Depleted Uranium: My battle for the truth
For almost a decade, journalist
Felicity Arbuthnot has fought to
reveal the deadly facts about DU
Publication Date: Jan 14 2001
Last Tuesday, Armed Forces Minister John
Spellar addressed parliament regarding
concerns over the use of depleted uranium
weapons. "Handled in accordance with the
regulations, DU shells present no hazard to our
forces," said the minister.
For those who have followed the issue since
these weapons were first used in the 1991 Gulf
War, his assertions were astonishing. Either he
has been dramatically misled by his civil servants
or, with possible prodding from the special
relationship with Washington, he was being
extremely economical with the truth.
I visited Iraq 10 months after the war ended. At a
press conference an eminent child psychologist
described the terrible aftermath of the war, and
what I discovered there was even more horrifying
than he described. I was determined to tell the
world and believed that when this was revealed
there would be outrage - but I was wrong.
Since I discovered that depleted uranium
weapons had been used, every attempt to find
out the truth has been met with a wall of lies.
Many of those who have investigated this - and
this includes the top experts in the world - have
been threatened, shot at and fired from their
jobs. I have been receiving death threats for five
years now, some of them imaginative, some
boring.
When I arrived in Iraq, doctors were already
reporting a rise in congenital abnormalities in the
newborn and a threefold rise in cancers and
leukaemias, especially in children. Birth defects
and illness were also affecting Gulf veterans.
Their search for answers and treatment has been
met with bureaucratic stonewalling and lies. As
they have attempted to find answers for
themselves and for the sick and dying, their
homes have been raided by the Ministry of
Defence Police. Computers, disks and
documents have been removed.
"Depleted uranium is a É radioactive waste and,
as such, should be deposited in a licensed
repository," stated the US Army Environmental
Policy Institute in June 1995. It does not advise
depositing on a school, hospital, radio station or
Chinese Embassy.
When I talked to a spokesperson for the United
Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell for
an article in this paper, he told of the authority's
alarm on discovering that these weapons had
been used in the Gulf - something it only
discovered from brief reports in the media.
So alarmed was the UKAEA that it sent a report
to the Ministry of Defence in April 1991, warning
of a health and environmental catastrophe. It
estimated that there could be more than half a
million "potential deaths from cancer" in the Gulf
within 10 years.
That the government of the day was aware of the
unique contamination was succinctly aired in a
rare display of glasnost by armed forces minister
Lord Gilbert on March 2, 1998. He referred to the
UKAEA document and to a letter written by Mr
PGE Bartholomew, business development
manager (defence) at UK Atomic Energy
Authority Industrial Technology, dated April 30,
1991 - just two months after the Gulf War. The
letter reads: "I promised to produce a threat
paper on the contamination of Kuwait from
depleted uranium used by the US and UK forces
in the recent war É [the paper] covers the threat
and outlines the action we believe is necessary
for health safety.
"The whole subject of the contamination of
Kuwait is emotive and thus must be dealt with in
a sensitive manner. It is necessary to inform the
Kuwait government of the problem in a useful
way É" This poisoned chalice, suggests the
letter, should be handed to the luckless British
Ambassador in Kuwait.
Leonard Dietz, an eminent nuclear expert,
received a letter dated August 15, 1991, from the
office of the director of defence research and
engineering at the department of defence in
Washington.
It states: "You posed the question of the
probability that lung cancer could develop after
the inhalation of depleted uranium. As you are no
doubt well aware, since the material is a source
of ionising radiation, the potential for
carcinogicity is real. The same holds true for
nephro-toxicity É protection from which requires
a much lower ambient concentration in drinking
water or foodstuffs.
"Let me assure you that we feel that your
concern, which parallels our own, is real and we
thank you for sharing that with us."
In his statement to parliament on Tuesday,
Armed Forces Minister John Spellar said there
was no rise in kidney ailments or cancers among
Gulf veterans. Sean Rusling, chairman of the
National Gulf Veterans' and Families'
Association, is astonished. "The armed forces
minister was being economical with the truth.
Many Gulf veterans suffer both cancers and
kidney diseases. There has been a systematic
cover up by the Ministry of Defence over the
deaths of servicemen and women after the Gulf
war - 521 to date. Out of 600,000 US troops,
130,000 are sick."
Tragedy, it seems, is now set to afflict troops
who have served in the Balkans, with seven
Italian peacekeepers already having died of
leukaemia. Countries whose service personnel
have been deployed there are all engaging in
screening programmes, with Britain finally and
reluctantly also agreeing to do so.
On the day that ground troops were sent into the
Balkans, the Sunday Herald asked the Ministry of
Defence whether we were now set to see an
epidemic of "Balkans war syndrome" since DU
weapons had again been used.
"Absolutely not," said the spokesperson. "The
armed forces minister [then Douglas Henderson]
has given the strictest instructions that no service
personnel must approach anything which might
have been hit by DU - and if it were unavoidable
they must wear full radiological protective
clothing."
Since I started campaigning on this issue, I have
often felt like a lone voice. Now that the rest of
the world has woken up to the terrible
consequences, I feel this is vindication for
investigative journalism.