HELIOLITH

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that the United States would be detonating nuclear shells to poison its own soldiers and the surrounding civilian populations with radioactive isotopes. -Helen Caldicott

Driving home from work today, I was listening to Beneath the Surface on KPFK (Pacifica) radio station (also available at 99.5 FM as WBAI for you NYC people).

The host, Jerry Quickley, had as his guest Leuren Moret. Moret is an independent scientist who worked for the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab for 5 years before she blew the whistle on “horrendous health and safety” violations at the lab (nuclear progam managed by the UC Regents). She then began speaking out against the dangers and current violence caused by radiation and radioactive materials.

Then I remembered learning about DU, so called “Depleted” Uranium, with a Half life of 4.5 billion years, nearly given away by the nuclear energy industry to the military for bombs, missiles, and bullets. I remembered that when it is used, it burns, and on impact, vaporizes into a dust too small for gasmasks to capture, and has toxic action by particulate, chemical, andradioactive actions. I remembered the extremely graphic flash short a while back someone emailed me a link to, that included photographs of babies born with severe deformities because of radiation poisoning. “Huh?” you’re thinking. What is DU?

320 tons of DU was left as shrapnel and dust in the first War against Iraq in 1991. More was left to kill by radiation in Kosovo. 1000 tons were left in Afghanistan, and at the start of the most recent and unfounded war against Iraq, we used 2200 tons in just March and April of 2004. Currently they are using it in never-before-seen abundance, and the government refuses to publically acknowledge its dangers. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent.

This isn’t just the U.S. against people whose grief so many seem capable of rationalizing away. We (your tax dollars and mine) are doing this to our own troops. Moret reported on a study done by the VAin another interview

In a group of 251 gulf war veterans from Mississippi, the Department of Veteran Affairs did a study on birth defects, and they themselves, the U.S. Goverment agency determined that the babies born after the Gulf War, 67% were born with severe birth defects.

More and more vets and ex government employees are coming foward against this failing war. Including former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and now, the Iraq Vets against the WAR.

Al-Jazeera today ran an excellent story entitled “Washington’s secret nuclear war” They quoted:

Terry Jemison at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), [as saying] of the more than 592,560 discharged personnel who served there [in Desert Storm], at least 179,310 - one third - are receiving disability compensation and over 24,760 cases were pending by September 2004.

Many of the vets from the first Iraq war show signs of DU in their semen, which they then can pass on to their wives or lovers. My brother-in-law is over there. I support him 110%, and I want him home now.

Endnote:

I am so torn between my desire to continue to remain informed and to report on my own self-education around the US War on the World, and my desire to relax, self-soothe, and be healthy by not adding extra stresses to my already overful stressload. The news is increasingly sad and increasingly warped by a growing number of media puppets. I thus feel more and more compelled to reflect and to re-seed these stories when I can.

I really wish that there was a transcript or a recording available of today’s interview that I could link to, because they really covered a lot of material, and I was only able to scribble a few things on my clipboard after I was parked safely in my driveway. I did find this link to an mp3 of another recent inteview with Moret on a different radio show.

It’s late, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to put together something coherent, and am not much closer.

Check the following for most of the links that I thought were valuable while I was searching.
All my DU bookmarks