The Second Day of Action Against DU
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news report
Tuesday June 03, 2003 21:06
by cadu per vs
A-10 + DU =
The A-10 combat aircraft is the major battlefield source of toxic and radioactive ammunition made from depleted uranium (DU). In Tuscon again two were arrested at a Tuscon Army Recruitng Centre after warning recruits about Uranium ammo.
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The Second Day of Action really had an fantastic response with actions happening all over the world. It was much larger than the first day as well which is very encouraging.
Below are some reports received so far. They just give a sample of the large and small events that took place all over the world.
*****
In Tuscon, USA, The Second International Day of Protest Against Depleted Uranium was marked in 18' chalk letters that give a warning to Tucson's A-10 pilots.
As dawn broke in Tucson Thursday morning, May 29, pilots approaching Davis-Monthan AFB could see broad strokes of white gypsum marking letters in the brown Sonoran soil. Near the north end of the runway, the ecological graffiti reads:
A-10 + DU =
WAR CRIME
The A-10 combat aircraft is the major battlefield source of toxic and radioactive ammunition made from depleted uranium (DU).
*****
In Tuscon again two were arrested at a Tuscon Army Recruitng Centre after warning recruits about Uranium ammo.
The hazards of the U.S. arsenal of depleted uranium weapons was the subject of a peaceful vigil in front of military recruiting
offices in Tucson this morning. Most of the radioactive ammunition is fired by the A-10 Warthogs warplanes that train over Tucson.
Members of the Tucson Pledge of Resistance organized the event to demand that the military fully inform potential recruits of theknown hazards posed by American and British use of depleted uranium armaments. Fifteen people participated in today's Tucson event, which was part of the second International Day of Action Against Depleted Uranium.
*****
At Dundrennan DU test fire range in Scotland. There was a funeral march to the gates, with several kids carrying a coffin. There were several speakers, then there was a mass die-in. Next some 'weapon inspectors' went off and wandered around the perimeter fences of the base. Around 70 people attended and Scottish TV news covered the action.
*****
In Perth, Western Australia, leaflets were handed out a vigil - to
let people know that the International Day Against DU was happening
*****
.
In Nashville Tennessee a group went to Congress man Jim Cooper's office today for the second annual International Day of Action Against Depleted Uranium. We had a petition with 40 signatures asking Mr. Cooper to support the proposed Depeted Uranium Munitions Study Act of 2003 (H.R. 1483). We gathered the signatures outside his office within 2 hours. Five of us went in to visit with Jim Cooper. However, we did not get to meet with the Representative. We were told by two of his staffers that Mr. Cooper yearns to meet with his constituents, and this morning he was so desperate to meet with his constituents that Mr. Cooper went to one of the malls in Nashville to meet senior citizens and to discuss his political agenda with them!
*****
The Rossendale Stop the War group, as befits a small group, just gave out 500 leaflets by the Rawtenstall Market. However, we had a good response. Every one read the leaflet or put it in their pocket to read later. One Pakistani man took three to put up in his Mosque.One lady whose son was serving in the Gulf said she would send it too him. She was very worried about him and gave us the impression that he and his mates were worried too. It was a day to cherish.
*****
The Clapham Junction vigil by Wandsworth Stop-the-War, London.
A small number of us (6 or 7) set up a stall outside the station, and lined up in front of the entrance, carrying A3 photographs of deformed babies, and handing out a pamphlet explaining about DU (more or less our press release, clipped to fit on one page).
The local paper (Wandsworth Guardian) sent a photographer down, and he took a few pictures of us. We carried on for about an hour as planned, and had started packing up at 7:15 when a pair of policemen turned up, saying they had received a call that we were displaying offensive pictures. A few minutes earlier, another pair of cops had surrounded the 2 activists on the other side of the flower stall, with pretty much the same message. They had received another phone call from a member of the public. So that's 2 phone calls, apparently. Our pair said that we ought not to display these pictures in public, then dithered a bit saying they were fairly sure we weren't allowed, before finally deciding that this was definitely the case - something about publically displaying obscene images involving children ! They were obviously making it up as they went along, but we agreed that the pictures definitely were obscene - and argued that this was precisely why the public had a right to know about them.
*****
Orang Orang Seen In Action Against DU IN Berlin
On Thursday, 29th of May the Uran Utan has been seen in pretty wild action in front of the dependency of Lockheed Martin in the Europa House close to the Brandenburger Tor. It has been reported that he was throwing around flyers of the AntiNuclearPlenary Berlin as part of the International Action Day against DU-Ammunition.
Being really daring we managed to get one from the radiating ape:
YOU (which is the meaning of DU in german)
You [DU] do not know what you [DU] can do about you [DU] ?
*****
Science for Peace in Toronto showed the video Invisible War in support of the International Action Against DU weapons.
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We, a Japanese group, Anti-Radiation-Exposure Campaign of Kansai, based on Osaka, also took participate in the International Day of Action Against DU. On 25th May, we had an educational meeting on DU, and the recent nuclear and military policy of US. There we discussed about the protest notes to the governments of US, UK and also Japan on the issue of the War in Iraq including DU. On 29th, we went to the local embassy of US in Osaka
to appeal against the DU and submit the protest note to them.
****
International Physicians Against Nuclear war in Greece held a Press conference and there was response from a few major daily
newspapers of Athens (Eleftherotypia) and from one radio station Athens 984. They all focus in the use of DU in the Greek
army.
*********************************************************************************************
The Campaign Against Depleted Uranium, Bridge 5 Mill, 22a Beswick Street,
Ancoats, Manchester, M4 7HR Tel./Fax.: +44 (0)161 273 8293
E-Mail [email protected] Website: http://www.cadu.org.uk
CADU's quarterly newsletter is available free of charge by E-Mail (send us a
message with 'Subscribe CADU News' as the subject) or by post for £6 per year.
Please send your cheque draft or postal order in £ sterling to the address above.
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Comments (12 of 12)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12Depleted uranium sounds scarier than it is. It's radiation can't penetrate the skin, so it is only dangerous if you eat it or inhale it (which is hard to do given that it's a heavy metal - even the tiniest DU particles don't stay airborne for long). Ask a physicist about DU. You'll be surprised at what you'll learn.
and you should also know sean that there is no such thing as a 'safe dose' of radiation, also, the fact is that when these munitions are fired, the dust created is jettisoned from the vehicle/gun/plane that fired it(keeping the 'valiant' crew safe), and therefore much of the DU that is left on allied battlefields is in the form of dust, which can be swallowed or inhaled. If you require further proof of the effects of DU, try to find records from the hospitals in Basra, sorry but I don't have a link, before the latest war in Iraq, to see what the effects of the DU used the lat time were. And, if you wait a little while, you'll see the same things happening in Afghanistan, Kosovo and around Sarajevo.
Sean, for one the liver stores heavy metals such as mercury, lead cadmium and uranium permanently!
Secondly Iraq which has seen the heaviest use of DU has very little rainfall and vegetation to trap DU in the soil, in fact they have regular dust storms which will whip up the DU in the environment so it can be ingested/inhaled and eventually stored in peoples livers.
I don't think we can afford to be complacent about this type of weapon.
Do you remember how lead, cadmium and mercury used to be dumped into the environment and the effects of mercury poisioning on the central nervous system of cats and eventually humans in Japan in the 1960s/70s?
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_xymphora_archive.html#105471408529088638
Sean, That's just bollox. Micron sized specks, billions of which are produced when a DU shell burns on impact,
can easily remain airborne and since they are so small, they get mixed up with all the other dust around the place.
And with billions of such radioactive particles, each of which contains billions of Uranium atoms, they can very
easily get inhaled and ingested. There they lodge and become a permanent threat to you. The decay of which one
atom alone is capable of breaking thousands of molecular bonds and producing similar number of free radicals, and
thereby causing major disruption to the surrounding cells, in terms of the function and damage to the DNA in them.
Once these particles are inside you, it becomes a near certainity you will start to have some of the many ill-health
effects, of which cancer is just one of them.
Please don't patronize us with your 'physics from first principles' stuff and so obviously loaded with your own
bias.
Radioactive doesn't always mean toxic
by Sean Healy Tue, Jun 3 2003, 11:37pm
>Depleted uranium sounds scarier than it is.
No, using the word 'depleted' is a spin that lets some think it is less dangerous. DU is a highly toxic heavy metal. The United Nations has issued several calls for a ban on DU.
>so it is only dangerous if you eat it or inhale it (which is hard to do given that it's a heavy metal - even the tiniest DU particles don't stay airborne for long).
It gets airborne when the pyrophoric DU shell hits the tank/ building/ car full of fleeing civilians and the DU becomes a powder ejected into the air by the force of the blast.
Given the rapid fire of the A-10 there was a lot of DU dust in downtown Baghdad when the US shot up that undefended building. Are you trying to tell me that in the centre of the capital city nobody was breathing that in?
The M-1 tanks can fire DU shells weighing about 4.5 kilos.
And the dust masks given to the troops are based on a lie, that the DU particles are nver smaller than 10 microns.
"Every member of the army's primary experts are sick...from exposures...from just cleaning it up."
quote from a US army DU expert.
The DU cleanup teams got sick so what chance do the local people have? the cleanup was just 24 military vehicles in 3 months.
Within 72 hours of their inspections, Rokke and his crew started
getting sick.
But they continued with their work. They went back to the U.S. to perform tests on Army bases. They deliberately blew up tanks with DU rounds, then ran over and jumped on the tanks while they were still burning. They videotaped the uranium-oxide clouds pouring out, and they measured the radiation being thrown off.
In the past decade, Rokke said 30 men out of 100 who were closely involved in these operations dropped dead.
The guy who wrote the manual is dead from lymphoma from uranium exposures
>Ask a physicist about DU. You'll be surprised at what you'll learn.
like Prof Pete Mitchell at DCU? the guy whose department is sponsored by the UKAEA? Don't the UKAEA make DU at the Springfields site?
Yeah, our local physicist's position would certainly be 'objective'.
How about I ask Dr. Doug Rokke (Maj. Doug Rokke Phd)? the health physicist on the DU assessment team in the US Army during Desert Storm, and former director of the Edwin R. Bradley Radiological Laboratories at Fort
McClellan, Ala.
.
Rokke's lungs and kidneys are damaged. He believes that uranium
oxide dust is permanently trapped inside his lungs. He has lesions
on his brain, pustules on his skin. He suffers from chronic fatigue
syndrome. He has reactive airway disease, which means he can't
stop wheezing and coughing, and experiences a loss of breath
when he exercises. He also has fibromyalgia, a condition that
causes chronic pain in his muscles, ligaments and tendons.
The VA tested Rokke for uranium levels in his body in 1994. He got
the results back two and a half years later. His urine had 5000
times the amount of permissible uranium.
Check out his photo and text at the link.
You can also read about how Brown & Root (one of Dick Cheney's Companies) got a contract to write up the DU clean-up plan.
It's long but it's interesting.
He also appears in the video documentary "Hidden Wars of Desert Storm"
This article reports the use of DU weapons spiked with Plutonium.
Editor, amend the related link in the previous comment to have an 'm' added to the
URL
http://liberty.hypermart.net/editorials/2002/U_S_DIRTY_BOMBS_Radioactive_Gene-Busting_Munitions_Spiked_with_Plutonium.htm
Well, it's interesting that DU results from the nuclear reaction process, a waste product of nuclear energy power plants. So, the US has thousands of tons of this toxic material lying around that's going to cost a bomb to make safe.
Somebody must have used that phrase and come up with a brainwave: "Let's make a bomb with it". So the US military get lots of dirty bombs and the military industry makes a bomb itself.
Pure genius.
Depleted Uranium is not quite a waste from a nuclear reaction as such. Instead it is more of a left-over
substance. It is still radioactive though.
Uranium that you mine, consists largely of two isotopes which are Uranium-238 and Uranium-235 and it consists of
99.3% of U-238 and 0.7% of U-235. It turns out that only the U-235 is useful to put straight into a reactor or
bomb and therefore it must be separated from the rest which leaves you with 99.7% of your Uranium left-over.
Both isotopes of Uranium are radioactive. An isotope refers to the fact that the two Uranium atomic nuclei having
different number of neutrons. Since the nucleus is composed of (postively charged) protons and neutrons and the
protons are trying to fly apart from each other, the role of the neutrons is to glue the whole nucleus together
via the nuclear force. For really big atoms like Uranium with a total of 235 protons+neutrons, the nucleus is on
the brink of falling apart, or fissioning. Thats why it is unstable and that why it's useful for a reactor of bomb.
Uranium-238 is that much more stable, since it has 3 additional neutrons to glue the whole nucleus together and thats
why its radioactive half-life is much longer, measured in billions of years.
Uranium-238 can be bombarded with neutrons and made into Plutonium. But there is so much U-238 around, that only
a small fraction of it is required to make all the bombs you want. You can also make nuclear bombs from U-235, but
since it is a lot less plentiful and harder to purify, back in the early days, it was figured it was just easier
to irradiate U-238 and get a bigger supply of Pu that way which was just as good.
In the early days of nuclear power, when they thought it was going to rule the world, scientists realized that since
99.3/0.7 =~ 141, then what ever the world supply of U-235, if you could get the power stations to run on Plutonium,
then the world supply of nuclear fuel was effectively 141 times greater. During the 1970s this resulted in new
nuclear facilities and programs throughout the world, known as Fast Breeder Reactors, which would produce and burn
Plutonium. Of course it all turned out very complicated and messy and most of the projects were cancelled in the late
1980s.
And guess during this time, the incentive to do something with all this Delpeted Uranium (U-238) arose, although the
military were long well aware of the ability of Uranium hardened warheads (since it is denser than Lead) to penetrate
armour.
What we have now, is via all these conflicts in Gulf War I, Kovoso, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), including all
target practice areas, is a fine dust of radioactive Uranium that will be extremely harmful to all human life in
all those areas for who knows how long. The contamination will spread out from these areas, through the water, soil
food, transport by animals (e.g. birds), dust (via the wind) and numerous other mechanisms. The use of DU must rate
as one of the most damaging acts to the sustainability of human life ever.
I read an article recently where a Russian general stated that they have a substance which they believe is just as effective as DU except that it is not radioactive. Sorry I can't find the link. I do not suggest that the Russians are any better in general (although their relative lack of power effectively makes them so at the moment) but if an equally good technology exists with less risk to both parties in a conflict, the intelligent thing to do would be to investigate and implement. That would, however leave the US with a big stockpile of DU that it would have to spend lots of money to sort instead of getting paid (not sure about this, it is equally likely they give it away for free, or pay to have it taken off their hands) to have it looked after.
DU burns intensely and is very hard. DU is also much cheaper than the substitute metal, tungsten. In effect, the U.S. military is trading off lower costs for increased health hazards. The health dangers of using DU-munitions have now been widely recognized, hotly debated and reported upon and need not be repeated here.2 Beyond just the health consequences, DU-munitions must be considered weapons of mass destruction insofar as the consequences of their usage are indiscriminate.
Russian Government finds DU dangerous
According to a statement in early June by Lieutenant General Boris Alexeyev, the Russian Defence Ministry have found DU dangerous for human life and health, but only in combination with other substances. A commission from the International Atomic Energy Authority carried out complex research into the effects of DU on the environment in Yugoslavia. NATO’s destruction of many chemical and pharmaceutical companies released into the environment many substances which became very dangerous once they combined with DU. The laboratories which analysed these products claim that 36 of them are lethal for animals and 11 for people. Leukaemia was singled out as the most significant danger. For CADU, this report raises questions. We do not question that DU may well be even more dangerous when in combination with other substances, which may produce a synergistic effect quite different from exposure to DU alone. But we question their finding that DU was not dangerous per se. What tests were carried out? Who was tested and what was their exposure route?