Depleted uranium is WMD

de Leuren Moret

My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin Joseph
McAllister, was born in Battle Creek in 1895. He does
not know that his first grandchild is an international
expert on depleted uranium. I have worked in two U.S.
nuclear weapons laboratories, and in 1991 I became a
whistleblower at the Livermore lab. Depleted uranium
is very, very, very nasty stuff:

– Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition
of weapon of mass destruction in two out of three
categories under U.S. Federal Code Title 50 Chapter 40
Section 2302.

– DU weaponry violates all international treaties and
agreements, Hague and Geneva war conventions, the 1925
Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws and U.S. military law.

– Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive
atomicity equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki
bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10 times the
amount released during atmospheric testing which was
the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has
permanently contaminated the global atmosphere with
radioactive pollution having a half-life of 4.5
billion years.

– The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars
in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since
1991, calling DU "conventional" weapons when in fact
they are nuclear weapons.

– DU on the battlefield has three effects on living
systems: it is a heavy metal "chemical" poison, a
"radioactive" poison and has a "particulate" effect
due to the very tiny size of the particles that are
0.1 micron and smaller.

– The blueprint for DU weaponry is a 1943 Manhattan
Project memo to Gen. L. Groves that recommended
development of radioactive materials as poison gas
weapons - dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty
bullets.

– DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy
penetrators, but even more effective bioweapons since
uranium has a strong chemical affinity for phosphate
structures concentrated in DNA.

– DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war - it keeps
giving and keeps killing. There is no way to clean it
up, and no way to turn it off because it continues to
decay into other radioactive isotopes in over 20
steps.

– Terry Jemison at the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs stated in August 2004 that over 518,000
Gulf-era veterans (14-year period) are now on medical
disability, and that 7,039 were wounded on the
battlefield in that same period. Over 500,000 U.S.
veterans are homeless.

– In some studies of soldiers who had normal babies
before the war, 67 percent of the post-war babies are
born with severe birth defects - missing brains, eyes,
organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.

– In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five
times higher levels of gamma radiation in the air,
which increases the radioactive body burden daily of
inhabitants. In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan
are uninhabitable.

– Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the
right conditions. One gram of DU is 1/20th of a cubic
centimeter and releases 12,000 alpha particles per
second.

Before my grandfather died, he told me that his
generation had made a mess of this planet. I wonder
what he would say to me now I would tell him to see
"Beyond Treason" (www.beyondtreason.com), a new
documentary about the history of treason by the U.S.
government against our own troops: Atomic veterans,
MK-Ultra, Agent Orange and DU. After Vietnam, Henry
Kissinger said, "Military men are just dumb, stupid
animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. . ."
(from Chapter 5 in the "Final Days" by Woodward and
Bernstein).

Leuren Moret is an international radiation specialist,
with a B.S. degree in geology from University of
California at Davis, a M.A. degree in Near Eastern
studies from University of California at Berkeley and
has done post-graduate work in the geosciences at
UC-Davis. She is environmental commissioner for the
City of Berkeley, Calif.