Depleted Uranium: A Scientific Perspective

An Interview With LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist

Interview Conducted By W. Leon Smith and Nathan Diebenow

Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who works almost around
the clock educating citizens, the media, members of
parliaments and Congress and other officials on
radiation issues. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at
the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing
fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. She is currently
working as an independent citizen scientist and
radiation specialist in communities around the world,
and contributed to the U.N. subcommission investigating
depleted uranium. According to Wikipedia online
encyclopedia, Moret testified at the International
Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Japan in 2003,
presented at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons
Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and spoke at the World
Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay,
India, in January 2004.

THE INTERVIEW

ICONOCLAST: What are the latest developments with
reducing depleted uranium exposures on U.S. troops?

MORET: A young veteran named Melissa Sterry of
Connecticut has introduced a bill into the Connecticut
Legislature requiring independent testing of returning
Afghan and Gulf War veterans going back to 2001. She
said that she did it because she’s sick, and her
friends are dead, and that’s from serving in the 2003
conflict. I have been following the bill and talking to
her. Yesterday, she testified twice at the United
Nations. I said, "Why don’t we get this bill all over
the U.S. in state legislatures because it informs the
public and get the local media to cover it."
The U.S. has blocked any accountability at
international and national levels. There’s a total
cover-up just like with Agent Orange, the atomic
veterans, MKULTRA, the mind control experiments the CIA
did. This is more of the same, but the issue is much,
much worse because the genetic future of all those
contaminated is effected. Now vast regions around our
world, as well as our atmosphere, are contaminated with
the depleted uranium. They’ve used so much. It’s the
equivalent number of atoms, as the Japanese professor
calculated it, to over 400,000 Nagasaki bombs that has
been released into the atmosphere. That’s really an
underestimate.

I went to Louisiana in April. I was invited to speak at
the University of New Orleans for three days. One of
the veterans asked me to be in their April 19 protest
and rally through the City of New Orleans. He took the
Connecticut bill straight to the Legislature, and he
got two legislators to sponsor it, and he said, "Just
whiteout the name ‘Connecticut’ and write in
‘Louisiana’ on the bill." You’re not going to believe
it. It passed 101 to 0 yesterday in the Louisiana
House.

I want you to write about it because we want it (the DU
testing bill) in Texas. Nevada is going to introduce
it. Congressman Jim McDermott is going to put it into
the Washington legislature. We want to get the governor
of Montana to do it because he’s the first governor to
demand his National Guard be returned. I think half of
them are back. He said, "I need them in the state."
The DU issue is just really, really, really, really so
awful. I don’t think there’s any greater tragedy in the
history of the world in what they’ve done.

ICONOCLAST: Is there a danger of depleted uranium,
being used in weaponry over there, spreading by air
over here?

MORET: The atmosphere globally is contaminated with it.
It’s completely mixed in one year. I’m an expert on
atmospheric dust. I’m a geoscientist, a geologist, and
that’s what I studied and did my research on. It’s
really a fascinating subject. We have huge dust storms
that are a million square miles and transport millions
of tons of dust and sand every year around the world.
The main centers of these dust storms are the Gobi
Desert in China, which is where the Chinese did
atmospheric testing, so that’s all contaminated with
radiation, and it gets transported right over Japan,
and it comes straight across the Pacific and dumps all
its sand and dust on the U.S., North America. It’s
loaded with radioactive isotopes, soot, pesticides,
chemicals, pollution — everything is in it — fungi,
bacteria, viruses.

The Sahara Desert is another huge dust center, and it
goes up all over Europe and straight across the
Atlantic, to the Caribbean, and up the East Coast. Of
course, you get it in Texas with those hurricanes. They
all originate in the Sahara Desert.

The third region is the Western United States, which is
where the Nevada test site is located. We did 1,200
nuclear weapons tests there, so all this radiation that
is already there, which is bad enough, has caused a
global cancer epidemic since 1945. All of that
radiation was the equivalent of 40,000 Nagasaki bombs.
We’re talking about 10 times more.

In April of 2003, the World Health Organization said
they expect global cancer rates to increase 50 percent
by the year 2020.

Infant mortality is going up again all over the world.
This is an indicator of the level of radioactive
pollution.

When the U.S. and Russia signed the partial test ban
treaty in 1963, the infant mortality rate started
dropping again, which is normal.
Now they are going up again. It’s the global pollution
with this radiation.

ICONOCLAST: I had one of our correspondents send me a
series of photographs of the Al-Asad dust storm in Iraq
on April 28.

MORET: That dust is what I’m talking about.

ICONOCLAST: In the picture you can see a gigantic wall
of sand.

MORET: I have 16 pictures of that storm. They’re posted
with photos from Iraqi doctors of the children of
people with cancer and leukemia. So what did you think
of that dust storm?

ICONOCLAST: I thought it was really dramatic.

MORET: It remobilizes all the radiation, but those are
the larger chunks. The DU burns at such high
temperatures. It’s a pyroforic metal which means it
burns. The bullets and big caliber shells are actually
on fire when they come out of the gun barrel because
they are ignited by the friction in the gun barrel.
Seventy percent of the DU metal becomes a metal vapor.
It’s actually a radioactive gas weapon and a terrain
contaminant.

I’ll email you the URL of the 1943 memo to General
Leslie Grove under the Manhattan Project. It’s the
blueprint for depleted uranium. They dropped the atomic
bombs, but they did not use the DU weapons because they
thought they were too horrific.

I’ve toured and gone all over Japan with a pediatrician
in Basra and an oncologist, a cancer specialist. These
poor doctors — their whole families are dying of
cancer. He has 10 members of his family with cancer now
that he’s treating, and this is just from Gulf War I.
They’ve used much, much, much more in 2003. All over
the whole country.

ICONOCLAST: What can soldiers expect when they come
home?

MORET: If they were in Bradley Fighting Vehicles,
they’re coming home with rectal cancer from sitting on
ammunition boxes. The young women are reporting
terrible problems with endometriosis. That’s the lining
of the uterus malfunctioning, and they just bleed and
bleed and bleed. Some of them have uterine cancer — 18
and 19 and 20 year olds.
The Army will not even diagnose it. They send them back
to the battlefields. They won’t treat them or diagnose
them. A group of 20 soldiers pushed from Kuwait to
Baghdad in 2003 in all the fighting. Eight of those 20
soldiers have malignancies.

ICONOCLAST: Does exposure to depleted uranium effect
their psychological background when they come home?

MORET: Depleted uranium are these particles that form
at very high temperatures. They are uranium oxides that
are insoluble. They are at least 100 times smaller than
a white blood cell, so when the soldiers breathe, they
inhale them. The particles go through the nose, go
through the olfactory and into the brain, and it messes
up their cognitive abilities, thought processes.
It damages their mood-control mechanism in the brain.
Four soldiers at Fort Bragg came back from Afghanistan,
and within two months, those four had murdered their
wives. This is part of the damage to the brain from the
radiation and the particles.

The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers
who came back, they had DU in their equipment, in their
clothes, in their bodies, in their semen, and they had
normal babies before they went over there to war. They
came back, and the VA did a study. Of 251 Gulf War I
veterans in Mississippi, in 67 percent of them, thier
babies born after the war were deemed to have severe
birth defects. They had brains missing, arms and legs
missing, organs missing. They were born without eyes.
They had horrible blood diseases. It’s horrific.
If you want to look at something, Life magazine did a
photo essay which is still on the Internet. It’s called
"The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm." You should look at
that — oh, my God, the post-Gulf War babies playing
with their brothers and sisters who are normal.
Basically, it’s like smoking crack, only you’re smoking
radioactive crack. It goes straight into the blood
stream. It’s carried all throughout the body into the
bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes into the
fetus. It’s a systemic poison and a radiological
poison.

ICONOCLAST: What about the people in the United States
that are here? You say that DU is being mixed and
spread globally?

MORET: Yes, it’s being mixed globally. We’re getting
secondary smoke. It’s the secondary smoke effect. You
know the people who inhabit a room with smokers? They
are getting that secondary smoke, and so are we.

ICONOCLAST: Is that secondary smoke getting thicker as
we speak?

MORET: Yeah, the concentration of the depleted uranium
particles in the atmosphere all around the globe is
increasing. There are indications that the U.S. will go
in June and bomb the heck out of Iran. We’re monitoring
the U.S. Army ammunition factories. They have very
large orders for those huge bunker buster bombs that
have 5,000 lbs. of DU in the warhead.

ICONOCLAST: So the prognosis for America isn’t really
good?

MORET: No, it’s really bad.

ICONOCLAST: And if this continues then?

MORET: It’s going to kill off the world’s population.
It already is, and it doesn’t just effect people. It
effects all living systems. The plants, the animals,
the bacteria. It effects everything.

ICONOCLAST: So the things that we eat for instance, if
they have DU in them, then we’ll just get it in our
systems, and so we’re polluting the oceans, so that
could effect all marine life?

MORET: Yes, it’s in the air, water, and soil. The half-
life of DU, Uranium 238, is 4.5 billion years the age
of the Earth.

ICONOCLAST: With the damage that’s been done to this
point, can we turn back? We can’t clean it up?

MORET: There’s no way to clean it up. What happens is
these tiny particles float around the Earth. There are
still plutonium and uranium floating around the Earth
from bomb testing. These particles are so tiny that
molecules bumping into them keep them lofted in the
air, and so the only way for them to get out of the
atmosphere is rain, snow, fog, pollution, which will
clear them out of the air and deposit them in the
environment. What happens is the surface of these
particles gets wetted by the moisture in the air. They
come down and land on stuff and stick to it like a
glue. You can’t ever get the particles off whatever
they’re sticking to because have you ever put a drop of
water on a microscope slide and then put another one on
top of it? Can you pull those apart?

ICONOCLAST: No.

MORET: Okay, that’s the same effect that happens to
radioactive particles. Once they are removed from the
atmosphere, they stick to any surfaces they land on. In
a way they are removed from circulation from the
atmosphere. You can’t wash them off. If it keeps
raining or they’re in a creek, you know, if they’re on
rocks or stones or something in a creek, they won’t
even wash off.
You didn’t know it was this bad, did you?

ICONOCLAST: No, I knew it was bad, but I thought it was
fairly isolated.

MORET: No. What is over there (in Iraq) is over here in
about four days. I don’t know if you followed
Chernobyl. That big bubble of radiation went around and
around the world, but this is dust. It becomes a part
of atmospheric dust. Like the dust storm you saw in
that photo, it goes everywhere.

ICONOCLAST: Is it in the upper levels of the atmosphere
or the lower levels?

MORET: It’s in lower orbital space.
They brought the Mir spacecraft back down to Earth when
they got done using it, and there was something called
a space midge which covered the electronics on the
outside of the spacecraft and protected it from
radiation that comes from the sun because electronics
are real vulnerable to radiation. They analyzed the
surface of that space net and found uranium and uranium
decayed products which they said came from atmospheric
testing or burned up spacecraft with nuclear materials
or nuclear reactors on board. Uranium can also come
from supernovas, but they thought that the most likely
sources were atmospheric testing and the nuclear
materials we put in space.

ICONOCLAST: Essentially then, you’re saying that we’re
conducting a nuclear war.

MORET: Yes, and that’s exactly what it is. We’ve
conducted four nuclear wars since 1991. Yeah, these are
nuclear wars. DU is a nuclear weapon.

ICONOCLAST: From the point of view of a scientist, what
needs to happen to correct this?

MORET: Well, we need to stop the use of it. We’ve built
an international movement to stop the use, the
manufacture, the storage, the sales, and the deployment
of depleted uranium weapons.

ICONOCLAST: Are the munitions we sell to other
countries contained with depleted uranium?

MORET: We have. In 1968 the first depleted uranium
weapons systems that we found a patent for suddenly
appeared in the U.S. patent office. It was for the
Navy. It was sort of a Gatling gun style weapon system
that you mounted on ships. It rapidly fires like 2,500
bullets a minute. It’s over 3,000 now. They’ve improved
the design. Then in 1973, we gave depleted uranium
weapons systems to the Israelis and supervised their
use. They used them in the Arab-Israeli war and
completely wiped out the Arabs in five days. Then the
show was on the road. That was the first actual
battlefield demonstration of this new weapon system.
Hughes Aircraft developed the full-length system which
is for the Navy. That’s the Gatling gun system. They
still use it. That was produced in 1974 and tested.
Within six months the U.S. government had sold the DU
weapons system to 12 entities which included many
branches of the U.S. military and other counties. We’ve
sold DU weapons systems to about — we don’t know
exactly for sure — it’s been about 12 or 17 countries.
The good news is that normally such a weapons system
that effective would have been sold to 80, 100, or 120
countries by now. But because of the radiological,
biological, and environmental hazard, countries were
not only afraid to buy it, the ones who did buy it are
afraid to use it. The only countries we know that have
used DU are Britain, the U.S., and Israel.
The United Nations in 1996 passed a resolution that
depleted uranium weapons are weapons of mass
destruction, and they are illegal under all
international laws and treaties.

In 2001, the European Parliament passed a resolution on
DU. What happened is that the NATO forces went into
Yugoslavia in 1998 and ’99 and flew 39,000 bombing runs
and completely bombed Yugoslavia into radioactive
rubble. Germany and the U.S. made the most money on the
destruction of Yugoslavia, and they made sure that
countries that didn’t know about the DU, that the
peacekeepers from those countries like from Italy and
Portugal, were sent to the most contaminated regions in
Yugoslavia. Germans and Americans didn’t send their own
troops into those areas. They were in the least
contaminated areas. These poor soldiers from other
countries came back and died within weeks or in a
couple of days or months. The parents in Portugal and
Italy are furious and went to the Parliament and media,
and there was just a huge media storm of articles about
DU.

The cat was out of the bag because of the 1998 NATO
invasion of Yugoslavia. The cat was out of the bag, but
Japanese troops have been sent into Somawa. They’re
self-defense forces. It was the most contaminated area
where the heaviest fighting happened in Iraq. We can
expect those soldiers to be really, really sick.

ICONOCLAST: What about Iraq itself? What’s been done
thus far?

MORET: It’s uninhabitable. The whole country.
Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan are completely
uninhabitable.

ICONOCLAST: But people live there, so they’re going to
live there suffering?

MORET: Well, you can see from the birth defects and the
illnesses that it is pretty severe. Each year the
number of birth defects and illnesses will rise because
of the total contamination levels in all living things
will increase because they are breathing that air and
drinking water and eating the food from contaminated
soils. It’s just a slow death sentence. The same with
Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

Depleted uranium is a very, very, very effective
biological weapon. This is the primary purpose for
using it. Marion Falk (a retired chemical physicist who
built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence
Livermore lab), who is the Manhattan Project scientist
I work with, taught me pretty much everything about
radiation and particles and DU. He said the purpose of
weapons used by the military is not only to injure and
kill the enemy soldiers, but the purpose is to kill,
maim, and disease the civilian population because it
reduces the productivity of a country and pretty soon a
lot of their resources are going to be used for taking
care of sick people. They will have fewer and fewer
healthy workers.

Of course, once you cause mutation in the DNA, that
damage is passed on to future generations of that
affected person or animal or plant. DNA does not repair
itself.

ICONOCLAST: So the mutations would be probably
destructive moreso than constructive.

MORET: Oh, the mutations are causing those birth
defects.

ICONOCLAST: They’re not evolutionary diseases?

MORET: No, they are evolutionary. They are inherited by
all future generations and passed on. It’s like if you
have red hair and all of your future generations will
have that gene.

ICONOCLAST: So if I had a precondition to heart disease
because of the radiation, then the generation that
would come after me would have the same problem?

MORET: Well, if you damage the cell or parts of the
cell or functioning of cells, that doesn’t necessarily
damage the DNA. There are two kinds of damage: one
damages the cells of the living organism, and that may
not be passed on, but if you damage the DNA in the egg
or the sperm, that is passed on to all future
generations.

ICONOCLAST: So the guys coming back from the war, their
sperm is probably going to be —

MORET: Damaged. Yes. They also have depleted uranium in
their semen. When they’re intimate with their partners,
they internally contaminate them with depleted uranium.
The women become sick themselves. They have depleted
uranium in their bodies, and there is something called
burning syndrome. Just absolutely horrible. You can
read about it in an article by David Rose in the
December Vanity Fair. It’s on the Internet.
A friend of mine is the widow of a Canadian Gulf War
veteran. David Rose interviewed her, and she griped
about the burning semen. She said, "I had 20 condoms
full of frozen peas in my freezer at all times, and
after we were intimate, I would insert one into my
vagina, and that is the only way I could bear the pain
from the burning semen." And it goes through condoms,
too.

ICONOCLAST: Gosh, durn!

MORET: Yeah, you should see the high school classes
when I talk about the burning semen and the internal
contamination. The girls’ mouths go into little round
Os, and the boys start panicking because they’re like,
"I’ll never get sick!" (laughs) The name of this
article is "Weapons of Self-Destruction."

ICONOCLAST: How much DU will it take to kill off all
known life on this planet?

MORET: The amount of radiation released is certainly
going to have a very, very profound global impact, and
we’re already seeing infant mortality increasing
globally. The fetus is the most susceptible to
radiation damage because all the cells are rapidly
dividing, the limbs and the bodies developing, so when
you start introducing toxic chemicals and radiation, it
really damages the natural process of fetal
development.

The reason they were able to convince the Senate to
sign the partial test ban treaty in 1963 was because of
the increase in infant mortality. It had been dropping
and declining two or three percent for quite a long
time each year because of better prenatal care and
educating mothers.
Infant mortality started going up after the bombs were
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially in the
‘50s when the big bomb testing started.
By 1963, it was really obvious that the bomb testing
globally was having a real impact on the unborn. They
signed the partial test ban treaty. Russia and the U.S.
stopped atmospheric testing, and the infant mortality
rate started going down right away. They’re going up
again now. This is global radioactive pollution, and
how long it would take to eliminate all life is
something nobody knows, but the depleted uranium is a
very, very effective biological weapon.

There are two purposes for the military use of weapons.
One is to destroy the enemy soldiers, and the other,
which is just as important, is to destroy the enemy
civilian population. By causing illnesses and disease,
long lingering illnesses really impact the productivity
and the economy of a country. It was Chernobyl and
other nuclear disasters that actually destroyed the
Soviet Union because the former Soviet Union is very,
very sick from all the radiation that was released.
They were much more sloppier than we were.
I have a World Health Organization world health survey
which they published in the Journal of American Medical
Association last June. The impact of atmospheric
testing is very, very apparent by the percentage of
population in each country they investigated for some
form of mental illness. For instance, Japan is 8.8
percent. Nigeria is very low — 4.7 percent. They have
almost no radiation in Nigeria. In the Ukraine where
they had the Chernobyl accident, it is 20.4 percent.
Spain is at 9.2 percent. Italy is 8.2 percent. It’s
pretty low because they don’t have nuke plants. France
is 75 percent reliant on nuclear power, so you have
mental illness in 18.4 percent of the population.
Mexico is at 12.2 percent, and the United States is at
26.3 percent — the highest rate of mental illness in
the world.

And George Bush and his siblings were all exposed in
utero to bomb testing fallout in the United States. He
had a toddler sister who died of leukemia when she was
about three.
I worked with a group called the Radiation And Public
Health Project. Their website is <www.radiation.org>; .
We are all radiation specialists, well-known
scientists, and independent scientists. We’ve collected
6,000 baby teeth around nuclear power plants and
measured the radiation in them, and one of our members
is the neighbor of the women who worked with all of the
Bush children, including President Bush himself,
because they had severe learning disabilities.

ICONOCLAST: How do we know that the Bush children were
exposed?

MORET: By the year of their birth. The year they were
carried by their mother. You have to look at how much
bomb testing material was released into the atmosphere,
and there’s a direct correlation to the decline in SAT
scores for all teenagers in the U.S. to the amount of
radiation that was released into the atmosphere the
year their mother was carrying them. These are delayed
effects of radiation exposure in utero.

ICONOCLAST: So they were living in Connecticut, but
they were still feeling the effects of the radiation in
Nevada?

MORET: Two years ago the U.S. government admitted that
every single person living in the United States between
1957 and 1963 was internally exposed to radiation. So
for any pregnant woman during those years, her fetus
was exposed.

ICONOCLAST: What type of radiation levels are we
talking about?

MORET: It’s low levels, and the main pathways are
drinking water and dairy products. It even killed the
baby fish in the Atlantic. Strontium-90 is a man-made
isotope that comes out of nuclear bombs and nuclear
reactors. They measured the levels of strontium-90 in
milk in Norway from the 1950s up until the 1970s, and
they measured the decline in the fishing catch in that
same period, and as the strontium-90 increased in the
milk in Norway, fishing catches declined.
By 1963, when the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb almost
every day (they did 250 tests in one year because the
treaty was going to be signed), the fishing catch
declined by 50 percent. In the Pacific, it declined 60
percent because there was Russian, Chinese, French, and
U.S. testing in the Pacific.

ICONOCLAST: So we’re still eating those contaminated
fish today. Has the genetic code been changed?

MORET: The oceans are getting whatever is getting
rained down, snowed down, or fogged down from the
atmosphere. It’s getting into the oceans. This big frog
die-off, which is global, is certainly related to the
radiation in the rainwater. It’s a global nuclear
holocaust. It effects all living things. That’s why
they call it "omnicide," which means it kills all
living things — the plants, the animals, the bacteria.
Everything.

ICONOCLAST: You think we ought to have the Weather
Channel report on the current sand storm conditions in
Iraq so we can prepare four days in advance for the
radiation?

MORET: I’ll tell you what I did when 9/11 happened.
I called all the doctors with Radiation And Public
Health Project, and I said, "Get out of town, and don’t
come back until it has rained three times." One lived
12 miles downwind from the Pentagon. She went out on
her balcony with her geiger counter. I said, "Get that
geiger counter out of your purse." We had just done a
press conference in San Francisco, and I knew she had
it in her purse. Well, the radiation levels were 8-10
times higher than background.
We called the EPA, HAZMAT, FBI, and said, "Get all
those emergency response workers suited up. They need
to be protected." Two days after 9/11, the EPA
radiation expert for that region called back and said,
"Yup, the Pentagon crash rubble was radioactive, and we
believe it’s depleted uranium, but we’re not worried
about that. It’s only harmful if it’s inhaled."
He said, "We’re worried about the lead solder in the
plane." Well, you know what’s in Tomahawk missiles?
They have depleted uranium warheads. The radioactive
crash rubble contaminated with DU is evidence of a DU
warhead.

ICONOCLAST: I did not think about that, but going back
to my original question: Should the Weather Channel
report for us on the toxic dust storms in Iraq?

MORET: But how could people get away from them? These
dust storms are a million square miles. They’re huge,
and they come right across the Atlantic, the Caribbean,
and Texas coast line, and right up the East Coast.
There are people who are going to leave the state every
time there’s a hurricane It’s in the food, drinking
water, dairy products, and then the problem with
Uranium 238, which is 99.39 percent DU, is that it
decays in over 20 steps into other radioactive
isotopes.
That’s why I call it the "Trojan Horse." It’s the
weapon that keeps giving. It keeps killing. This is
like smoking radioactive crack. It goes right in your
nose. It crosses the olfactory bulb into your brain.
It’s a systemic poison. It goes everywhere. These
particles that form at very high temperatures —
5,000-10,000 degrees C — are nanoparticles. They are a
10th of a micron or smaller. A 10th of a micron is 100
times smaller than a white blood cell. They get picked
up in the lipids and probably the cholesterol and go
right through the cell membranes of the cell. They
screw up the cell processes. They screw up the
signaling between the cells because the cells all talk
to each other and coordinate what they’re doing. It
messes up brain function.

ICONOCLAST: Do you know what Iraq was like before the
first Gulf War?

MORET: Iraq prior to the 1991 Gulf War was the most
advanced in the entire Middle East. They had scrupulous
databases of the health problems and disease rates,
which
is why the U.S. bombed all of the offices in the
Ministry of Health. We destroyed all those records so
that a pre-Gulf War health base could not be
established to show how much these diseases have
increased. This would concern the U.S. in terms of
compensation for war crimes.
In these horrible U.N. sanctions, they (the Iraqis)
could never get all of the protocol medicine for the
treatment of leukemia. They (the U.N.) would say,
"These steps of the leukemia treatment were components
in weapons, so you can’t have that." They never gave
the people the full proper protocols in the areas of
treatment they needed to get rid of the leukemia. It
hid the effects of the depleted uranium because the
children were starving. They had malnutrition. They had
the healthiest population in the Middle East (prior to
Gulf War I).

ICONOCLAST: Let’s talk about the children of Iraq.

MORET: After the Gulf War, they had maybe one baby a
week born with birth defects in the hospitals in Basra.
Now they are having 10-12 a day. The levels of uranium
are increasing in the population every year. Every day,
people are eating and drinking while the whole
environment is contaminated. Just what you’d expect.
There are more babies born with birth defects, and the
birth defects are getting more and more severe.
An Iraqi doctor told me that babies are being born now
that are lumps of flesh. She said that they don’t have
heads or legs or arms. It’s just a lump of flesh. This
also happened to populations that were not removed from
islands in the Pacific when the bomb tests occurred.
Basically, governments were using them as guinea pigs.

ICONOCLAST: So all the countries that were equipped
with nuclear weapons are guilty of those atrocities.

MORET: They were all doing it. France, Russia. China,
and the U.S. And I’m not sure if Britain did bomb
testing. They were real low key about it.

ICONOCLAST: Where are the radiation hot spots in the
United States?

MORET: In the United States, it would be within a 100
miles of nuclear power plants. We have 110 nuclear
power plants in the U.S. We have the most of any
country in the world, but only a 103 are operating.
Almost all of the entire East Coast.
What we did was we took government data from the
Centers of Disease Control on breast cancer deaths
between 1985 and 1989. Anywhere from within a 100 miles
of a nuclear power plant is where two-thirds of all
breast cancer deaths occurred in the U.S. between 1985
and 1989.

It’s also around the nuclear weapons laboratories. That
would be Los Alamos in New Mexico, the Idaho Nuclear
Engineering Lab in Idaho, and Hanford in Washington
State, which is where they got the plutonium for all
the bombs. They contaminated the entire Columbia River
watershed and almost the whole state of Washington.
It gets into the water and into the plants and into the
vegetation. If you eat clams or mussels or crabs or
things like that, even certain kinds of fish that eat
off of the mud at the bottom of the river, you have
much higher levels of radiation in your tissues. It
depends on each person and on how healthy they are, but
this man from Washington State died suddenly. He was in
his late 40s. They did an autopsy, and he was full of
radioactive zinc. They went, "Where in the world did he
get this? It only comes from nuclear bombs and nuclear
reactors." They studied his diet and discovered he
loved to eat oysters. They found out where he bought
his oysters and found the oyster beds. They were 200
miles off shore, from Washington State. The radiation
was being carried off out to sea from the coastline. It
was passing over this oyster bed. The oysters were just
gobbling them up.

ICONOCLAST: What are the symptoms of DU poisoning?

MORET: Soldiers on the battlefield have reported a
metallic taste in their mouth. That’s the actual taste
of the uranium metal. Then within 24-48 hours, soldiers
on the battlefield have reported that they felt sick.
They start getting muscle aches, and they lose energy.
Some of them came back incontinent. In other words, in
adult diapers.

One woman reported that the first night home, she
wanted to be intimate with her husband, but she had
absolutely no feeling. She couldn’t feel anything from
the waist down. This particulate matter damages the
neuromuscular system, the nerves; it just goes
everywhere. And there’s no treatment for it. These
particles are very, very insoluble, so they can’t even
dissolve in body fluids, so they can be excreted from
the body. Then they keep releasing. Even when uranium
decays, it turns into another radioactive isotope. So
it’s a particle that just sits there shooting bullets
until you die.

Another problem is that soldiers have crumbling teeth.
Teeth just start falling apart. The uranium replaces
calcium in the calcium-phosphate structure of the
teeth. Some have complained about grand mal seizures,
cerebral palsy. Some diseases reported at very high
rates in Air Force and Army soldiers are Parkinson’s
disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Hodgkin’s disease.
This is damage to the mitochondria in the cells and the
nerves. The mitochondria make all the energy for the
body, so when you damage mitochondria, another symptom
is chronic fatigue syndrome. There’s just not enough
energy produced by the body to function normally.
I found a study in the SanDia Nuclear Weapons
Laboratory employee newsletter in September 2003. They
are doing major studies in mitochondrial disfunction
related to Lou Gehrig’s, Hodgkin’s, and Parkinson’s
diseases for veterans. Since it’s at a nuclear weapon’s
lab, they are fully aware of the health damage.

ICONOCLAST: Tell me about the tests that detect for DU
in the body.

MORET: The chromosome test in the best indicator. It’s
$5,000. The urine test is a $1,000. If you test
positive with the urine test, you know you’re
contaminated. If you test negative, it does not mean
that you’re not contaminated. It just means that you
may or may not be contaminated but enough hasn’t
dissolved in your blood stream to go through your
kidneys to be excreted in your urine. Anyone who goes
now cannot avoid being contaminated. Anyone. Anyone.
Anyone. Everyone who goes to the Middle East and
Afghanistan will be contaminated.
The DU issue affects every single living thing on this
planet. What else has that impact? They have altered
the genome for the entire planet forever with this DU.
The Pentagon people say, "You’re exaggerating or you
use the uranium word to scare people." I don’t care if
people believe me or not. All I can say is that over
time what I am saying will actually be an
underestimation of the long term effects.

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