The political fallout over the United Kingdom\u2019s decision to send DU anti-tank shells to Kiev for use along with its Challenger 2 tanks continues to spread. On Saturday, President Putin said he didn\u2019t buy Britain\u2019s assurances that the munitions wouldn\u2019t cause any health effects, and that taking into account the toxic radioactive dust generated by the shells, they \u201cof course amount to a weapon of the most dangerous kind.\u201d
Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia\u2019s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense (RCBD) Troops, echoed the president\u2019s concerns, predicting that the weapons\u2019 use would \u201ccause irreparable harm\u201d to the health of soldiers and the civilian population alike, with DU compounds expected to remain in the soil and affect people, animals and the environment for many years to come.
Russia\u2019s concerns are not unjustified. Throughout the past year, Russian intelligence and the RCBD Troops issued report after worrying report regarding Kiev\u2019s ambitions to build nuclear weapons, scenarios involving false flags using radioactive dirty bombs, and a long list of evidence of dangerous US and European-funded and coordinated experiments with biological weapons at Ukraine-based biolabs.
But depleted uranium poses a special kind of danger, due both to its availability and record of use.
Discovered during the Cold War by US and British scientists as an effective but controversial armor-piercing weapon, DU tank and artillery shells and air-dropped bombs are stuffed with the uranium byproducts left over from the production of nuclear energy.
Military R&D engineers quickly discovered that the extraordinary level of heat generated by DU rounds when they hit their target and catch fire (measured in the thousands of degrees Celsius) allow them to literally \u2018burn through\u2019 armor like a hot knife through butter \u2013 entering tank crew compartments, killing everyone inside and often literally blowing turrets clean off.
The militaries of NATO, the USSR, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and South Africa stockpiled hundreds of thousands of tons of DU materials, but the WWIII scenario they were training for never became a reality.
But having acquired the weapons, the US and its NATO allies quickly found places to use them, overlooking all potential international legal and moral barriers. DU shells and bombs were deployed during the Gulf War in 1991, in the bombardment of Bosnia and the rump state of Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2001-2021 occupation of Afghanistan, the dirty war against Syria, and, allegedly, the 2011 NATO air campaign in Libya.
Iraq and the former Yugoslavia were hit the hardest, with upwards of 2,300 tons of DU used in the Middle Eastern country in 1991 and 2003-2005, and as much as 30 tons strewn across the Balkans between the mid-to-late 1990s. Almost every country in which DU has been used has reported a surge in deadly ailments, including cancers, strokes, and birth defects. In Iraq, cancer rates in DU-affected areas jumped from 40 cases per 100,000 in 1991 to 800 per 100,000 in 1995, and 1,600 per 100,000 by 2005. Serbs, Bosnians, Kosovar Albanians, Montenegrins and other peoples of the former Yugoslavia suffered a similar fate, with Serbia today facing some of the highest cancer rates in Europe, with many attributing the spike in illness to NATO\u2019s DU deployment two-and-a-half decades ago.
\u2018Anecdotal Evidence\u2019 Claiming Real Lives
The US and UK governments have bent over backwards to avoid admitting that depleted uranium is the cause of the epidemic of cancers facing Iraqis, Serbs and others, suggesting evidence regarding their effects is \u201canecdotal\u201d and \u201ccircumstantial.\u201d
In 2021, British and US researchers released a much-cited study which concluded that low-level exposure to pesticides and sarin nerve gas, not depleted uranium, were the \u201cmost likely\u201d causes of Gulf War Syndrome \u2013 the chronic disorder faced by about hundreds of thousands of US vets who took part in the 1991 Gulf War, and who now face a heightened incidence of cancers, respiratory and neurological illnesses, and other diseases.
\u201cThe British Army has used depleted uranium in its armor piercing shells for decades,\u201d Britain\u2019s Defense Ministry said in a statement last week meant to \u201cdebunk\u201d Moscow\u2019s concerns. \u201cRussia knows this, but is deliberately trying to disinform. Independent research by scientists from groups such as the Royal Society has assessed that any impact to personal health and the environment from the use of depleted uranium munitions is likely to be low.\u201d
But independent academics and researchers who have studied the weapons\u2019 use and impact tell a very different story, as do those who know victims of depleted uranium poisoning, including Iraqi and Balkan civilians, but also NATO troops tasked with handling and deploying the toxic weapons.
\u201cThey completely destroyed Fallujah with these and other weapons,\u201d the academic said, noting that radioactive contaminants spread by DU munitions have polluted the entire region\u2019s food supply.
Al-Azzawi said there are roughly 5,000 DU-contaminated tanks and other armored vehicles destroyed by the coalition in the 1991 war and after the 2003 invasion spread across nearly two dozen large tank grave yards around Basra. \u201cWhenever a sandstorm blows through the area, an additional dose of radiation moves from these sites towards the civilian population,\u201d she noted.
\u201cIn 2005 alone, an area of about two square kilometers was cleared of depleted uranium. Our army did that. They put up a wire fence and wrote \u2018Hazard to Life: Do Not Approach\u2019. But nobody knew about that until 2005,\u201d the lawyer added.
Aleksic hopes to take a case against NATO to Belgrade\u2019s Higher Court later this year, representing a Serbian officer who filed to sue the alliance in early 2021, but subsequently died, with a health checkup finding levels of uranium contaminants in his body to be off the charts. NATO claims immunity from prosecution, but the attorney hopes to win compensation for the victim\u2019s family anyway, saying the court could reach a verdict without the alliance\u2019s participation.
\u201cThere is no immunity from criminal responsibility, especially when it comes to responsibility to civilians. My mother got sick, my relatives got sick, my clients got sick. They had nothing to do with the war; I am not getting into politics. I\u2019m just talking about the consequences,\u201d Aleksic stressed.
The lawyer explained that his efforts to defend victims of the 1999 bombings got started after working with Angelo Fiore Tartaglia, a Rome-based attorney who has spent some 20 years of his life representing Italian soldiers injured by DU, and their families.
Domenico Leggiero is a retired Italian military pilot and weapons inspector who saw firsthand how many of his colleagues began to \u201cfall ill with cancers, just like falling leaves,\u201d after service in the former Yugoslavia. Leggiero now heads Osservatorio Militaire, an Italian military watchdog that seeks to shed light on the consequences of DU use on Italian troops.
\u201cWe couldn\u2019t figure out where the cancers were coming from until we and our medics started taking biopsy samples from troops that had gotten sick, or even died. So we would take the primary biopsy of tumors and look at them not as medics, but as physicists, and realized that within these biopsy samples, there were materials that shouldn\u2019t have been there,\u201d Leggiero told Sputnik.
\u201cWe\u2019re talking cadmium, we\u2019re talking mineral substances, heavy metals. Furthermore, these heavy metals all had a well-defined shape and size \u2013 a very small size \u2013 10-100 times smaller than PM-10 [particles with a diameter of 10 microns or less, ed.]. They basically had a spherical shape,\u201d the soldier explained.
In research, Leggiero and his colleagues discovered that these particles were so minute and numerous that they were could disburse in the air over long periods of time, get inhaled by exposed civilians and military personnel, and enter the food chain after being deposited on crops.
The veteran said the Italian military\u2019s commanders \u201cknew\u201d about the health risks associated with DU munitions since they were provided with this information by the Pentagon, but ordinary soldiers \u201cwere not warned.\u201d
\u201cI am in possession of all possible and imaginable documentation, including the rules on how to treat material contaminated with uranium. These rules were established at the level of the general staff; they were never issued among the troops, and therefore we essentially had a massacre,\u201d Leggiero said.
\u2018Depleted Uranium Makes No Distinction Between Nationalities\u2019
Dr. Hans-Christof von Sponeck, a former UN assistant secretary-general and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq who resigned in 2000 in protest against the UN\u2019s sanctions regime, which he said constituted a violation of the Geneva Conventions, has no doubt in his mind about the consequences of the US and Britain\u2019s use of DU on Iraqi civilians.
\u201cLet me also add that depleted uranium does not make a distinction between different nationalities. British and American soldiers deployed to southern Iraq and their families, also became the victims of depleted uranium, as court cases in the UK and the US confirm\u2026Should depleted uranium munitions be used in Ukraine, it would mean that people in the area, soldiers and civilians alike, would be victimized even though the dangers of such munitions are well known in 2023,\u201d the veteran German diplomat stressed.
What Makes DU Charges Difficult to Pursue?
\u201cBased on what we know, depleted uranium will be bad for health and likely cause cancer. However, linking depleted uranium exposure to its effects using epidemiology is extremely difficult,\u201d says Dr. Keith Baverstock, a veteran University of Eastern Finland biologist and former head of the Radiation Protection Program at the World Health Organization\u2019s European office.
For one thing, Baverstock said, “exposure is very local to where a depleted uranium munition impacts but the depleted uranium, particularly in arid conditions, persists on the surface of the ground, so defining an exposed population is also difficult.” On top of that, the security situation in some affected countries, particularly Iraq, makes meaningful epidemiological research next to impossible, according to the scientist.
In an extensive, wide-ranging and highly illuminating interview with Sputnik, Dr. Busby explained how he and a group of British and Iraqi colleagues carried out extensive, first-hand, on-the-ground research into oncological diseases and child mortality in Iraq in the mid-to-late 2000s. Research led them to discover that cancer rates in Fallujah \u2013 specifically those associated with radiation, like leukemia and lymphoma, were higher than those in Hiroshima, the Japanese city hit with a US atomic bomb in 1945, and not just by a little, but by a factor of two or even more, depending on the cancer type.\u201cWe found out the high level of infant mortality within the first year of life and the cause of these deaths were congenital malformations. We also [found a] skewed birth sex ratio, which is another sign of genetic damage associated with radiation exposure. We put all of these results together and concluded that there had been some very large genetic damage event which occurred around the time of the Fallujah [campaign],\u201d the academic said.
Busby says that one of the factors making DU so deadly is its ability to bind strongly to DNA \u2013 a factor the scientific community has known about since the 1950s. As uranium burns, it produces microscopic volatile particles which behave like a gas and can contaminate wide swathes of territory, not only the environment surrounding battlefields, but neighboring countries or even distant regions. The academic pointed out, for example, that filters in the UK looking out for uranium picked up contamination from Iraq in 2003.
Another issue, which Dr. Busby said he discovered mostly independently, and which he presented to the MoD\u2019s Depleted Uranium Oversight Board in 2004, is uranium\u2019s very high atomic number (the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom), which he said turns it into \u201ca sort of amplifier for normal radiation.\u201d
\u201cWe all live in an environment where we get gamma rays that come through our body and go out\u2026If you\u2019ve got uranium inside you, then it intercepts this [radiation] because of its high atomic number and all its electrons. In my opinion, and I’ve written quite a lot about this, this is the reason why uranium is very dangerous. First of all, it binds to DNA. Secondly, it causes these photo electrons to be omitted into the DNA. And all studies that have been done of people exposed to uranium showed massive chromosome damage. So when they look to see the chromosomes in their cells, in the peripheral blood cells, they find massive amounts of chromosome damage that leads to genetic effects \u2013 cancer, birth defects and so forth. So that’s the reason why uranium is so dangerous,\u201d the academic emphasized.
Busby noted that once uranium contaminant particles enter the body, they don\u2019t go away. Instead, they sit inside the victim, \u201cshooting off little cannonballs all the time, close into the cells,\u201d into the DNA, until a tumor is formed.
Recalling visits to Iraqi hospitals and conversations with local doctors treating people suffering from the DU usage after the First Gulf War, the scientist recalled how doctors told him that there was nothing they could do to combat the disease thanks to the tough sanctions regime against Iraq.
The problem today, according to Dr. Busby, is that the military planners in Washington and London see DU as a \u201cmagic\u201d anti-tank weapon. \u201cIt’s inconceivable that the military would allow anyone to stop them using [DU] in a real war where you want to win, and they don’t really care about the people that die as a result of all of this, the collateral damage\u2026the cancers downwind, the congenital malformations, the weeping parents and all the rest of it,\u201d the scientist summed up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n