Will Obama Stop The DU Environmental Hell The U.S. Military Has Created?

Thursday, December 18, 2008 Posted by Shattered Paradigm

While many Americans are extremely concerned with global warming, very few Americans are even aware of the absolute environmental hell that the U.S. military has created in Afghanistan and Iraq by using depleted uranium munitions in those nations.

Under President George W. Bush, the United States has been using thousands upon thousands of tons of depleted uranium munitions - dirty bombs made from nuclear waste - in their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The resulting devastation from using these dirty nuclear weapons is a crime against humanity of the utmost magnitude and it is time for Barack Obama to declare that he will permanently ban these weapons.

So what is depleted uranium?

Depleted Uranium is actually a waste product of the nuclear enrichment process. Despite claims that depleted uranium is much less radioactive than natural uranium, the truth is that it actually emits about 75% as much radioactivity as natural uranium.

When DU munitions impact a target, the uranium coating of these weapons becomes a powder which is easily contaminates the air, the soil and any surrounding water.

Depleted uranium is both chemically toxic and highly radioactive. In laboratory tests it severely damages human cells, causes DNA mutations and has other carcinogenic effects.

Depleted uranium poisoning has been shown to cause almost every illness one can imagine including severe skin rashes, intense muscle and joint pain, major birth defects, cardiovascular disease, brain tumors and just about every type of cancer. Depleted uranium also replaces calcium, destroying teeth and bones.

As a result of the acute depleted uranium contamination in Iraq and Afghanistan, severe birth defects and cancer have dramatically increased in both U.S. soldiers and in Iraqi and Afghan civilians in the affected areas.

Depleted uranium munitions are classified by the United Nations as illegal weapons of mass destruction. Since the uranium used in these DU weapons has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the U.S. military has ensured that countless generations of Afghans and Iraqis will suffer terribly from horrific cancers and deformities. Just look at the picture of the baby (yes that is a baby) at the top of this article. Babies like this are being born every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When a woman has a baby in Iraq now, they no longer ask if it is a boy or a girl. Instead they ask: "Is it normal?"

To see many more of these tragically deformed babies visit this site:


According to doctors at maternity and children hospitals in Kabul, Afghanistan the rate of various congenital deformities has multiplied dramatically since the U.S. invasion of their country.

Most Americans also do not seem to know that thousands upon thousands of our own troops are getting sick and dying from exposure to depleted uranium.

According to official (but unpublicized) U.S. government data, there have been over 70,000 deaths and over 1 million disabilities among American soldiers as a result of America's wars in the Middle East.

The truth is that we have been slowly nuking our own troops and most Americans don't even realize it.

The following is an excerpt from an excellent article that clearly demonstrates how the Bush administration has been killing our own troops.....


Excerpt from "Death By Slow Burn:How America Nukes Its Own Troops"


Ironically, support for our troops will extend well beyond the war in Iraq. Americans will be supporting Gulf War II veterans for years as they slowly and painfully succumb to radiation poisoning.

U.S and British troops deployed to the area are the walking dead. Humans and animals, friends and foes in the fallout zone are destined to a long downhill spiral of chronic illness and disability.

Kidney dysfunction, lung damage, bloody stools, extreme fatigue, joint pain, unsteady gait, memory loss and rashes and, ultimately, cancer and premature death await those exposed to DU.

Award-winning journalist Will Thomas wrote: “As the last Gulf conflict so savagely demonstrated, GI immune systems reeling from multiple doses of experimental vaccines offer little defense against further exposure to chemical weapons, industrial toxins, stress, caffeine, insect repellent and radiation left over from the last war. This is a war even the victors will lose.”

When a DU shell is fired, it ignites upon impact. Uranium, plus traces of plutonium and americium, vaporize into tiny, ceramic particles of radioactive dust. Once inhaled, uranium oxides lodge in the body and emit radiation indefinitely.

A single particle of DU lodged in a lymph node can devastate the entire immune system according to British radiation expert Roger Coghill. The Royal Society of England published data showing that battlefield soldiers who inhale or swallow high levels of DU can suffer kidney failure within days. Any soldier now in Iraq who has not inhaled lethal radioactive dust is not breathing.

In the first two weeks of combat, 700 Tomahawks, at a cost of $1.3 million each, blasted Iraqi real estate into radioactive mushroom clouds. Millions of DU tank rounds liter the terrain. Cleanup is impossible because there is no place on the planet to put so much contaminated debris.

Bush Sr.'s Gulf War I was also a nuclear war. 320 tons of depleted uranium were used against Iraq in 1991.

A 1998 report by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances confirms that inhaling DU causes symptoms identical to those claimed by many sick vets with Gulf War Syndrome.

The Gulf War Veterans Association reports that at least 300,000 Gulf War I vets have now developed incapacitating illnesses. To date, 209,000 vets have filed claims for disability benefits based on service-connected injuries and illnesses from combat in that war.

Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, is a former army medical expert. He told nuclear scientists in Paris last year that tens of thousands of sick British and American soldiers are now dying from radiation they encountered during Gulf War I. He found that 62 percent of sick vets tested have uranium isotopes in their organs, bones, brains and urine. Laboratories in Switzerland and Finland corroborated his findings.

In other studies, some sick vets were found to be expressing uranium in even their semen. Their sexual partners often complained of a burning sensation during intercourse, followed by their own debilitating illnesses.

Nothing compares to the astronomical cancer rates and birth defects suffered by the Iraqi people who have endured vicious nuclear chastisement for years. U.S. air attacks against Iraq since 1993 have undoubtedly employed nuclear munitions.

Pictures of grotesquely deformed Iraqi infants born since 1991 are overwhelming. Like those born to Gulf War I vets, many babies born to troops now in Iraq will also be afflicted with hideous deformities, neurological damage and/or blood and respiratory disorders.

Army health physicist Dr. Doug Rokke was dispatched to the Middle East to salvage DU-contaminated tanks after Gulf War I. His Geiger counters revealed that the war zones of Iraq and Kuwait were contaminated with up to 300 millirems an hour in beta and gamma radiation plus thousands to millions of counts per minute in alpha radiation. Rokke recently told the media: “The whole area is still trashed. It is hotter than heck over there still. This stuff doesn't go away.”

DU remains “hot” for 4.5 billion years. Radiation expert Dr. Helen Caldicott confirms that the dust-laden winds of DU-contaminated war zones “will remain effectively radioactive for the rest of time.” The murderous dust storms which ensnared coalition troops during the first few days of the current invasion will have significant health consequences. Rokke and his clean-up team were issued only flimsy dust masks for their dangerous work.

Of the 100 people on Rokke's decontamination team, 30 have already “dropped dead.” Rokke himself is ill with radiation damage to lungs and kidneys. He has brain lesions, skin pustules, chronic fatigue, continual wheezing and painful fibromyalgia. Rokke warns that anyone exposed to DU should have adequate respiratory protection and special coveralls to protect their clothing because, he says, you can't get uranium particles off your clothing.

(Article continues at the link above)


The following is just one testimony from one of our soldiers who has had his life changed forever by depleted uranium:







Matthew and his wife believe Victoria's shocking deformity has something to do with her father's illness and the war — especially since there is no history of birth defects in either of their families.




Because it is twice as heavy as lead, DU has been used by the Pentagon since the Persian Gulf War in certain types of "tank-buster" shells, as well as for armor-plating in Abrams tanks.


"My husband went to Iraq to fight for his country," Janice Matthew said. "I feel the Army should take responsibility for what's happened."

(The article continues at the link above)


We owe the world an apology of unprecedented magnitude for using depleted uranium munitions. Barack Obama MUST ban the use of depleted uranium by the U.S. military or else he will be a party to these crimes. This is one of the biggest environmental crimes in the history of the planet, and it must stop NOW.


  1. Rhotel1 said...

    This posting is full of mythology. Why not learn what depleted uranium is and more importantly what it is not by visiting www.depletedcranium.com or by reading the dozens of linked reports at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/DUStory/message/88 - when you do, you will realize that there is no DU Environmental Hell, just a propaganda campaign started by Saddam Hussein in about 1992 that continues to be spread around the internet. I suspect that this is what gave Gerard Matthew the idea that DU caused his illness (but when you read the Federal Court complaint, his illness becomes so far fetched that you wonder if it is for real after all), that plus the anti-DU crusaders who wanted a poster boy and girl (yes, he and they have used his daughter as another symbol thanks to a doctor who visited Iraq when Saddam's government controlled the propaganda. The case they filed is under appeal; if they win, they will be adjudged to have been sick due to DU only because the government chose to use the defense that the National Guardsmen were not entitled to sue the United States under the "Ferres Doctrine" rather than attack the veracity of the men's statements. Had the government done that, it might have easily proved the claims to be without merit and such darlings of the anti-DU crusade as Asaf Durakovic, who probably reports naturally occuring uranium as being DU contamination, as being nothing more than frauds.


  2. Rhotel1 said...

    I just noted that there is a totally false claim - Afghanistan - DU was used very sparingly, if at all, in Afghanistan. It has two uses, (1) kinetic energy penetrators - basically thin very dense metal rods, fired at high velocity from a tank or aircraft (A-10) cannon and (2) as "heavy armor" for the M1A1 Abrams Main Battle tank. The Abrams has never been deployed to Afghanistan and the few tanks that the Taliban had were destroyed by bombing, not cannon firing DU penetrators. There is no DU in a bomb. There have been false claims made by Asaf Durakovic, who claims to have found DU in drinking water in Afghanistan (but who also claimed that US feared Japanese DU being used in balloon bombs in WW-II so he is known for being a little inventive to say the least and not exactly true to facts), Mohammed Daud Miraki, an Afghan refugee from the Soviet invasion who seems to have grown to hate the country that took him in; Miraki leads off his claims with grotesque photos of an infant with fiery red eyes and bizarre looking skin, photos he claims to have taken in Afghanistan of DU caused birth defects that are in fact Harlequin Ichthyosis, a rare, formerly almost always fatal, genetic skin condition that was first noted in 1750 almost a century before the discovery of metallic uranium, and then there is Douglas Lind Rokke, aka Major Rokke, aka Doctor Rokke, who fails to tell you that First Lieutenant Rokke was an Army Reservist who was the low man on the totem pole in Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War or that the doctorate is in Vocational Education and not any form of science, let alone medicine - Rokke has falsely claimed that Israel used American supplied DU-tipped bunker busting bombs against Hezbollah in Lebanon, when he full well knew that there is no such thing as a DU-tipped bomb - there is no DU used in any bomb - and if you do not believe me, then go to the Federation of American Scientists and read what they have to say - Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28) http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/gbu-28.htm -- you can also see a video of an infant with Harlequin Ichthyosis here
    http://www.thefetus.net/page.php?id=1448 - There were no tank-to-tank battles and there was no DU used in the bombs dropped in Tora Bora and the UN Environmental Programme found no DU when it examined a former Soviet SCUD base and removed the hazardous materials contamination from that site - UNEP Report - Ground Contamination, Astana, Afghanistan
    Assessment Report of Military Waste (SCUD Missile, etc) Storage Site - gives Uranium concentrations on Pages 27-32
    http://postconflict.unep.ch/publications/afghanistan_cont.pdf -- I even see that Alarab in London heeded my request to remove an article that lead with Miraki's photo. I was going to show you that so you could compare it with the Harlequin Ichthyosis video, but it is not there anymore, not at that location anyway, but I am sure that someone else still has it up.

  3. Nor'Easter said...

    Here's a link to a blog that features a comment by a man named Andrew Alper (editor of Metal News, a magazine that serves the metallurgy industry.


    This is an excerpt from that comment...


    Bio-availability. To understand this crucial difference, I have to describe the action of a penetrator. The high heat kinetic energy penetrators achieve actually comes from the friction created as the super dense material flies through the air. The air molecules rub against the projectile, making it hotter and hotter. By the time it reaches it’s target (in this case a heavily armored tank) it is white hot. DU and WHA behave very differently at this moment of contact.

    DU begins breaking off brittley at the contact point in an action called “shear banding” or “self sharpening.” The projectile enters the tank much more efficiently. Like a crystal, only much more dense, the tip stays sharp as pieces break away from it, causing it to enter much faster. Once inside it explodes, just from the change in atmosphere. The Depleted Uranium shatters like glass and obliterates everything inside, covering everything with shrapnel and a large amount yellow-orange dust that was created at the explosion, and ask the pieces broke off outside. The yellow-orange dust is no longer Depleted Uranium, but Uranium Trioxide, a very radioactive byproduct created by the extreme heat and exposure to air. This dust is easily breathed in, and has a high bio-availability. It is deceptive to call this dust DU, as it has undergone a dramatic transformation from exposure to air and heat.


    As you can see, the issue is Uranium Trioxide, and even more lethal substance that is created by the explosion and heat when the DU material hits its target.

    What is truly disgusting is that I run into these apologists for this weaponry, and many of them are not even paid shills for the industry, but are deluded ideologues who feel they are protecting America's right to destroy whomever and whatever it decides to destroy and for whatever reason it decides to destroy whatever it is that it destroys. What the don't realize is that they are destroying the legacy of this empire, and it will be the sins that they defend that will define the United States for future generations of human beings that will determine whether this was a shining city on a hill, or just another cruel and malignant empire that couldn't fall too soon.

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