our troops were used as human guinea pigs for the Pentagon. Thousands must have walked through almost invisible clouds of uranium dioxide mist, not realizing that micro-sized particles were entering their lungs."

When I was in Iraq in May 1998, I attended a briefing by Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi, at the College of Engineering of Baghdad University, regarding the environmental damage that was caused by these depleted uranium weapons. She shared with us some data that she and her colleagues had collected.

Starting in 1995, four years after the war, the scientists collected soil, water, and plant samples from areas in southern Iraq, where DU weapons were used most widely. They reported finding excess concentrations of thorium-234 and radium-226, two radioactive byproducts from the decay of uranium-238. They reported that the concentrations ranged from seventy to five-hundred times higher than what would normally be expected.

They also reported that there was a greater than ten-fold increase in radiation in areas near destroyed tanks, and a twenty-fold increase inside the wrecks. At that time they estimated that over 200 million tons of soil and almost one million tons of edible wild plants had been polluted with these isotopes. As much as 31 percent of animal resources were also exposed.

Now, let us return to Yugoslavia. Many suspected that we were also using depleted weapons in Yugoslavia, but this information was difficult to verify. Pentagon spokesperson Major-General Chuck Wald finally admitted to BBC news on May 7, 1999, that A-10 Warthog planes were firing depleted uranium ammunition.

Although we do not know the long term consequences of U.S./NATO depleted uranium weapons use in Yugoslavia in 1998, we can expect to see parallels in the effects DU has had on Iraq since the Persian Gulf War. In both soldiers and civilians we can expect to see a high increase in the incidence of cancer of the blood, the lungs, the digestive system, and the skin, and a notable increase of congenital diseases and fetal deformities.

And because DU use results in widespread, long term contamination of the environment, we can expect to see the horrifying consequences of U.S./NATO DU use in generations of Yugoslavians to come.

John Catalinotto, co-editor of Metal of Dishonor: Depleted Uranium, said the DU used in Yugoslavia "is one important aspect of a looming environmental disaster for the region that will harm all the different nationalities of the former Yugoslavia and could spill over into Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics." He said the use of DU weapons in Yugoslavia "adds a new dimension to the crime NATO is perpetrating against the Yugoslav people -- including those in Kosovo."

"The environmental arrogance of the NATO generals exposes their original humanitarian, excuse for starting to bomb Yugoslavia as a fraud," he added. "They are making the whole region unfit for human habitation. And they will wind up poisoning their own soldiers as they did with Agent Orange in Vietnam and with DU in Iraq."

The use of these weapons of mass destruction is a crime. Depleted Uranium weapons are an unacceptable threat to life, a violation of international law and an assault on human dignity. They violate international law because of their inherent cruelty and unconfined death-dealing effect. They threaten civilian populations now and for generations to come.

Back to Yugoslavia Series Table of Contents