Nuking Lebanon

On top of the destruction of the entire economic infrastructure of the country of Lebanon, the United States just delivered at least 100 GBU 28 bunker busters bombs containing depleted uranium warheads to Israel.

Sections 2-4 and 2-5 of U.S. Army Regulation 700-48 entitled "Management of Equipment Contaminated With Depleted Uranium or Radioactive Commodities" authored by Headquarters, Department Of The Army respectively, as well as two separate Army directives ("Medical Management of Army personnel Exposed to Depleted Uranium" authored by Headquarters, U.S. Army Medical Command 4/29/04, and "Medical Management of 'Unusual' Depleted Uranium Casualties", authored by the Pentagon 10/14/93), and an Army Technical Bulletin (TB 9-1300-278: "Guidelines For Safe Response To Handling, Storage, And Transportation Accidents Involving Army Tank Munitions Or Armor Which Contain Depleted Uranium" authored by Headquarters, Department Of The Army 7/96) all require that:

• DOD officials provide "prompt and effective medical care to all exposed individuals";
• Military personnel "identify, segregate, isolate, secure, and label all RCE" (radiologically contaminated equipment);
• Implement "procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity as soon as possible";
• Directs that "radioactive material and waste will not be locally disposed of through burial, submersion, incineration, destruction in place, or abandonment"; and,
• Directs that "all equipment, to include captured or combat RCE, will be surveyed, packaged, retrograded, and decontaminated".

None of this has been done in Lebanon, indeed even rational warnings to the civilian populous have not been distributed via media outlets. And beyond the Israelis, the United States itself has yet to follow any of these directives in Iraq, and instead the corporate media itself is willingly self-censoring the entire subject of depleted and NON-depleted uranium in munitions.

It is officially a "non-topic" despite the fact that even depleted uranium is highly toxic and carcinogenic with a half-life of some 4.5 billion years.

In order to produce nuclear weaponry, naturally occurring uranium has to be enriched to increase the level of fissile uranium, U-235. The leftover product is depleted uranium. In depleted uranium (DU) the level of fissionable uranium 235 has been reduced from 0.7% to 0.2% by the enrichment process. Uranium 238 makes up over 99% of the content of both natural uranium and depleted uranium. Depleted uranium is roughly 60% as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium. Since the beginning of the Nuclear Era, America alone has produced a waste stockpile of depleted uranium in excess of 1.1 billion pounds. Rather than burying this toxin to protect the genetic future of the human race, the DOD's answer to waste disposal, is to give depleted uranium for free to arms manufacturers for use in armour and munitions.

Why would they want it, you ask?

Well, tank armour reinforced with depleted uranium is virtually impervious to conventional shells. And conversely, shells reinforced with depleted or non-depleted uranium slice through targets like a super-sharp knife through warm butter. Uranium is preferred by arms manufacturers over other ballistic materials such as iron, lead or tungsten because of it's unique metallurgical properties. It is extremely dense, and pyrophoric. In other words, it's dust burns spontaneously at room temperature. Solid metal uranium is auto-igniting at 170 degrees Fahrenheit. And most importantly, solid metal uranium has a property not available in any other metal -- it is "self sharpening". Meaning, that when it hits a target at high velocities, it breaks in such a way as to continually sharpen at it's point. The leading points of all other warhead metals flatten or mushroom under these conditions. These properties give uranium superior performance as a penetrating warhead capable of punching through the hardest and thickest armor plating, retaining penetration capabilities at 15% greater distances and lower speeds than the most common alternative, tungsten. Specifically, they can bore through 20 feet of super-reinforced concrete bunkers. Or apartment buildings.

When detonated, these types of weaponry essentially shatter/combust into diamond hard microparticles forming a radioactive dust which is released into the air with the explosion. 60% of this aerosol of fine uranium particles are less than 5 micron in diameter - 10 microns is a respirable size. When inhaled, DU and NDU goes into the body and stays there, slicing through DNA. And while it's true that this "dust" falls quickly to the ground, the dust storms inherent to the Middle East mean that what might typically be distributed over a relatively small area, instead gets blown around throughout an entire region.

An Iraqi Dust Storm

The DOD's common excuse for this is that "while such things may be true, the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere is negligible." This is what is more commonly referred to as a convenient half-truth. While such a contention might be correct when speaking about a single bomb dropped into an area, it no longer remains true when you're dropping roughly 4 MILLION POUNDS of it PER YEAR on a target area.

The other half of that truth is a bit... inconvenient. It's called "aggregate toxicity". And it means that in Iraq alone, we've dropped what amounts to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs PER YEAR in Iraq since the start of the war. In Afghanistan, it amounts to roughly 100,000 Nagasaki bombs worth of radioactive material.

From a health perspective, this has led to the following:

• Fully 100% of Afghan civilians tested for exposure were found to have levels of non-depleted uranium in their system between 400% and 2000% higher than normal. Subjects also presented identical symptom profiles and chronologies. Victims reported pain in the cervical column, upper shoulders and basal area of the skull, lower back and kidney pain, joint and muscle weakness, sleeping difficulties, headaches, memory problems, and disorientation, as well as burning of the nasal passages, throat, and upper respiratory tract;
• Cancer rates in Iraq have increased 1000% between 1989 and 2001, as a result of the use of DU and NDU in the First Gulf War. Since the start of the current Iraq War, they have increased exponentially;
• More than 240,000 Gulf War vets are on permanent medical disability, and more than 11,000 are dead;
• A U.S. Government study conducted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs on the offspring of Gulf War Vets revealed that 67% of the babies had serious birth defects (born without eyes, without ears, missing whole organs, missing legs and arms, fused fingers, thyroid or organ malformations) or other adverse health effects;
• Among Iraqis, cases of anophthalmos (babies born without eyes) was literally 250,000 times greater than the natural occurrence of this particular birth defect (20 cases per 4,000 births, as opposed to the normal 1 in every 50,000,000 births), and women there often give birth to babies born without brains, with organs outside of their little bodies, or they simply give birth to pieces of flesh; and,
  
• In wheat-growing area north of Mosul, Iraq, the crops are producing stunted blades of grass. This is the grain breadbasket of the area. A region that would normally feed nineteen million people.

All this despite the fact that use of DU weapons are prohibited under the terms of the 1980 Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects, and Article 35 of Additional Protocol 1 of the 1977 Geneva Convention which states "it is prohibited to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment."

With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, DU and NDU amount to a permanently available contaminant randomly distributed into the environment.

And in addition to the now more than 800,000 people made homeless by the relentless shelling, we are now providing such uranium-reinforced weaponry to the Israelis for use in Lebanon.

This image shows the bomb pattern of Israeli Strikes in Lebanon so far: