|
|
 |
| Jul 29, 2010 - 06:45 PM |
Queen City News - Helena's FREE Weekly Newspaper |
Helena, Montana |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Did you know that U.S. troops have fired in combat 2,500 tons of radioactive bullets and shells during the past 16 years? Made from a material referred to as Depleted Uranium (DU), these kinetic penetrators are 99.8 percent Uranium 238, a radioactive emitter of Alpha radiation with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
A single milligram of DU emits 1,071,000 Alpha particles a day, and each of these particles is nearly one million times more powerful than the force needed to break the DNA in adjacent cells, potentially degrading the cells’ functioning or causing cancer, birth defects, or inherited DNA damage.
How is it that our military could have begun using radioactive munitions? On the one hand, our national government, post 9-11, has been warning us that immoral terrorists might attack us using “dirty bombs” (combining conventional explosives with radioactive material with the goal of spreading radioactive contamination). On the other hand, this same national government, during combat in the past 16 years, has released into the environments of Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq 2,500 tons of radioactive material.
Those of us in the Helena area troubled by our country’s use of DU munitions have formed a group called the Montana Depleted Uranium Education Project. It is an apt name as we are trying to educate ourselves about DU and trying to share the results of our educational efforts with others.
A central project of our group has been to try to help combat vets receive testing and treatment for DU exposure. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 221,000 first Gulf War vets are disabled, and more than 10,000 have died (though fewer than 200 died in the war).
DU was first used in combat in the first Gulf War, and many vets are comparing the harmful effects of its use to the harmful effects caused by the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
The Pentagon believes that DU kinetic penetrators give it a huge fighting advantage, as they burn at 3,000 to 5,000 degrees Celsius while penetrating armor, instantly knocking out targets they hit.
The Pentagon claims that because DU is 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium, it poses no radiation danger (nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are required to isolate DU from the biosphere as toxic nuclear waste).
The Pentagon can make the harmlessness assertion because DU is not dangerous if it isn’t ingested or inhaled or placed in proximity to an organism or put into the air, water or soil. But this fails to take into account the transformation that occurs as DU burns at high temperatures on penetrating a target.
Up to 70 percent of the DU penetrator is vaporized into a metal fume of infinitesimally small particles (as small as one nanometer, which is one-millionth of a millimeter) that are transformed in the extreme heat (as in a kiln) into a ceramic form. As ceramicized micro-particles, this DU is able to penetrate all of an organism’s defenses as it is small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier or the placenta, for example, while its ceramic nature makes it insoluble and resistant to the body’s filtering and excreting mechanisms, which depend on water solubility to function.
It is possible that Gulf War Syndrome, an across-the-board degradation of health in Gulf War vets, is caused by vets’ exposure to DU micro-particles. The mitochondria of a cell are 16 times more vulnerable to radiation damage than the DNA in a cell’s nucleus.
As those who took high school biology class will recall, the mitochondria of a cell do the cell’s functional work. It is possible that these vets’ poor health could be caused by DU-induced damage to the mitochondria of their cells. Cells with damaged mitochondria are not able to do their jobs, which include the metabolizing of fuel, the clearing of wastes, the creation of vital enzymes, and the functioning of the immune system, among many others.
Those of us in the Montana Depleted Uranium Education Project believe the “benefits” of DU munitions are outweighed by the problems connected with their use. Some of the thousands of pounds of DU micro-dust unleashed in Iraq have undoubtedly made their way even to Montana as the Middle East’s infamous dust storms have likely lifted these extraordinarily small toxic particles into the jet stream.
When we consider that the radioactive danger from this DU dust will remain biologically destructive for the next 4.5 billion years, we wonder what those involved in causing this could have been thinking. We are amazed that supposedly rational and moral Americans proposed, manufactured, used, and defended the use of DU munitions. Surely some in this harmful chain of causality didn’t know what they were doing. But the leaders who have made these things happen apparently believe in a very different country than the one we were taught to believe in when we were schoolchildren.
We encourage those interested in learning more about DU to come to a special showing of an award-winning documentary film originally produced for German television, “The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children”, to be shown at the Myrna Loy Center on Thursday, March 1st, at 6 p.m. Geoffrey Millard, an Iraq War veteran, will be present to answer questions.
(Jonathan Matthews of Helena is a member of the Montana Depleted Uranium Task Force.)
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Queen City News is published every Wednesday in Helena, MT, by Mossback Media, LLC.
Contents are copyrighted and cannot be used in any form without prior permission from the QCN.
Copyright © Queen City News, 2002
Logo by Internet Navigating
Design and development by Pure Development
Best discount software.
|
|
|
