Depleted Uranium Rant

PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY, ESPECIALLY TO YOUR U.S. FRIENDS - DON NORDIN

The Implications of the Use of U.S. Depleted Uranium  Weapons in 
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq

(Don Nordin's interview with Leuren Moret)

Hello, this is Don Nordin.  You're listening to the Monday 
Brownbagger (Vancouver Cooperative Radio - 102.7 fm) of February 23, 
2004 and I will have on the line in a moment a guest from Berkeley. 
Her name is Leuren Moret. She is an independent scientist and 
international expert on radiation and public health issues. She is on 
the organizing committee of the World Committee on Radiation Risk, an 
organization of independent radiation specialists, including members 
of the Radiation Committee in the EU parliament, the European 
Committee on Radiation Risk.  She is an environmental commissioner 
for the City of Berkeley.  Ms. Moret earned her BS in geology at U.C. 
Davis in 1968 and her MA in Near Eastern studies from U.C. Berkeley 
in 1978.  She has completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in the 
geosciences at U.C. Davis.  She has traveled and conducted scientific 
research in 42 countries.  She wrote a scientific report on depleted 
uranium for the United Nations sub commission investigating the 
illegality of depleted uranium munitions.  Marian Falk, a former 
Manhattan Project scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab, 
who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout, has trained her 
on radiation issues.

(Don) So let's get into it.  I'll ask you to tell the folks what 
depleted uranium is.

(Leuren) Depleted uranium basically is the radioactive trash from the 
nuclear weapons and the nuclear power plant programs, and three 
isotopes of uranium occur in nature, so when it is mined those three 
isotopes are extracted from the ore. The DU is about 99.9% U-238, 
0.72% U-235 that is the fissionable isotope used in nuclear bombs and 
reactor fuel, and there's just a trace of U-234 left in a tenth of a 
percent of the remainder.  So what they do is they make a gas out of 
it, and they extract half a percent of the U-235 and what is left, 
which is 99.95% of what they mine, is called depleted uranium because 
it is depleted in U-235.  It does not mean that it is depleted in 
radioactivity; it's actually very radioactive., pstonard@ix.netcom.com

(Don) What kind of a half-life do these constituents of the depleted 
uranium have?

(Leuren) The half life of U-238, which is the majority of what we're 
talking about, is 4.5 billion years and it's actually a component of 
meteorites, planets, stars, space dust and it is distributed 
throughout the earth at about 2.4 parts per million, and because it 
is radioactive, it releases tiny amounts of heat over time and that 
is why we have a liquid or molten interior in the earth.  It's from 
the decay of U-238.

(Don) Do you have any idea of how much depleted uranium the U.S. has 
in its national inventory?

(Leuren) Yes, the U.S. has about a million tons of depleted uranium. 
Most of it is stored in canisters as uranium hexafluoride, and it's 
just really an environmental problem.  There is no place to dispose 
of it so in 1974,  against the advice of the Department of Energy, 
the Department of Defense began testing and manufacturing weapons 
made out of DU and the first system was manufactured by Hughes 
Aircraft. It was called the Phalanx System developed by the Navy and 
within six months of the Navy testing it, they had sold it to 14 
branches of the U.S. military and other countries.  We have now sold 
DU weapons systems to 29 countries.

(Don) In what kind of weapons is this DU used?

(Leuren) Well, depleted uranium is made in every caliber [and used in 
projectiles] for handguns, tanks, cannons, all the way up to large 
bombs weighing more than 5,000 lbs [and also used in the body of] the 
Warthog airplane.  So everything from handguns to bombs practically 
has...many have conventional weapons for ammunition but they also 
have them in depleted uranium.  A lot of systems are interchangeable. 
You can put a DU warhead in a bomb or a conventional warhead in the 
same bomb.

(Don) Did I hear you say they're using depleted uranium in the actual 
airplanes themselves?

(Leuren) Oh, yeah.  The US Air Force and the US Army are the largest 
users of depleted uranium. For instance, [DU is] very, very 
frequently used in the A-10 Warthog, but other [military] planes, and 
weapons systems carried by many planes, have DU.

(Don) Now why would they use it in the construction of an airplane itself?

(Leuren) Oh, depleted uranium or uranium metal is nearly twice as 
dense as lead and so instead of using larger amounts of a dense 
material like lead, they can use smaller amounts of depleted uranium 
as ballast in planes, so they use it in commercial planes and in 
military planes as ballast along the wings and the tail to balance 
the plane.  [It's] very similar to the lead lugs they put on tires 
when we go and get our tires balanced.

(Don) Well, I guess, anyway, the DU being in the wings and tail 
wouldn't be of any significant threat to the occupants of the plane 
itself.

(Leuren) It's not to the occupants of the plane; it is to crash site 
investigators when a plane crashes.  There was depleted uranium in 
whatever hit the Pentagon on 9-11 and I'm the only journalist in the 
world who even wrote an article about it.  The German science journal 
Nature picked up my article and actually wrote its own [article] 
based on the interviews I did.  It's used in golf clubsŠit's used in 
many, many surprising things and because there is so much of it, 
which the Department of Energy has, they're trying to find ways to 
dispose of it.  And there are proposals now to put it inside building 
blocks to construct buildings with. So if this continues we'll be 
living in radioactive buildings and then the terrible thing is that 
when the aluminum from planes or the metal from planes is recycled, 
the DU is not removed, so the metal that is re-manufactured will 
contain radioactive DU mixed in with it.

(Don) Now, of this one million tons of depleted uranium in the United 
StatesŠhow is that stored?

(Leuren) Oh, it's stored at, for instance, Oakridge, Tennessee. 
There's a big nuclear weapons lab facility there and it's stored as 
uranium hexafluoride gas in huge drums, and they're just stacked 
outside on top of each other.  It's also stored at Portsmouth, Ohio 
and other locations -- Hanford in Washington State.

(Don) So the storage issue itself must be quite problematic.

(Leuren) It's very problematic and the canisters that it's stored in, 
the big drums, are subject to corrosion on the outside and the 
barrels that are stored closest to the ground and subjected to 
moisture and heat and bacterial action corrode faster.

(Don) Now, in the bombs that were dropped on Iraq and Afghanistan, 
what percentage of depleted uranium would be typically used in those 
bombs?

(Leuren) That's a classified piece of information, but I would 
suspect that much of [the bombs' weight] is the depleted uranium 
ballast, and because it's so dense and heavy, as it falls there's a 
lot of kinetic energy [produced] and when it hits the ground or when 
a uranium shell hits a target, that kinetic energy is converted into 
heat. So when the bomb hits the ground,  you can actually identify 
depleted uranium bombs because the uranium is very hot. Probably some 
of it is liquid or molten and there is a shower of tiny pieces of 
depleted uranium that are on fire. It splutters all over the place 
and at least 70% is aerosolized into particles and fumes and dust of 
radioactive depleted uranium oxides that are smaller than bacteria or 
viruses.  These [particles] are hundreds and thousands of times 
smaller than blood cells, so it's inhaled by anyone in the 
contaminated areas, both enemy and our own soldiers.  And [those 
particles] go directly into the bloodstream and are distributed like 
fairy dust throughout the body.  And it's insoluble so the body 
cannot excrete it and it just destroys a person's body over time.

(Don) So it's likely that practically all the individuals, let's say 
in Baghdad including the U.S. Marines, are contaminated with depleted 
uranium now.

(Leuren) Anyone within 1,000 miles of Iraq; anyone within 1,000 miles 
of Afghanistan is potentially contaminated now.  It's not just the 
people [living] in the country.  Anyone going to Iraq or Afghanistan 
now will become contaminated. There's no way to escape it.

(Don) Now, for the average soldier over there, what types of 
reactions would this likely be causing in the body?

(Leuren) In the first Gulf War they used an estimated 340 or 350 tons 
of DU and the amount used is increasing every year.  So there were 
terrible effects from that [which people know as] the Gulf War 
Syndrome. In Afghanistan a thousand tons were used, three times as 
much. The entire country, the water supplies, the infrastructure were 
bombed, and now in last March and  April they used at least 2,200 
tons, which is eight to ten times more than what they used in Gulf 
War One, and like Afghanistan, they bombed the whole country, the 
towns, the cities, the villages, the water supplies, the whole 
infrastructure of the country.  So civilians and soldiers will be 
experiencing skin rashes, which is the heavy metal effect; they will 
have dental problems, respiratory problems. It's causing heart damage 
and brain damage.  The effects will be much more severe and much 
faster now than what we know of in Afghanistan or the first Gulf War 
in 1991.

In Kuwait, which is downwind [of Iraq], and DU was used in Kuwait, 
doctors are reporting three times the number of congenital heart 
problems with newborn  babies.  Those are the birth defects.    Gulf 
War soldiers who served in 1991 had normal babies before the Gulf 
War. [In a study of 251 Gulf War veterans by the Department of 
Veterans Affairs, it was determined that 67% of the babies born to 
soldiers after the Gulf War had severe birth defects]. They were born 
without brains, without eyes, [with] organs missing, without legs or 
arms, or they had terrible radiation related blood diseases for 
instance.

(Don) How many years is this effect likely to go on?

(Leuren) It will be forever.  The half life of depleted uranium is 4 
and a half billion years, but even worse, over time as the 
Uranium-238 decays, it transforms four times into much more 
radioactive daughter products or daughter isotopes and they are more 
radioactive than uranium-238 by millions and billions of times, so 
the level of radioactivity will increase over time, and that's why we 
call depleted uranium the Trojan Horse of Nuclear War.  Depleted 
uranium is a nuclear weapon and it is a weapon of mass destruction 
under the U.S. government definition of WMDs.

(Don) Now you have done some comparison, I believe, as to the 
radiation effects from the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in relation to 
the radiation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Would you like to talk about 
that?

(Leuren) Yes. In October 16 to 19, 2003 there was a very, very 
excellent and very important world conference on depleted uranium 
weapons held in Hamburg, Germany.  Two hundred people from 20 
countries and five continents attended [including] scientific, 
medical, legal experts, organizers, and activists and there were also 
Iraqi medical doctors and scientists there.  And I've never been to a 
conference like that. It was very, very interesting, very informative 
and sometimes difficult to have all of the affected parties involved. 
But some of the talks presented very important facts, and a Japanese 
physicist, professor Yagasaki from Okinawa, presented one of them. 
He had calculated the atomicity equivalent of the Nagasaki bomb to 
depleted uranium, and the atomicity means the number of radioactive 
atoms.  So he calculated that 800 tons of depleted uranium is the 
atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. So [the total 
atomicity], roughly estimating the amount of depleted uranium weapons 
used in Afghanistan and Iraq and former Yugoslavia, is approximately 
equivalent to 400,000 Nagasaki bombs.  In all of the testing by the 
nuclear states during the Cold War, the [atomicity] equivalent of 
only 40,000 [Nagasaki] bombs was [produced], so this is roughly ten 
times the amount of radiation that was released during nuclear 
weapons testing.  This is just an absolutely  horrendous amount of 
radiation. The U.S. has staged a nuclear war in Iraq and in the 
Middle East and Central Asia, and the northern half of India all the 
way through Turkey and Iran and the Russian oil-rich states, the 
Caspian oil region, and half of Egypt, Israel and the Saudi Arabian 
peninsula. These areas are now all contaminated.

(Don) There are measurable signs of depleted uranium in those countries?

(Leuren) There was before.  There was in the Saudi Arabian peninsula, 
Kuwait, Hungary, Greece -- this was all reported after the 1991 
bombing. Over time, [with] these very dry climates, the extreme dust 
storms and wind storms transport the radioactive material. The dust, 
as atmospheric dust, [is] scattered all over Europe.  It's 
transported across the Atlantic to North Carolina and the southern 
United States coastal areas, the Caribbean, and these dust storms 
carry sand all over Europe.  I've lived in England in the 1960s and 
70s, and sometimes Sahara dust was on our windshields in the morning 
in the streets.  It's known from mediaeval times.

(Don) So it seems to me that, especially now and in future years, not 
so future either, with the lowering of our quality of food and of our 
immune system, that even in the fringe areas and areas around the 
world where there's not so much of this dust, that DU is going to 
have an effect on [the number of] cancer deaths.

(Leuren) Well I am a geoscientist, so I study the earth and earth 
processes. [I do] research at U.C. Davis -- I haven't finished my 
dissertation yet, but my research has been on atmospheric dust.  I 
was studying the ice record, glaciers on the top of the Andes and 
Greenland and Antarctica and on top of the Himalayas, Mount 
Kilimanjaro in Africa, and [the study of] these ice records on 
glaciers are like the study of tree rings. They have an annual record 
of the dust transported around the world and also atmospheric gases, 
and the radiation released each year is preserved in each layer of 
ice.  So we know from volcanic eruptions, like Mount Pinatubo in the 
Philippines, that the dust from volcanoes, the volcanic dust and ash, 
is globally mixed throughout the entire atmosphere in one year.  So 
whatever they have been bombing with is, in one year, globally mixed 
throughout the entire atmosphere.    And right now the world is in a 
global cancer epidemic and other radiation related diseases, which is 
a result of the Cold War weapons testing.  We've added ten times as 
much radiation to the Middle East and Central Asia. Much of it will 
remain in the area recycling through the waters, the dust, the food, 
and the air.  It's inescapable.  But a lot of it will also be 
transported throughout the world. And remember that cancer starts 
with a single atom of uranium, a single alpha particle or gamma ray 
released from one atom under the right conditions.  So it doesn't 
just affect humans, it affects all life. Everything will mutate, will 
be affected, if it's exposed under the right conditions.

(Don) Well, the question that comes to mind is: Do the people who are 
waging war against the world in the United States and those that are 
releasing depleted uranium to be used in these weapons, realize the 
effects of depleted uranium on the environment and on people?

(Leuren) Of course.  The United States has since spent 300 billion 
dollars-that's a conservative estimate up to 1995-on nuclear weapons 
development.  I worked at two nuclear weapons laboratories: The 
Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the Lawrence Livermore Lab.  This entire 
time they have conducted detailed and very extensive studies on the 
biological effects of radiation. They absolutely know everything 
about the impact on the environment and on human health of what they 
are doing, and when I worked at Livermore from 1989 to '91, [before] 
I finally walked out one day and became a whistleblower, I watched 
teams of radiation experts leaving that lab monthly, weekly, yearly 
traveling to radioactive contaminated sites all over the world, 
taking collections of plant materials and living materials like the 
fish out of the rivers or the lagoons. [They also studied] the human 
guinea pigs, people at Chernobyl, at the Pacific Islands where 
nuclear weapons were tested and even Americans [in the] the nuclear 
weapons program and the nuclear power plant program.  They have 
special laboratories at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab and Livermore. 
They have special units with instruments to measure the radiation and 
samples, freezers to keep the samples in, and in the labs that I've 
worked in, there are charts with defective sperm on the walls.  I 
remember walking by them every day. They know everything.

(Don) So if they know the effects of depleted uranium on people, does 
that not then make them the highest type of war criminals?

(Leuren) These are the highest types of war criminals.  These people 
have developed weapons of mass destruction knowing full well what the 
health and environmental effects are, and they have spent tremendous 
amounts of money and effort to hide this from not just the American 
people, but from the global community.  They have constructed a huge 
and a very connected apparatus of scientists, scientific journals, 
medical professionals, academic institutions, secret radiation labs, 
and nuclear weapons laboratories. We have over 550 national 
laboratories in the United States-I think the number has been reduced 
maybe to 250, but there were over 3,500 facilities in the United 
States, which functioned as part of the nuclear weapons complex. 
There's no way that they don't know everything and the international 
nuclear-I call them the nuclear Mafia-has mostly been controlled by 
the United States.  It's all to hide the health and environmental 
effects.

(Don) They seem not to be only the highest types of criminals, but 
they seem to be insane. I mean only an insane...

(Leuren) It's a culture of insanity!  You're absolutely right.  I 
worked at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab. I saw people go to work 
every day.  Their friends were dying of cancer. Some of them had 
cancer.  You know that a nuclear weapons lab paycheck is about 30 to 
40% more than scientists would make in a private sector academia.  So 
people get addicted to that money and their wives die of brain 
cancer.  Their children die of leukemia and they still go to work 
every day.

(Don) Yeah, George W.'s son and progeny are going to be affected for all time.

(Leuren)  George Bush Jr., our president now, he and all of his 
siblings have learning disabilities as a result of being exposed to 
nuclear weapons testing fallout during the Cold War.  And his toddler 
sister died of leukemia when she was just a couple of years old.  His 
whole family has been affected by nuclear weapons testing.  This is 
the insanity of it. They do it anyway.

(Don) Yeah, it doesn't bode very well to be ruled by people that are 
brain cell deficient, that's for sure.

(Leuren) Well, it's had a tremendous effect on the I.Q. and the 
learning ability of all American children. The SAT scores, the 
average SAT scores for the entire population of 18 year-olds, 
teenagers in their last year of high school when they are given the 
SAT tests, declined from 475 which was the average score for 20 years 
before bomb testing started and it started in about 1946. By 1963 the 
SAT scores for children born that year, [those children] exposed in 
utero to the radiation and receiving brain damage, [declined 
nationwide] to 425.  As soon as the test ban treaty was signed 
between the U.S. and Russia in 1963, SAT scores started going up 
again.  But what the United States did was sacrifice an entire 
generation of children to test nuclear weapons.  The same thing is 
happening now because of nuclear power plants and one out of twelve 
children have learning disabilities in the U.S. What cost is that to 
our society?

(Don) Hasn't Baghdad, and maybe even the whole country of Iraq, been 
made virtually an area that is not suitable for living in now?

(Leuren) Oh, and the regions within a thousand miles.  The Middle 
East and Central Asia are radioactive.  People shouldn't be living 
there; nothing should be living there.  And I began to read-I 
couldn't believe it-when I started researching it, I just couldn't 
believe it.  I couldn't believe what had happened.  I couldn't 
believe they were using depleted uranium in the amounts they were 
using.  And when that Japanese professor calculated the atomicity 
equivalent of Nagasaki bombs, I started making maps of the areas 
contaminated and when I saw the map with circles drawn around 
Afghanistan and Iraq with a one thousand mile radius, I knew there 
was a deeper purpose.  But I still couldn't understand why they'd 
used it.  No other country has used it.  The U.S. broke a 46-year 
taboo in 1991 and used it.  No other countries have used it since 
then.    There has to be a reason, and I began to read The Grand 
Chessboard by Brzezinski.  Anyway he, Zbigniew Brzezinski -- it's 
called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic 
Imperative -- wrote it in 1998 but it's a blueprint, absolutely, for 
U.S. foreign policy being carried out in Central Asia and the Middle 
East.  And they have basically bombed the major oil rich regions in 
the Eurasian area. This is not going to stop. It's going to continue.

Call-in portion of Interview

(Caller #1) Listening to your guest.  Great topic.  Good guest!  I've 
just got a few things to say.  I was just thinking about this.  I 
think you are  absolutely right when you say that the people who are 
doing these kind of things to humanity, there is no other reason: 
they must either just be insane or incredibly sinister and perhaps 
another reason exists that maybe we don't really think about.  Has 
anyone ever thought that maybe these leaders, these mad bombers and 
serial killers such as George W. Bush and his father -- what about 
the theory that these people are really reptilians from another 
dimension or planet perhaps who have invaded our human areas and who 
are carrying out their own agenda?

(Don) Well I don't know if I'd like to degrade the reptilian race by 
saying they're reptilians. (Laugh)

(Caller #1) OK.  I don't know what other reason exists other than I 
didn't realize people are [so] completely sinister and I throw in a 
guy like George W. Bush, of course.  But I'll just hang up now and 
listen to your comments and perhaps your guest's comments.  Thank you.

(Caller #2) Well, I'd just like to discuss for example Helen 
Caldicott, who has been active in struggling against nuclear weapons 
proliferation, and there are groups out there struggling against 
radiation and all different types of organizations fighting to reduce 
the amount of damage done through militarism and international 
aggression and so on.  But there seems to be a real lack of 
democratic decision-making processes within these organizations.

(Don) That's for sure.

(Caller #2) Yeah.  There is very little in the way of public 
involvement and there is virtually no democratic decision-making that 
is taking place just based on the empirical information relevant to 
the decisions to be made, rather than the persuasive, coercive 
influence of leadership elements and  PR firms, advertising agencies, 
media organizations, and different groups within these organizations. 
I wonder if maybe she could speak to that, if there is any 
organization she's aware of that are more democratic?

(Caller #3) I just had a question for Leuren.  I was wondering which 
countries in Europe would be safe from contamination?  Where would it 
be safe to visit?

(Don) I think she's said that basically the whole world is 
contaminated but it's just to a lesser degree.  I would imagine that 
there's a gradual [reduction] of radioactivity away from the central 
bombing areas, but we'll go back to Leuren.

(Leuren) In terms of less contaminated areas, I would think Europe 
would be OK.  Turkey is in the region of potential contamination and, 
if you are going for short visits, you have a better chance of not 
becoming contaminated. Of course there is no safe level of radiation 
exposure, but the people living in these regions, chronically exposed 
24 hours a day to air borne [and] water borne [radiation], and [to] 
food contaminated with radiation, will be the most affected.  It's 
just everywhere.    It's really, I think, the greatest tragedy that 
humanity has faced.  So I feel terrible about people who went to Iraq 
as human shields, to media who were there-they're all contaminated. 
And when I was in Japan last summer I met the human shield people 
from Japan-they're sick with depleted uranium exposure and over time 
it just continues to act in the body.  So people really need to think 
about where they are going and be aware of the potential risk.    Now 
the other question the gentleman had about this need for openness and 
democracy in the decision-making process [concerning] the nuclear 
weapons program, nuclear power plants, and now the DU, because it's 
all the same-it's alpha, beta, or gamma exposure internally whether 
it's coming out of nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants, or depleted 
uranium or the radioactive weapons.  The problem is that the secrecy 
has allowed these programs to be developed when they do tremendous 
harm to human health and all species, as well as the impact on the 
environment.  And right now the United States is gearing up for a 
nuclear war.  We now have nuclear weapons spending at the highest 
level ever-even [than] during the Cold War.  It's higher now than 
during the Cold War and the United States has no enemies. This is 
causing other countries to also increase nuclear weapons development 
and what I was shocked to discover in my research is  that Japan and 
Germany are now tied in second place.  They have passed Russia in 
nuclear weapons development.  And the deeper purpose for all of this 
is to play nuclear blackmail and to frighten other countries into 
developing their nuclear weapons and thinking they need them.  For 
instance, India is afraid of Pakistan.  Pakistan is afraid of India. 
Japan is afraid of North Korea. North Korea is afraid of South Korea. 
So everyone is developing nuclear weapons and what's really happening 
is the US is manipulating these countries rimming China to develop 
nuclear weapons programs and we are enticing them to be our nuclear 
partners with China as a common and the real enemy.

(Don) I have so many more questions to ask you. One of the ones I 
wanted to ask is, what about the groundwater?  Is that going to be 
contaminated for all time and how far away [from the areas of 
conflict] would it be contaminated?

(Leuren) The groundwater is contaminated of course. Over time, as the 
leftover bullets and ammunition that did not burn degrade and weather 
with the heat, and [with] the cold and seasonal changes-rain, snow, 
and the wind-[depleted uranium contamination] migrates into the 
groundwater. So there's just a constant new supply of depleted 
uranium oxides and metal which will be released into the air and 
migrate through the ground into the groundwater. A study that the 
United Nations Environmental Program released last March 2003 
reported that 25% of the bare metal, uranium bullets and weapons in 
the soil in Yugoslavia, had dissolved since 1998.  So if 25% of the 
munitions buried in the ground dissolved in four or five years in a 
wet climate, it will be slower in desert areas, but it's going to 
continue contaminating groundwater, soil, food and air.

(Don) And I think-you have mentioned that these particles go down 
into very fine sizes, so [I would imagine] there's no way they can be 
filtered out of the water.

(Leuren) There's no way to filter it out.  It goes through all gas 
masks. It goes through all filters.  These particles are a tenth of a 
micron or smaller.  A red blood cell is seven microns and a white 
blood cell is about ten microns, so they are much, much smaller than 
even blood cells.

(Don) Before we wrap it up, I would like you to give us contacts on 
the website where people can find more information.

(Leuren) People can go to an excellent website: 
 and just do a Google search on my name, 
Moret.

They can also go to: . That's the 
Traprock Peace Center in Connecticut.  They have an excellent 
website.  Lots of people get a lot of good information from it and 
they have a lot of information on depleted uranium.

Those are probably the two best websites that I know of.    There's a 
letter to Congressman McDermott that I wrote. They could do a Google 
search on "letter to McDermott".  He's a Congressman from Seattle, 
Washington who has introduced a bill in Congress, and I wrote him a 
letter with a lot of details. The attachments and the references are 
also on the website with a letter.  That's on the mindfully.org 
website, and then [there's] my testimony for the International 
Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan of December 13, 2003, which is also 
on the mindfully.org website.  That [testimony] has fourteen 
questions that the prosecutor sent  me to answer, and there are 
questions like: What does the U.S. government know about DU? (My 
answer was twelve pages long). What is the connection between 
depleted uranium and fourth generation nuclear weapons? And then, 
what are the environmental and human effects?

(Don) What I think has to happen is [that] some organizations in 
Vancouver have to get together and bring you into Vancouver for a 
large meeting.

(Don asks remaining callers to give comments only)

(Caller #4) Well I was wondering about the possibility of certain 
plants being used to decontaminate the human body and [the] possible 
development of bacteria that might be used for that purpose also?

(Don) I was asking for comments.  We don't have time for questions now.

(Caller #4) Well my comment is that it is one big inhumane, 
parasitic, military-industrial, ecocidal and social atrocity.

(Don) Thank you.  `

Last comment of Leuren Moret:

(Leuren) I would like to read a quote from Henry Kissinger. 
"Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in 
foreign policy". This is what the elite believe about our military. 
I am now working with an international group of scientists and 
radiation experts.  We are forming a World Committee on Radiation 
Risks comprised of honest researchers to help citizens, elected 
officials, affected populations and individuals to learn the truth 
about radiation, and to work toward an international moratorium on 
depleted uranium and other radioactive weapons.  So watch for us. 
The European Committee on Radiation Risk, within the European 
Parliament, has just published an excellent report on low-level 
radiation and you can get it at: 

And now the citizens of the world, the scientists of the world, the 
radiation experts of the world-we have to all work together and it's 
not hopeless.  But people need good information.