[A-List] America's Perpetual Nuclear War

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Robert Weitzel

CommonDreams.org (March 13 2007)


On the evening of July 25 1945, President Truman confided to his diary that the
atomic bomb "seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be
made the most useful". Twelve days later it was "useful" in Hiroshima, and again
three days later it was "useful" in Nagasaki.

In a radio speech the day Nagasaki was obliterated, Truman told his American
audience, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack 
to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

The world took note that as many as 140,000 civilians were killed instantly 
or later died of injuries and radiation poisoning at Hiroshima.

To prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power in the Middle East, President Bush
has tasked the Pentagon with developing plans for a surgical strike on Iran's
nuclear facility at Natanz, which is buried under 75 feet of earth and rock.

One option on the table is the B61-11, the smallest tactical nuclear weapon in
the US arsenal. The B61 is a variable yield bomb. It can be calibrated to yield
as low as 0.3 kilotons or has high as 170 kilotons of atomic power. Its maximum
yield is ten times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

In keeping with our country's "humanitarian" effort to minimize civilian
casualties in a nuclear strike, "low" yield tactical nuclear weapons, such as
the B61, have been reclassified by the Pentagon as "safe for the surrounding
civilian population". Because these weapons are now considered as "safe" as
conventional munitions, their use is at the discretion of the theater commander.
Presidential approval is no longer needed to start a nuclear war.

But the world should note that America has been waging a "low yield" nuclear war
that has been killing civilians for almost two decades. Missing from this war
are mushroom clouds and very loud booms. Present is nuclear fallout with its
insidious long-term effects on both combatant and civilian and its perpetual
contamination of land and water resources.

The United States began waging nuclear war in Kosovo in 1990 and has continued
through the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The "nuclear tipped"
weapon of choice in each of these theaters of war has been depleted uranium (DU)
munitions.

To build atomic bombs, and later to fuel nuclear reactors, the US began
enriching uranium ore mined from the earth's surface. In the process, the
fissionable isotope Uranium 235, which accounts for 0.7 percent of the ore, 
is extracted, while the remaining 99.3 percent of the unfissionable isotope,
Uranium 238, becomes "low yield" radioactive waste. By the middle of the 1950s
there was approximately 600,000 tons of DU waste being stored at various
facilities throughout the United States.

Depleted uranium has several properties that attracted the US 'military
industrial complex'. It is cheap and plentiful and 1.7 times denser
than lead, which makes it an idea metal for armor piercing bullets and tank
rounds, armor plating on tanks, and ballast for cruise missiles and aircraft.
Consequently, much of what has been dropped, launched, fired or destroyed during
combat operations involving the US and its allies in the last two decades is
radioactive and will remain so for as long as the Earth exists.

When a "nuclear tipped" DU tank round, containing ten pounds of uranium, strikes
the armor plating of an enemy tank, it ignites and burns through to the interior,
setting off the tank's ammunition. The resulting fire and explosion creates a
radioactive dust cloud of submicroscopic insoluble uranium oxide particles,
which is suspended in the air and ultimately settles on the ground to be inhaled
and ingested by combatant and civilian alike.

Depleted uranium, though it sounds safe, is still one-third as radioactive as
the original natural uranium, and will lose only half of its radioactivity in
4.5 billion years - the age of the solar system. Depleted uranium emits alpha
and gamma radiation, which can be mutagenic and carcinogenic in the human body
and result in cancers and birth defects. It is a nuclear-plated Trojan Horse
that continues to kill civilians long after the fighting has moved on.

In April 1991, only one month after the end of the first Gulf War, a secret
report prepared by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was leaked to 
The Independent of London. The report described the hazards of the radioactive
dust from expended DU munitions and destroyed DU-armored tanks getting into the
food chain and water supply. The report warned that forty tons of radioactive 
DU debris left on the battlefield could, in the decades ahead, cause as many as
500,000 civilian deaths.

The US left behind 375 tons of DU debris in the Gulf War, 800 tons in
Afghanistan, and 2,200 tons during the current invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Children are particularly susceptible to DU poisoning and the resulting cancers
due to a higher absorption rate in their blood, which is instrumental in
building bones and soft tissue. In March 2001, Dr Aws Albait, a physician
practicing in Baghdad from 1990 to 1999, reported a twelve-fold increase in
leukemia and lymphomas in Iraqi children and a six-fold increase in adults
during that decade. In 2004 it was estimated that children under the age of five
accounted for 56 percent of all cancer patients in Iraq, compared with thirteen
percent fifteen years ago.

It is not only Iraqi children who are the victims of our perpetual nuclear war,
but American children as well. A Veteran's Administration study of 251 Gulf War
veterans in Mississippi found that 67 percent of their children born since the
war had birth defects and severe illnesses. In addition, 90,000 veterans suffer
from the chronic, debilitating effects of the Gulf War Syndrome, which many
researchers believe may be related to exposure to DU fallout.

In 1995, a US Army Environmental Policy Institute report stated, "If DU enters
the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences. 
The risks associated with DU in the body are both chemical and radiological."
Regardless, the Pentagon steadfastly refuses to conduct studies of its effects
on both military personnel and civilians exposed to DU fallout. In fact, its
policy is to silence those who would sound an alarm.

Dr Asaf Durakovic, founder of the Uranium Medical Research Centre and the former
Chief of the Nuclear Sciences Division at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research
Institute, was fired from his position as Chief of Nuclear Medicine at the
veterans' hospital in Wilmington, Delaware when he refused to terminate his
research on Gulf War veterans with symptoms of radiation exposure.

Dr Durakovic stated, "The Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the
risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body ... uranium does cause
cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill ... [It] is a threat
to humanity".

If the Bush administration follows through with its plan to attack Iran with
tactical nuclear weapons, they will, in essence, only be adding a sound track 
to the silent nuclear war America has been waging for decades.

But this perpetual nuclear war is not a clash of ideology or religion, nor 
is it to spread democracy or to fight the long war on terrorism. It is about 
the immoral war profiteering of the US military-industrial complex, and the 
even more morally repugnant dumping of its radioactive waste in someone else's
backyard. It is about the maiming and killing of civilians who are not yet born.

_____

Robert Weitzel is a freelance writer whose essays appear in The Capital Times 
in Madison, Wisconsin. He has been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
Skeptic Magazine, and Freethought Today. He can be contacted at: rweitz@xxxxxxx

http://www.countercurrents.org/us-weitzel130307.htm


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