Iraq Links Cancers
to Uranium Weapons
By Robert Collier
BAGDHAD -- Something is killing the children in Dr. Emad Wisam's hospital
ward, and filling it up again and again with more sick and dying kids.
Walking a visitor through
the halls of Al Mansour Children's Hospital in Baghdad last weekend,
Wisam stopped briefly at his small patients' bedsides to commiserate.
After checking 5-year-old
Nur Abdullah, who has a tumor in his throat, Wisam turned away with
a pained look in his eyes.
"He will die soon,"
he said. "Most of these kids will die. And there's almost nothing
we can do."
Iraq
has experienced a dramatic increase in child cancers, leukemia and birth
defects in recent years. Wisam, Iraqi medical authorities and growing
numbers of American activists cast blame on the U.S. weapons containing
depleted uranium that were used in the 1991 Gulf War and in the 1998
missile attacks on Baghdad and other major cities. They also assert
that such munitions -- which were also used by U.S. forces in Bosnia,
Kosovo and Serbia in far smaller quantities -- may be a cause of Gulf
War diseases, elusive maladies that have affected 50,000 to 80,000 U.S.
veterans of the 1991 conflict.
The Pentagon says studies
it has sponsored have found no evidence that depleted uranium, known
as DU, causes serious illnesses, while many international medical experts
remain on the fence, citing the lack of definitive scientific evidence
on the issue.
But with the renewed use
of DU weapons by the U.S. military considered likely in the event of
a new war with Iraq, the controversy is being stirred up again.
Depleted uranium is the low-level
radioactive waste left over from manufacturing nuclear fuel and bombs.
It is used in bullets and missiles by the United States, Britain, Russia
and several other nations -- though, from all indications, not by Iraq.
HIGHLY EFFECTIVE
Military experts regard DU
as an almost magically effective material. DU is 1.7 times denser than
lead, and when a weapon made with a DU tip or core strikes the side
of a tank or bunker, it slices straight through and erupts in a burning
radioactive cloud. In addition, armor made of DU appears to make tanks
far less vulnerable on the battlefield.
During the Gulf War, U.S.
airplanes and tanks fired off munitions containing 320 tons of DU. According
to Iraqi health statistics, the country's recent increase in health
problems has been concentrated in the same areas of the country that
took the brunt of U.S. attacks: Baghdad, the southern port city of Basra,
and the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk.
No similar problems are known
to have occurred in Kuwait, where DU was also used, because such weapons
were used mainly outside of population centers and because Kuwait carried
out a comprehensive, well-funded postwar cleanup of spent munitions
and combat wreckage.
Among children throughout
Iraq, the number of cancer cases has risen five- fold since 1990, and
congenital birth defects and leukemia have tripled, say government health
officials. Overall cancer rates among all Iraqis have risen by 38 percent,
the Iraqi government says.
"There are thousands
of cases of DU poisoning in Iraq by the Americans and British,"
said Health Minister Dr. Omeid Mobarik.
FUTURE USE PREDICTED
The Wall Street Journal reported
earlier this month that branches of the U. S. military are looking for
alternatives to DU, but officials refuse to say publicly whether DU
weapons will be used in a new war against Iraq. Defense Department spokeswoman
Barbara Goodno has acknowledged, "Depleted uranium is an important
component in the U.S. arsenal."
"Despite being engaged
multiple times (during the Gulf War), often at close range, by Iraqi
tanks and anti-armor weapons," she added, "not a single U.S.
tank protected by DU armor was penetrated or knocked out by hostile
fire."
Experts say the crucial edge
that DU technology affords makes it too effective to pass up.
"Yes, certainly the
U.S. will use it," said John Eldridge, editor of the authoritative
book Jane's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense.
Christopher Hellman, a senior
analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said U.S.
and British military planners are likely to be swayed more by DU's effectiveness
than by possible health concerns.
"Their view is very
simple," said Helman. "This is war, and a destroyed enemy
tank is less dangerous than one that's shooting at you, regardless of
whatever residual effects DU may have."
Just what those health effects
may be, however, is hotly debated.
Pentagon officials deny any
links, either to Iraqi civilians or American Gulf War veterans. They
dismiss Iraq's reports of increases in cancer, birth defects and leukemia,
saying their pre-1990 baseline figures are unreliable.
They point in particular
to a Pentagon-funded review of scientific literature on cancer and DU
carried out by the Rand Corp. in 1999. It concluded that no link had
been found. Initial studies by the World Health Organization and the
European Community also have found no link.
But the Rand report -- which
leans heavily on research into the relatively mild effects of conventional
uranium -- acknowledges that "few studies to date . . . have focused
directly on DU."
While the Veterans Administration
has conducted limited studies of some veterans exposed to DU, and found
no links so far to serious illness, U.S. activists point out that none
of the published studies have tested broad numbers of sick Americans
or Iraqis who have been exposed to DU. The U.S. military has conducted
several such studies, but they remain classified. The Iraqi military
refuses all comment on whether its veterans have experienced their own
Gulf War illnesses.
AMERICAN EXPERT
One American with personal
experience of DU is Doug Rokke, former director of the U.S. Army's Depleted
Uranium Project. He was in charge of a team of about 100 soldiers who
examined and cleaned up Iraqi tanks and American vehicles struck by
DU shells during the Gulf War.
The work was ghastly -- the
DU explosions so badly burned the dead soldiers inside that the team
dubbed them "crispy critters."
The team's members, uninformed
about the danger of DU residue, were themselves contaminated. Most have
suffered serious health problems in the intervening years, and "too
many" have died, says Rokke, who says he eschews exact numbers
because of the difficulty of proving direct links to DU exposure.
Rokke, who has a Ph.D. in
physics and until recently was a professor at Jacksonville State University
in Alabama, says he has "5,000 times the recommended level of radiation
in my body" and has called the health woes among residents of southern
Iraq and his own colleagues "the direct result" of DU exposure.
In an interview on Saturday,
Rokke said of his own health: "I'm trashed." He said that
Pentagon officials routinely tell him and others who were contaminated
in the gulf theater that the elevated levels of uranium in their bodies
are "just coming out of our diets."
INTERNATIONAL OPINION
But organizations outside
the United States have come down against DU munitions:
-- In 1999, the European
Parliament voted to urge NATO to suspend the use of DU munitions pending
results of an independent study. The request was ignored.
-- Last August, the U.N.
Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights authorized
a study of the dangers of DU, which the panel had already labeled a
weapon of mass destruction. The move -- coming over the objections of
the United States and Britain -- was a significant victory for Karen
Parker, a San Francisco lawyer who works with the International Educational
Development/Humanitarian Law Project and has campaigned against DU for
years.
-- A 1991 study by Britain's
Atomic Energy Authority found that use of DU weapons in the Gulf War
could eventually lead to half a million "potential deaths from
cancer." The report was suppressed by the British government until
1998.
Hard science on the DU issue
remains scarce, however.
Richard Clapp, an epidemiologist
at Boston University School of Public Health and one of the few experts
to investigate the DU-cancer relationship, is carrying out a study of
Gulf War diseases among Massachusetts veterans.
His initial findings suggest
increased incidences of Hodgkin's disease in Gulf War veterans exposed
to DU, but no increases in other types of cancer.
But Clapp cautions that further
comprehensive study is needed. In an e-mail interview, he wrote: "The
potential for a DU-cancer link (especially lung cancer in those who
breathe DU through dust and smoke particles) is still an open question.
I certainly would not rule it out on biological grounds, and 'no proof
of harm is not proof of no harm,' as we say."
OIL FIRES, CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Iraq's health problems and
Americans' Gulf War illnesses could have many additional causes besides
DU, Clapp and other U.S. experts say. Other possible factors include
pollution breathed in from the oil fires ignited in Kuwait by retreating
Iraqi soldiers or from Iraqi chemical weapons stores hit by U.S. missiles.
"The reason there is
no proof of causality between DU and any particular disease is that
no one has seriously looked for it," said Steve Leeper, co- director
of the Global Association for Banning DU Weapons, a U.S.-Japanese coalition
based in Atlanta, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"The biggest problem
with radiation, especially involving a low-level radiation source that
is also a toxic chemical, is that it can get you in so many ways,"
said Leeper.
"Which disorder you
wind up with depends on where the DU winds up in your system and what
sort of damage it does to what sort of cells. To really find an effect,
the government would have to study all the veterans, especially the
205,000 that have applied for medical help from the Veterans Administration,
and the people of southern Iraq and test for uranium in their urine,
organs and bones, then look for correlations with various pathologies."
Dr. Alim Yacoub, a British-educated
epidemiologist who is dean of the medical school at Mustansiriya University
in Baghdad, expressed anger at the world's response to the Iraqi health
crisis.
"Why have no international
studies been carried out?" he asked. "Where is the World Health
Organization? This issue is highly political and has been affected by
propaganda, by American pressure."
WHO officials say that in
2001, the U.N. organization proposed to Iraq a comprehensive study of
all cancer problems, including DU, but received no response.
U.N. SANCTIONS
Yacoub insists that the project
was blocked by the strict U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq since the Gulf
War. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency has refused to allow
Iraq to import radiology equipment needed to carry out the research
because it is termed "dual use," meaning that it could be
used to help develop nuclear weapons.
Defense analyst Hellman summed
up the standoff over DU by saying, "The science on this is not
unanimous.
"My approach is: If
you can't use it safely, then you shouldn't use it. The military's approach
is 180 degrees from that. They say, 'If you can't prove it isn't safe,
we're going to keep using it.' "
ORIGIN, USES, EFFECTS OF DEPLETED URANIUM
Depleted uranium (DU) is
a byproduct of the process during which fissionable uranium (uranium
235) used to manufacture nuclear bombs and reactor fuel is separated
from natural uranium, a heavy metal found in soil and water everywhere
on earth, mainly in trace quantities.
DU (uranium 238) is about 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium,
but it remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years. Because it is such
a highly dense metal -- heavier than lead or steel -- it is prized for
its abilities to both penetrate military armor and provide shielding
against attack.
Upon impact, DU produces
extremely fine uranium oxide dust that is both chemically toxic and
radioactive. Easily spread by wind, it is inhaled and absorbed into
the human body and absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of
the food chain.