U.S. nuclear attacks cause cancer epidemic in Iraq

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It's not very well-known, but American forces use shells and missiles made out of nuclear waste. This nuclear waste is aerosolised when the shells are used, and this resulting dust is deadly. They like to call it "depleted uranium" but that is a fancy expression for nuclear waste. It's the waste that comes from the enrichment of uranium. The U-235 is made into bombs and U-238 is left over in large quantities as waste. Some people thought it would be a fine idea to turn this into shells. Some of this waste may include traces of neptunium and plutonium.

Cancer - a deadly legacy

In Falluja, which was heavily bombarded by the US in 2004, as many as 25% of new- born infants have serious abnormalities, including congenital anomalies, brain tumors, and neural tube defects in the spinal cord.

The cancer rate in the province of Babil, south of Baghdad has risen from 500 diagnosed cases in 2004 to 9,082 in 2009 according to Al Jazeera English.

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Abdulhaq Al-Ani, author of “Uranium in Iraq” told Al Jazeera English that the incubation period for depleted uranium is five to six years, which is consistent with the spike in cancer rates in 1996-1997 and 2008-2009.

There are also similar patterns of birth defects among Iraqi and Afghan infants who were also born in areas that were subjected to depleted uranium bombardment.

Dr. Daud Miraki, director of the Afghan Depleted Uranium and Recovery Fund, told Al Jazeera English he found evidence of the effect of depleted uranium in infants in eastern and south- eastern Afghanistan. “Many children are born with no eyes, no limbs, or tumors protruding from their mouths and eyes,” said Dr. Miraki.

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According to Al Jazeera, the Pentagon used more than 300 tons of depleted uranium in 1991. In 2003, the United States used more than 1,000 tons.

That is not so. Uranium 238 is barely radioactive; for most intents and purposes it can be considered stable. You can even get vases with it in:



The toxicity of uranium comes from its chemical properties; in this regard it is similar to lead, mercury, cadmium etc. It's a misnomer to call it a "nuclear attack" because the radioactivity of the uranium isn't an issue - it's the way it behaves chemically that causes people to get sick.

If the uranium is impure and merely utilized in military weapons for its density which makes it heavier than lead and if it was obtained from depleted reactor fuel there is good reason to suspect it had elements of radioactivity retained from reactor byproducts. Or perhaps there is some dispute over the radical increase in cancer and birth defect statistics. If those statistics are taken as valid then what else could be the cause?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium

I am aware that uranium had been used to color glass and ceramics in the early 20th century and also that it was removed from the market for its radioactivity which was, admittedly, small but medicine has noted that there is no threshold for radioactive danger and contact with it should be minimized. There is, of course, always a background of natural radiation but that does not mean it is not somewhat dangerous, even if it cannot be eliminated.

depleted uranium will likely be the Agent Orange of the Bush-era Colonial wars.

add this to the approx. 1.3million+ deaths, I burn with a white heat when anyone tries to jusitfy the Iraq invasion by stating the necessity of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

The article states that the depleted uranium is the U-238 left over after uranium enrichment, which takes place long before it ever goes into a reactor. Such depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, as most of the (comparatively) more radioactive uranium 235 has been removed. Furthermore, so have a lot of the decay products which are usually present



Boring, mundane, everyday chemical toxicity. I'm not disputing that uranium is poisonous. All I'm saying is that its radioactivity has a negligible contribution to its toxicity. You'd be dead many hundreds of times over from the chemical effects before you can absorb enough for the radioactivity to give you cancer (and you'd probably already have cancer from the chemical effects anyway).

As a result, it is inaccurate to refer to the use of depleted uranium as a "nuclear attack". A chemical attack, maybe, but really just a case of the US government not thinking through the consequences of spreading large quantities of a toxic heavy metal all over the place.

The figures indicate an extraordinary rise in cancer and birth defects. Are you refuting those statistics or are you so utterly bored by the misery that it has no effect on your sensibilities? In no way did you attempt to indicate what you thought was the cause in the statistical rise.



I have looked up the radiation decay emissions of uranium 238 http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/uranium.html and it indicates alpha radiation is the output. Solid chunks of uranium emitting alpha radiation are relatively safe since alpha radiation has poor penetration capabilities but in military use the impact of uranium armaments generate radioactive uranium dust which can be inhaled and lodge in the lungs and other internal body parts to cause all the nasty effects of radiation over a long period of time. The dust is extremely dangerous.

Read again. I quite clearly stated that the chemical properties of uranium were quite sufficient to explain the increased incidences of cancer, renal failure, etc which result from exposure.

But not the horrible birth defects which indicate radioactive gene mutilation. Internal alpha radiation is nothing to be bored with.

I think we've got a semantics issue here, one party is not so much arguing against the impact of using DU weaponry, but of the validity of characterizing it as a "nuclear" attack, which conjures up a very specific image in the minds of most that conflicts with the reality of the situation. I don't think that DU = bad is in question.

On a related note, several years ago the US military changed over from lead to tungsten cores in it's small arms ammunition to reduce contamination of it's bases due to weapons practice, raising the question of how dangerous lead particles from conventional kinetic weaponry is. I know that most indoor gun ranges are required to have pretty extensive ventilation systems if they allow the use of lead bullets, so I'm less interested in whether or not DU projectiles have harmful aftereffects than how much worse they are than those of lead projectiles.

Depleted uranium is more poisonous than lead with similar attributes, and only emits alpha radiation unlike it's prequesite, Uranium-235. If any powder or residue from DU is in the air you could end up in a world of hurt, (here's some info.) For those that don't know about alpha radiation, it's safe to be in fairly close proximity to it, just not to actually ingest or come into contact with it. You won't need a lead overcoat.

The problem here is the fact this stuff is peppered all over warzones, meaning it gets into everything from crops to babies and messes them up.

this is appalling. all because they wanted better weapons.

The really ugly question is whether it's used more for it's penetrative and pyro-reactive qualities as a munition, or as a cheap way of disposing of the stuff in someone else's backyard. I know that DU is extremely dense and does ugly things when it hits something at velocity, but I don't know it's relative hardness compared to other available materials, so I can't really make a judgment as to whether DU projectiles provide enough of a penetration advantage to necessitate it's use in anti armor kinetic impact weapons in the current conflict. I do know that the whole family of DU munitions were developed in the 70's and 80's in response to overblown reports of advancements in Soviet tank armor, making the 30mm cannon rounds used in the GAU Avenger rotary gun and 120mm APFSDS tank projectile virtually unchallenged by any modern armored battlefield target. Using it on the Iraqis and their outdated Soviet hand me downs seems a bit like sandblasting a soup cracker, we could probably get away with using the older HEAT rounds without compromising battlefield effectiveness, and stash the DU stuff in case we come up against something with armor thick enough to justify the risk in using it, just MHO.

The problem with uranium dust is that it doesn't go away after the conflict is over. Land mines are bad enough but eventually they can be gotten rid of. Uranium dust is there forever. It should be illegal.

I don't know enough about uranium, so I can't speak about it.

But deaths never go away. Once your family member is killed, it stays forever. Once you saw your friend dying at the battlefield, you are not sure to recover. War never stops, its effects last for years or for the entire life of people.

That's not to say that if you're right (and I guess you studied more than me regarding this subject), it's worse than "regular" shells. But just to point that out. There is no "good" war, only less bad, perhaps. Not contradicting you, of course, just to add.

Uranium was used, in the United States, in dentures and false teeth until the 1980s - at a maximum of 0.05% - under the intention of the teeth showing as white as possible. Unfortunately, they fluoresced blue, green, red and other colours under a black light while subjecting the inside of the mouth to several times over the exposure received from a dental xray. Environmental exposure occurs for many, many reasons.


M.

I think a lot of it is semantics. Nuclear attack = atomic bombs, which is the inference (but not the truth).
Depletion is the process whereby most of the radioactivity is removed from the uranium (U235 is what's used in the bomb, U238 is the more stable isotope).
The implication is that we know these are insanely dangerous, yet we're using them on purpose to be even more evil than we already are. I'd like more corroborating evidence from perhaps the gunners and armory officers that use this, to see if there's a similar instance of renal failure and carcinoma.