Australian troops and the next Gulf War Syndrome?

[Compiled by David Spratt]

[11 August 2002]

As Australian prime minister John Howard salivates at the prospect of sending Australian forces to an imperial war against Iraq, will he tell the Australian people how many soldiers, like their American and British counterparts from the last war against Iraq in 1991, will slowly become disabled or die from the toxic effects of the depleted uranium warheads and chemical residues that will rain down on the field of battle?

183,000 veterans, or more than one-quarter of US military personnel, from the the 1991 Gulf War war against Iraq were classified as "disabled" by mid-1991; a rate two and one half times the disability rate from the 10-year-long Vietnam War and more than five times the rate of Korean war veterans.

Their disabilities have been many, from knee injuries to post-traumatic stress disorder and a combination of conditions characterised by muscle aches and joint pain, chronic fatigue, headaches, anxiety, depression, dizziness, sleep disorders, rashes, loss of concentration, kidney damage, birth defects, and wastage and death from cancers and immune deficiency disorders known collectively as Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). A two-year study head by US Senator Don Riegle's study found that 77 percent of the wives of GWS veterans were also ill, as well as 25 percent of the children conceived before the war. A 1996 survey of US Gulf War veterans in the small Mississippi town of McGann showed that out of 267 families questioned, 67 per cent of children conceived after their fathers had returned from the Gulf had rare birth deformities.

Whilst the US Department of Defence continues to deny any organic basis to Gulf War Syndrome, and there has been evidence of links to chemical and biological weapon residues, increasingly the finger is pointing to depleted uranium (DU), used to harden bombs used by the West to decimate Iraqi ground forces. DU, which remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years, was incorporated into tank armor, missile and aircraft counterweights and navigational devices, and in tank, anti-aircraft and anti-personnel artillery.

Depleted uranium does not occur naturally. It is the by-product of the industrial processing of waste from nuclear reactors and is better known as weapons-grade uranium. Tungsten and DU are the main options for hardened warheads known euphemistically as ?advanced unitary penetrators?, including those deployed in Iraq in 1991 and in Afghanistan, including 2 tonne GBU-37 Bunker Busters and 2000 lb GBU-24 Pave-way smart bombs, and the Boeing AGM-86D, Maverick AGM-65G and AGM-145C hard target capability cruise missiles. Both Tungsten and DU are used by US and UK forces for armour piercing shells, but DU is preferred because it is burns inside the target to become an incendiary bomb and is far cheaper and easier to manufacture

"Depleted uranium is a radioactive waste and, as such, should be deposited in a licensed repository," according to a June 1995 statement by the US Army Environmental Policy Institute. At no point does it advise its use on mosques, schools, hospitals, Belgrade radio stations or a Chinese embassy. "Basically, DU missiles are just cylinders of nuclear waste with fins," says Angus Parker, a sick veteran and former expert technician at Britain's Porton Down weapons establishment, who was deployed in the Gulf with the First Field Laboratory Unit.

Whilst the Pentagon says studies of the veterans group with the highest DU exposure show their levels are "still well below occupational exposure limits", one of their own experts tells a very different story.

In September 2000 Dr Asaf Durakovic, professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, Washington, and the former head of nuclear medicine at the US Army's veterans' affairs medical facility in Delaware, told a conference of eminent nuclear scientists in Paris that "tens of thousands" of British and American soldiers are dying from radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired during the Gulf war. Durakovic concluded that troops inhaled the tiny uranium particles after American and British forces fired more than 700,000 DU shells during the conflict. The finding begins to explain for the first time why medical orderlies and mechanics are the principal victims of Gulf war syndrome. His findings have been verified by four independent experts.

Just 10 months after the Gulf War, Iraqi doctors were already bewildered by the rise in rare cancers and birth deformities. At the time, it was not known that DU weapons had been used in the war, but the doctors were already comparing their new cases to those they had seen in textbooks related to nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1950s. In Basra, the main city of southern Iraq which was in the eye of "desert storm," paediatrician Dr Jenan Hussein has completed a thesis comparing the cancers and birth deformities seen in Iraq with those following the bombing of Hiroshima. Experts say that DU has entered the food chain via the water table and soil.

Professor Doug Rokke, the Pentagon expert who devised the clean-up of nuclear material from Kuawit says that the clean-up was never completed. By 2001 half of his team has died of DU-related illnesses and the other half, including himself, were desperately sick -- with the exception of the only team member who insisted on wearing full radiological protective clothing, despite the heat.

Having seen the result of their use, it is not difficult to understand why former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark considers the use of DU weapons a "criminal act." The Pentagon has confirmed that 320 tonnes of DU dust remain in Iraq. Some scientists estimate that there could be as much as 900 tonnes.

More recently DU-tipped weapons have been used in Afghanistan and in the NATO bombing of the Balkans, to the increasing consternation of European governments, and even their military chiefs. On the day ground troops were sent into the Balkans, the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) instructed 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. And what the returning refugees? And the civilan populations of Iraq and Kuawit in 1991? And the civilian population of Afghanisatn in 2001? And the civilian population of Iraq in 2002 or 2003?

US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld has acknowledged the use of DU in Afghanistan, and Defense Department spokesperson Kenneth Bacon confirmed ?We obviously put out instructions about avoiding Depleted Uranium dust. Our troops are instructed to wear masks if they?re around what they consider to be atomised or particle-sized DU?

Whilst the British The Ministry of Defence (MoD)has always refused to accept any conclusive link between cancer and the use of DU ammunition it has recently decided, after recommendations from the Royal Society , to conduct a study "to identify any links between exposure to depleted uranium and ill health", including a review of the "effects of depleted uranium inhalation on the pulmonary lymph nodes" and the effects of used DU shells on soil and marine environments.

But MoD makes it clear that is has no intention of stopping the use of DU munitions whatever the outcome of the research, but instead states that "DU will remain in the UK inventory for the foreseeable future" and indeed that there"is a need?to extend the capability of those DU munitions currently available to the UK Armed Forces." And that means the next war against Iraq.

But even without the high likelihood of contamination by DU, Australian troops in the Iraqi war zone will, like those who participated in the 1991 Gulf War, face a toxic chemical soup of insecticides, pesticides and chemical and biological warfare agents released from the bombing of Iraqi facilities; and possibly smoke from buring oil facilities and the effects of experimental preventive medicines.

A congessional headed by then-US Senator Don Riegle held extensive hearings and issued two reports on GWS, pointing to exposure to low levels of chemical and biological warfare agents as contributing to GWS. His committee identified 18 chemical, 12 biological, and four nuclear facilities in Iraq bombed by the U.S.-led allied forces. Debris from the bombings was dispersed into upper atmospheric currents, as shown in US satellite photos, as well as in videotape obtained by Congress. This airborne dispersal came down on the heads of allied personnel in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. Official documents show weather patterns over Iraq that carried chemical fallout to coalition troop positions. So do U.N. assessments of damage done to well-stocked Iraqi chemical storage facilities.

[http://mediafilter.org/caq/Caq53.gws.html]

Depleted uranium dust, residue from chemical and biological agents, pesticides and herbicides. This is the destiny of Australian troops in the next war against Iraq, and the destiny of the Iraqi people.

Good on you, Johnny ?Digger? Howard. War doesn't get much better than this.

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