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The Criminality of Depleted Uranium

Deadly Physical Effects of Du

Australian Gulf War Veterans Contaminated with Uranium

Australian service personnel who served in the Gulf during 1991have tested positive for uranium contamination. The Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) in Canada, working in conjunction with DUSK Australia (Depleted Uranium Silent Killer) has tested a representative from the Australian Navy and a representative from the Australian Army. The uranium isotope analysis on their urine was carried out at the J.W. Goethe University in Germany and confirms depleted uranium contamination.

To date, the Australian Government has not acknowledged the possibility that Australian service personnel could be contaminated with uranium. However, scientific research reveals that Iraq is highly contaminated with the radioactive fallout from depleted uranium weapons. The positive tests of these Australian veterans,
reveals that they are still excreting uranium through their kidneys, fifteen years after their return from Gulf War 1.

The Australian veterans in this test case are ill. They exhibit multiple health problems from their exposure to radiological warfare. Their intimate partners suffer health problems and so do their children. The contamination of Iraq has resulted in an explosion of cancer, leukaemia and birth defects among the local civilian population.

Depleted uranium is highly toxic and radioactive waste. It is a by-product of the enrichment process that prepares uranium for use in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. This radioactive waste is denser and heavier than lead. It is manufactured into bunker busters that can penetrate deep into the earth and into the most powerful anti tank weapons available in the arms market today.

The Australian debate about embracing nuclear power technology, has omitted the inextricable link between uranium mining and uranium weapons. The proliferation of nuclear weapons causes concern, but depleted uranium weapons, are used daily in conflicts across the world.

The nuclear industry exists on the understanding that radioactive contamination is safely contained within nuclear facilities. The ethics of recycling radioactive waste into weapons and shooting it into another countries' backyard is missing from this debate. When depleted uranium weapons are fired, they immediately flare off uranium particles that can be ingested and inhaled. They lodge in the lung and other organs, irradiating the victim from the inside.

There are repercussions for all Australians now that Australian service personnel have tested positive for uranium contamination. The Uranium Medical Research Centre is concerned about blood products and organ donations from persons known or suspected to be exposed to depleted uranium.

Uranium weapons are illegal. They fail the four rules derived from the whole of humanitarian law regarding weapons.

1. Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle.
2. Weapons can only be used for the duration of the armed conflict.
3. Weapons must not be unduly inhumane
4. Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural
environment.

Depleted uranium is radioactive for 4.5 billion years.

Therefore, uranium weapons cannot be contained on the legal battlefield, nor within the timeframe of the battle. The birth defects exhibited by babies born after the conflict and the explosion of cancers afflicting civilians is evidence of the inhumanity of these weapons. The radioactive particles will drift across countries and around the world, contaminating air, water, soil and all life forms.

Australians are at risk at home. The Senate Hansard reveals that we have imported from the United States 34,000 depleted uranium weapons. The Australian Navy has used these weapons in training off the Australian coast. There are no records available to the public to identify `when or where' these weapons were expended. Wind patterns at the time of the training exercises would reveal communities at risk of contamination.

In 2003 the Australian Government opened up all of our defence training areas to the United States. There is ship to shore and air to ground bombing near Perth in Western Australia at the Lancelin Defence Training Area. In January 2006 the United States began flying in from Guam for regular bombing of the Northern Territory. This occurs just west of Katherine at the Delemere bombing range.

The Shoalwater Bay defence training area in Queensland includes a section of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.  It will host the largest joint Australian US military training exercise in June, Talisman Sabre 2007.

The Australian Government is adamant that no uranium weapons are being used, however no testing of water and soil is being done to reassure the public that uranium weapons have not and will not be used. The Australian Defence Force has purchased the M1A1 tank that is shielded in depleted uranium. The patent of the Hellfire 11 missile reveals a "dense metal" warhead of tungsten or uranium alloy. It is being imported from the United States for use with the Australian Tiger Helicopter, currently being manufactured in Brisbane.

As a result of the uranium contamination of Australian Army and Navy personnel, it is time for Australia to rethink the export of uranium. Government safeguards assuring us that Australian uranium is only used for `peaceful' purposes are simply an illusion of protection. Once our uranium is exported, it can be mixed with uranium from other countries. In the gaseous diffusion that separates enriched and depleted uranium, it is not possible to isolate Australia's uranium. We export uranium to the United States, the world's largest manufacturer and exporter of arms.

Estimates reveal that up to 800 tons of radioactive waste (depleted uranium) was dumped on Iraq during Gulf War 1. There is an estimate of about 1,100 tons used in Gulf War 2 and the bombing continues.

How many Australian service personnel are contaminated?  How will this affect the Australian civilian population?  It is time to take seriously the undiagnosed illnesses of Australian Gulf War veterans who have been deployed to a radioactive theatre of war. It is time to address the sickness of their partners and their children. It is time to look carefully at what is happening on Australia's defence training areas. From uranium mines to uranium weapons: Has Australia's uranium unleashed a public health catastrophe?

Pauline Rigby
 

Coordinator:
DUSK/ UMRC project to test Australian veterans for uranium contamination
DUSK (Depleted Uranium Silent Killer) Australia www.dusk-qld.info
 
from http://health. groups.yahoo. com/group/ du-watch/ , Message #8495.
 
NOTE: "Upsilquitch" is the nom-de-plume of a former weapons inspector in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. You are welcome to visit my own Yahoo! group on uranium weapons and other internationally outlawed weapons, where we maintain a File of all of his posts to DU-Watch and our own group at http://health. groups.yahoo. com/group/ AmericanDUST/ . I am not at liberty to reveal his identity at this time. Hajja Romi Elnagar

Deadly Environmental Effects of DU

Joint Australian and U.S. Military Exercises: "Blowin' in the Wind"

Dear Folks, 
  
Next May/June will see Australia host the largest military exercises we've ever had in peacetime. Talisman Sabre 07. 
  
Twelve thousand Australian soldiers and nearly 14,000 US troops and sailors will take place in bombarding our shores and fragile landscape, storming our beaches, gunning down 'terrorists' in the newly built urban guerilla warfare training centre, testing their latest laser guided missiles and 'smart' bombs in some of the most pristine wilderness I've ever seen on this planet - and in 30 years of making films, I've seen a lot of this planet. 
  
Idyllic Shoalwater Bay near Rockhampton will cop it all - live aerial bombing, ship to shore naval firings, underwater depth charges exploded in areas where turtles and dugong breed, nuclear subs using high level sonar frequency which zaps the hearing of sea life and mammals, nuclear aircraft carriers inside the so-called Great Barrier Reef marine national park (!), land based artillery firings blasting the hell out of areas where the most amazing biodiversity in Australia is to be found. (Shoalwater Bay covers 740,000 hectacres and is almost unique in our climatic landscape because it is a cross over point for tropical, sub tropical and temperate zones giving rise to an amazing variety of many species of flora and wildlife, birds, sea creatures etc.) 
  
Anyone who has seen Al Gore's film has to ask why are we allowing such madness to take place and wanton misuse of resources to further add to the huge level of CO2 put up into the atmosphere in exercises such as these at a time when we all should be combining forces in the War for Our Survival. 
  
These live munitions actions at Shoalwater Bay will run simultaneously with US bombing runs by Stealth, B1 and B52 bombers (just one B52 bomber carries 30 tonnes of bombs - needs three semi trailers to load it up with its bombload...) from Guam to drop their live payload from 5 kilometres high on Delamare bombing range near Katherine NT and live fire exercises involving many Abrams tanks rumbling across the landscape at Bradshaw tank range (surrounded by Bradshaw national park south of Darwin, target practising on country against the wishes of the senior Aboriginal elders, custodians of that country....). 
  
These military exercises and their coordination in both states will be beamed live via satellite from tiny cameras on the tanks, bombers, landing craft, army commander's lapels etc to the coordinationg War Room at Newcastle where the US and Australian generals will call the shots of what is fired next. Son of Star Wars has arrived in Australia!. 
  
I don't know how you feel about that, but I am still disgusted that  Australia supports the US so sycophantically in this bullshit War on Terror. Our unholy crusade at the latest count had 653,000 innocent people in Iraq killed - even if its half this number comprehensively and methodically counted number, its till a national and immoral disgrace that we have lent our name and support to such a huge number of innocent people murdered in our nation's name. 
  
Next year's Talisman Sabre exercises are a con for blatant continuing militarism of a similar vein post Afghanistan and Iraq. We are now about to pollute our own most pristine areas, far away from the centres of population by letting the US military test their latest weapons here. There are big plans by British Aerospace and the other arms manufacturers to quietly turn the depressed Rockhampton area into a big arms manufacturing industrial estate.  So not only will we export our soldiers who are the best there is to adventurist wars overseas, we are about to see an explosion in Australia manufacturing and exporting weapons of war. 
  
Not particularly drawn to military phrases, we have to 'draw a line in the sand' and say when 'enough is enough'. Its time my friends, to stop this madness and our complicity in it. 
  
With a view to oppose these exercises, a group of people from around Australia with peace activist credentials had a phone link up yesterday and spoke for an hour about our willingness to combine forces and oppose these exercises. We will link with activist residents of Shoalwater Bay (Yeppoon and Byfield) that we made contact with last year during Talisman Sabre 2005. 
  
We plan to put on a big concert at Yeppoon and have people come from all over Australia to take part in that concert and choose, if they wish, to be part of non violent actions to oppose the war and Australia's involvement in such wars. 
  
Through my contact with musicians like Paul Kelly, Midnight Oil (friends from Uni days), John Butler, Deborah Conway, Robyn Archer, Kev Carmody and actors Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill, Bryan Brown, we intend to put on a big concert which will spill into the evening with relevant films and speakers to raise awareness of just what Australia has signed up for with this new secret treaty the then Defence Minister Robert Hill and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer signed with Rumsfeld and Powell back in July 2004.  It is that secret treaty which is allowing the Americans to come here and do what they want - without so much as an environmental impact study being done before or after the exercises. 
  
We need people in communities right along the eastern seaboard to be actively inv olved in this campaign to build awareness amongst your local communities and to take on the role of being local coordinators as the campaign builds over the next six months, to help with the logistics of organising people to come by bus, peace train, cars, planes to be there in June for that concert and weekend leading into week of actions. Some people with work or other commitments will only be able to come for a few days, perhaps the weekend. No matter. We have to send a BIG message to the rest of our apathetic and many indifferent Australians and the government that this is not on any more. 
  
Please look at this website and subscribe to it to keep generally informed of what is happening, how to link up people in your local community if you want to help make this peace convergence a BIG event. 
  
http://www.peaceconvergence.com
  
If you would like to be part of the actual organising (that's why I'm emailing you now in the hope thereof...) please email Dimity Hawkins from MAPw (Medical Association for the Prevention of War) dimity.hawkins@mapw.org.au and ask her to put you on the list for organising. That way you will be told when the next national phone link up is happening and other important info to let folks in your respective communities know over the coming months as we seek to build awareness and a 'buzz' about being at the Talisman Sabre peace concert etc. But we want people who will DO, not just talk about it. 
  
Okay, thanks for reading this and taking it on board hopefully in a world where we all have incredible demands on our time and stress. 
  
Yours sincerely,
  
David Bradbury

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s1489013.htm

http://www.frontlinefilms.com.au/videos/blowin.htm

See Also: 

http://www.planetization.org/toxicmilitary.htm

http://www.planetization.org/canceronearth.htm

http://www.planetization.org/ejectweapons.htm