04/01/11 – Doug Weir – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio I'm looking at band depleted uranium org on The line is Doug where he is the coordinator for the International Coalition to ban uranium weapons Has worked on D you for six years on both the UK and international campaigns again the website Banned depleted uranium org welcome to the show Doug.
How are you?
Not too bad.
Thank you for saving me a plug Oh, yeah, there you go.
No, I mean that's what the show is about is recommending reading to people and When I read this article this morning concern grows over possible use of depleted uranium in Libya I thought hey, this is real journalism and I hate to say it, but this is a subject that is prone to a lot of quackery and Assertions without evidence and and it's mostly because the government does nothing but lie about it So there's a giant void in the discussion that's filled with a lot of nonsense And so I'm always very happy when I read something about depleted uranium.
That is, you know Written with you know, obvious credibility and thoroughness and so forth as this article is so that's why you're here So that we can both help recommend people go read concern grows over possible use of depleted uranium in Libya at banned depleted uranium dot org and this article Talks at first about the a tens which I guess it was the Washington Post report at first that they're using these a 10 warthogs in combat against Qaddafi's forces and You talk about the likelihood that They are using machine gun rounds and perhaps bombs and missiles that are tipped with depleted uranium Is that correct?
Well, we're talking about the ammunition rounds There's actually very little evidence to substantiate the use of depleted uranium in bombs and missiles more generally so this article is specifically about the ammunition and from two particular aircraft and Primarily the a 10 warthog or Thunderbolt and also the Marine Harriers that have been operating from a ship off Libya But these are the two things we're particularly concerned about at the moment Okay, and now so Tell us about the likelihood because I guess you don't have any sources saying one way or the other yet here But you say there are a couple of different rounds you you seem like you're very familiar with the kinds of weapons that these warthogs use and and So how likely is it do you think that they're using these DU rounds and can you tell us a little bit about the background?
Of that?
Yeah, certainly.
I mean the warthog was sort of developed in the 70s as a Aircraft for attacking the tops of tanks in a cold war scenario And so they basically built an aircraft around an enormous cannon which fires either depleted uranium Rounds these are 30 millimeter rounds each room with 300 grams of DU in them or high explosive rounds or a mixture of the two In Iraq and in the Balkans, we saw that they were firing a mixture of the two in Afghanistan What we've seen suggested they're just firing the high explosive rounds because they're not going after armored targets Which then lead us on to Libya where clearly their role there now that the air defense has been knocked out by cruise missiles and SAS jets It's to then attack armor armor personnel carriers and tanks for Libyan forces on the ground and This is a role which the US believe that DU is very well suited for So we believe that there are significant chances that they're using DU And the last official statement from the US government regarding DU was just prior to the A-10s Arriving and going into action So it's probably not still relevant at this stage And there's been pretty much a blistering silence from the authorities Over whether DU is being used and I mean just looking at Google News There are what 17,000 news articles mentioning the A-10s are in use in Libya and of these Seven actually mentioned that this aircraft fires depleted uranium.
And so we're urgently trying to Parasite the situation the US government to see whether this stuff's being fired or not All right so for the context there I think that really says something about the cannon of the A-10 and the kind of bullets that they're using Depleted uranium tip bullets if with all of the precision guided laser JDAM Sophisticated kind of weaponry that the American Air Force and the US Navy Have at their disposal that they still would use ground attack aircraft Using machine gun cannons to take out armored targets.
That must be a bad-ass gun Fires around 4,000 rounds a minute They don't actually fire for a minute if they did it would probably knock the aircraft out the sky or tear it to pieces I think but in the case of the Balkans I mean we've listed sites in Kosovo where they'll have been attacked lasting there a few seconds and in that time Several hundred rounds the EU will have been fired leading to a hundred kilos More than hundred kilos of do you contamination at a particular site?
I mean some of those rounds will lodge in the ground and there's worries there over contamination of groundwater contamination of agricultural fields Others will if they hit a hard target kind of vaporize into a uranium dust and then contaminate the surface and if there are civilians nearby There's risk of inhalational exposure One thing we're really quite concerned about is that we've seen a lot of footage of the Libyan rebel forces Stripping any vehicles they can get for parts because obviously there's the arms embargo there and they have very few operating vehicles themselves so One of the sort of big risks which the US and UK governments both agree to is for people sort of returning to vehicles Quite quickly after they've been hit by DU and this could well be an issue for the Libyan rebels if they're going in stripping spare parts from these contaminated vehicles Wow Well, you know even if you just were to accept the premise for the sake of argument about the most humanitarian motives behind all this I'm reminded of what Aldous Huxley said about how your means determine your ends no matter what your lofty goal And boy, you know, it seems like it's pretty problematic You know to have this kind of thing because not only Do we have you know the the illnesses and things like that and hopefully we can talk a bit about the cause and effect of that in the next segment, but It's there forever.
It turns as you said into dust on impact with armor I guess because of you know, the way those molecules are linked together when it hits It's a self sharpening round instead of going dull get sharper and sharper Which means that the outsides of it basically are peeled away and you have these Microscopic little pieces of this stuff and there's no magnet in the world to clean it up with I mean We're talking about once you blow up a tank with this stuff It's pretty much there until the half-lifes over long after the end of mankind or something, right?
I mean the Experience from the Balkans which we've reported on and we've got a fairly chunky report on that on our website under the publications section But yeah, I mean the Serbian government they tried to clean up the 12 or so sites They had in southern Serbia and they spent an absolute fortune and they were very clear in the United Nations Environment program are very clear that you're never going to be able to remove all the contamination You can remove a fair amount of solid penetrators You can strip back top two meters of soil as they did and but then you're left with the issue Well, what you do this contaminated soil, which technically would be classified as low-level waste So then that has to be stored indefinitely In Iraq, you know, we have a lot less information and there's been a few studies done, but they've been very limited in scope We've always seen there was that there's a very active trade in scrap metal And so it's almost similar to the spare parts stripping issue that a lot of contaminated scrap metal was a being dumped Once it was potentially taken off the streets from civilian areas.
It was being dumped in unprotected scrap yards So you had these hot spots of contamination which were access, you know kids love playing on Messed up more material and these people were being exposed Now there was nothing, you know If this happened in the UK or the US there'd be large fences and barbed wire around these sites people won't be allowed near them These stuff would be dealt with they'd be decontaminated They'd go to low-level waste dumps, but in a state recovering from conflict, you know That sort of requires a certain level of administration, which is very rarely in place And I mean we see from the United Nations Environment Program International Atomic Energy Agency World Health Organization Still a lot of debate over health effects But one thing they're very clear on is that stuff should be done after conflict to reduce the risk and what we see time and time Again, is it this stuff simply isn't done so that again sort of shift the balance of how much of a risk these weapons are Well, yeah, I mean to clean it up would be to acknowledge.
It's problematic to use it in the first place Might as well just ignore it.
I guess from the point of view of the military and the Empire and So I was hoping that you could tell us a bit about the science of depleted uranium because it's easy to say Oh, no radioactive cancer I saw a Japanese monster movie just like that and I don't like it and things like that But what's better is, you know real substance?
So I figured I'd give you a chance to really explain what is known what is not known about the effects of depleted uranium poisoning on people Okay, well I'm depleted uranium itself is primarily an alpha emitter so it emits alpha radiation alpha radiation itself Can't actually penetrate the skin but the issue with DU is that as you mentioned earlier when these rounds hit a hard target they burn into a fine dust and So then if you inhale this dust then you're taking in this radioactive source into your lungs where it can then lodge for a long period Irradiating directly into the tissue And therein lies the problem.
There are huge uncertainties about the effects of low-level radiation emitters inside the body And so this is a major problem We also have the sort of twin issue that DU is chemically toxic So like lead and other heavy metals and it's been shown to be carcinogenic through both these routes So then we sort of have a we've got a huge amount of research Essentially the sort of animal studies and laboratory studies Which you would do if you were trying to put a new cosmetic or a new medicine on the market because you can't test on Human subjects have they had the same results for a commercial product then it would never reach the shelves But somehow because it's a military weapon, then it sort of deserves a higher level of proof it's been shown to be carcinogenic and Not just by some sort of wacko hippies in a laboratory somewhere But by the u.s.
Is there an armed force radiobiology research institute who showed it caused leukemia in mice more recently They've shown that DU exposure can cause sort of generational issues for the generation after the one that's been exposed So this is just some of the sort of research we have and there's you know, a huge amount There are also real big uncertainties about how do you behave in the environment?
And that's something we sort of saw reflected in some recent work We did at the UN where the United Nations Environment Programme really called for a precautionary approach to the use of DU Which we think is entirely justified All right.
Now, let me play devil's advocate for a minute here It's depleted uranium after all here's you take natural uranium ore You spin it through a centrifuge and you take out all the worst stuff The the 235 is the sweet stuff that you make a nuclear bomb with and then this is the byproduct of that so how radioactive could it really be, you know, I read a a Gigantic half-life.
I forget the last number.
I saw 80,000 years or something It's the half-life of the thing, but doesn't that just mean it's not very radioactive Four and a half billion years the half-life.
I mean you could argue that you could say well, it's less radioactive than Fresh natural uranium, but there's a couple of issues there I mean when you enrich uranium and create depleted uranium in the process It's not depleted of all the uranium 235 plus uranium 238 on its own is also radioactive And then the issue is that you can't sort of look at the radioactive isotope as this sort of stable thing It's the whole sort of a lump of DU is constantly in motion with various radioactive decays So why you can say well It has 60% of natural radioactivity of natural uranium when it comes straight out the enrichment plant from that point onwards the various isotopes inside it start to decay and You produce sort of an increased level of radiation, but probably more fundamentally is that The natural uranium ore which is always compared to exist in a sort of rather sort of sparing State in in the environment you very rarely come across a lump of pure uranium ore whereas DU is Uranium depleted uranium is a sort of very enriched Kind of lump of it, so you know this is the issue really and they often sort of say well We've looked at uranium miners We've looked at other people and they seem to be fine, but to use a very sort of specific kind of contamination It's very difficult to draw very clear parallels with other scenarios where people may have been exposed to uranium All right now just as a parenthetical here I'm looking at your website ban depleted uranium org here And there's a pretty extensive sidebar of links, and I wonder whether we can find Resources about for example those animal studies you referred to do you have all that kind of documentation lined up at the site under the resources, but if you go down to scientific and then general papers and and there is Somewhere down there review of the latest published papers of DU And that's about a year and a half old I think and that's fully referenced Details of a lot of the peer-reviewed studies that have come out lately Okay good well, we know there was one that came out in December and one that came out previously last July 2010 and I talked then with One of the doctors who did the study dr.
Christopher Busby and one of the things that he mentioned was that Aside from the alpha particles being emitted by the inhaled dust Beside from heavy metal poisoning of the human tissue cells if there's one other effect that they I Think you know pretty well confirmed to use Dick Cheney's phrase I'm not exactly sure how positive, but something to the effect that the little bits of depleted uranium Dust inside the human body actually serves sort of as an antenna for other Radiation in the environment and tends to intensify it and retransmit it out to the body in that sense Do you know about that or do you?
Yeah, I mean, I've read Chris's papers suggesting that I'm I'm not a sort of expert on internal radioactive emitters But I know that there's still a lot of discussion a lot of debate as to whether that is actually a genuine effect So I'm probably not super qualified to comment more on that Well one thing is for sure is that these weapons should be banned and It's hilarious.
I saw actually on mute over here out of the corner my eye this morning on MSNBC Obama Giving a big lecture about how all private Businesses need to go green and this and that when he's the biggest polluter on the face of the earth and I guess again We don't know for sure that they're using depleted uranium rounds in Libya but as you say, it's the right kind of targets that they do arm a 10s with these sort of bullets for and why wouldn't they you know, it's certainly a danger and Something that you know again is a pretty permanent thing.
What do you say a billion year half-life?
This is something that I know billion years a half a billion years I think that's all the the US government is actually quite sensitive to do you I mean post You know it's a very sort of natural human response when I sort of speak to people who've never heard of it before and they're sort of Aghast that this is being used in weapons and then there's obviously a very sort of deep human response to Exposure to radioactivity as well.
And when the weapons were first started developed back in the 70s There was a very clear acceptance from the u.s But these wouldn't really be acceptable and so they had to make a very very compelling case for their utility But you know They couldn't get by without these weapons and that still continues to be the case The UK took a slightly different approach by just trying to be as transparent as possible But always sort of sticking to this utility line that we need these weapons to protect our boys and etc, etc And there is sort of you know, the US is kind of trying to kind of move away from do you in some of the calibers?
So in these medium caliber rounds of the type fired by the a-10 We've got we've seen stuff to suggest that you know They're looking for alternatives with a new giant strike fighter there for the contracts the ambitions and that they're very clear that they don't want Depleted uranium for the ammunition.
So there is this acceptance.
There is kind of a bit of a groundswell I mean, we've had repeated UN resolutions on this issue most recently last year, which was supported by 148 states Which was calling on the user do you?
UK in the US to identify the locations where they fired them in Iraq That's one sort of huge problem and a huge bar to actually doing sort of meaningful research on the ground and also to do Decontaminating is that the US hasn't told anybody where it's five four hundred odd tons That's European tons.
So four hundred thousand kilos At DU in Iraq over the two conflicts and you know, if this was landmines or cluster munitions people would be up in arms But for some reason the US kind of sort of got away with just not mentioning where it's five these weapons despite all these sort of august scientific bodies saying one of the first things you should do is identify these locations warn the local people and in areas where there's high contamination Spend a lot of money and decontaminate these sites And so we're noticing this, you know, we've had European Parliament resolutions.
We're starting to get national bans on these weapons Most countries around the world their military to you know, to be fair the US very rarely goes into war on its own They tend to not be very comfortable with these these weapons the service personnel certainly aren't So I know there is I think a general sort of shift and we're going in the right direction but what you really need is the campaigners and activists to really just stick to the facts and stick the reality and Just step back from all the hyperbole about these weapons and see them as what they are Which is you know a dirty weapon system, which isn't essential.
It isn't some enormous conspiracy It can be dealt with through campaigning means All right.
Well, I sure appreciate all the information and your efforts I'm just getting familiar with this website, but it looks like a really great resource here ban depleted uranium org Get involved there learn all about DU there.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today Doug where you very welcome