DEPLETED URANIUM
A CRIME AGAINST WISDOM

By Gabriel Cousens, M.D.

The Issue of Depleted Uranium (DU) is extraordinarily important. Though it
represents a clear threat to the health of all humanity, and all life forms
on planet Earth, it also represents a clear debasement and loss of any
moral or ethical standards by the U.S. and by the rest of the world in
allowing DU to be used in warfare. Scientists, medical professionals, war
veterans, active duty personnel, international lawyers and the global
human community are calling for an awareness of this crisis and simply to
stop the use of Depleted Uranium, in order to preserve life on the planet.

It is a crisis that is clearly greater than even cancer or HIV/AIDS. It is
contributing to an awesome increase in all types of cancers, birth defects,
and disease in people, as well as plant and wildlife all over the world.

According to Geophysicist Leuren Moret, the equivalent of atomic bombs
released by the use of DU in Iraq in 2003 is 400,000 Hiroshima bombs. We
need to be clear that these DU particles have a half-life of 4.5 billion
years. In other words, its effects will not blow away in a few years.

DU does not mean it is not radioactive. Depleted Uranium is 60%
asradioactive as pure U-238 and it is 99.3% pure U-238, .7% U-235.

Upon impact, there is a tremendous amount of heat, up to 5,000 degrees
Fahrenheit,  which creates ceramic Depleted Uranium Oxide particles (DUO)
which are small enough to be inhaled into the lungs, and light enough
to travel in the upper levels of our atmosphere.

This is a global issue. The DU has been given to a variety of national
armies, and it needs to be addressed on an international level. It is not
about right or wrong in a limited sense. It is not even a political
question. It is a question of common sense. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said,
We can have a future of nonviolence, or a future of nonexistence. Depleted
Uranium, as we will see in a moment, is a future that can take us into
nonexistence.

In 1991, an estimated 375 tons of Depleted Uranium were dumped on Iraq, and
approximately 2200 tons were dumped in the war in 2003. According to geiger
counter readings in four different sites, the radiation levels were between
one and two thousand times higher than normal background radiation.
Millions of Iraqis have been affected. Of the 697,000 American troops that
were there in 1991, about half of them have since reported serious medical
problems and significant increases in birth defects in their newborn
children.

For perspective, in Vietnam, about 10% of veterans reported problems, and in
WWII about 3% reported, and now we are looking at 50%. About 1/3rd of the
Iraq vets  230,000 people are on Veterans Administration (VA) Disability.
That is a huge increase over previous wars.

What we are looking at is something beyond the imagination. DU has been
blamed on the health level for the effects of the Gulf War Syndrome,
including chronic muscle and joint pain, fatigue, and memory loss among at
least 200,000 soldiers. Cancer in Iraq, according to a UN Subcommission,
seems to have increased between 7 and 10 times, and deformities, or
congenital defects between 4 and 6 times expected levels of the norm.  A
United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority report said up to 500,000 people
would die before the end of the century due to radioactive debris left
behind in the desert. The use of Depleted Uranium has lead to birth defects
in the children of our veterans, and it is believed to be a cause of
anophtalmos, meaning babies born without eyes. The usual rate for this is
one in fifty million births. In Baghdad, they had eight cases in just two
years.

A study of 251 Gulf War Veterans from Mississippi conducted by the Veterans
Administration showed that 67% of veterans had children with severe
illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems, and fused
fingers. This is very significant data. Their babies were born after the war
they were deemed to have severe defects. The newborns had missing: brains,
arms, eyes, organs. . . they had blood diseases. The Gulf War Veterans came
back with DU in their clothing, bodies, and semen. These were people who
had normal babies before they went over there, now they are running 67%
birth defects. The DU is in their semen, and when they have intercourse they
are infecting their mates, as well.

There is a tremendous amount of research throughout the world. It took us 30
years to prove that lung cancers were related to smoking, we seem to have
the same kind of denial going on with the use of DU. The Army is in
a difficult place because DU is an incredible weapon.  It is a superior
weapon for destroying an enemy tanks and society. DU is the most devastating
weapon we have. Unfortunately, it is another form of nuclear warfare.
According to Dr. Caldell from Australia, Leuren Moret, a Geoscientist who
works almost
around the clock educating citizens about this issue, has one of the best
bio-physics and humanitarian understanding of the issue. She is talking
about the genetic future of humanity, which is at risk from the use of
DU. She points out that vast regions around the world, as well as in our
atmosphere are contaminated with DU. She makes the point that within four
days, DU is already in the United States, carried by the winds and dust
storms from the Sahara Desert, coming across in the hurricanes, dropping
more intensively in Florida, Texas, and the East Coast of the US, but
impacts the entire planet. Moret is an expert in atmospheric dust. These
dust storms are millions of square miles and transport millions of tons of
sand dust around the world.

There is a creeping awareness that something ANTI-HUMAN AND POWERFULLY
DELETERIOUS TO ALL LIFE ON THE PLANET is going on. Even the World Health
Organization in 2003 said that they expect the global cancer rates to
increase 50% by the year 2020. The infant mortality, which began to go down
when they had a nuclear test ban in 1963, is now rising around the world.
This is an indicator of radioactive pollution.

Our Veterans are particularly affected by Depleted Uranium. The use of DU in
Iraq is not a isolated issue. The UN used it in the Balkans; it is a problem
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well. These are the
kinds of things that the reports are bringing back, though much of this
information has been suppressed. If you were in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle,
you might be coming home with rectal cancer from sitting on DU ammunition
boxes. The young women are reporting problems with endometriosis, which is
the lining of the uterus not functioning right; 18-19 year olds are coming
back from the Middle East with uterine cancer. . . the problem is that they
are not being diagnosed, so this information is not showing up in the
official military records. There is a group of 20 soldiers that fought from
Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003 all fighting on the ground - eight of them now
have malignancies, a very high figure for people in their 20s and 30s.
The mental state is also affected. DU Oxides, created at high temperatures,
are insoluble and 100 times smaller than a white blood cell. The soldiers
breathe in these particles through the nose into the olfactory and these
particles go to the brain, affecting cognitive and other levels of brain
function. There is significant supporting research on this, but for our
purposes here we are trying to keep this simple, but there is a particular
physiology that is being affected. It damages the mood control mechanism in
the brain.

The effect on the brain was studied by the World Health Organization (WHO),
and they published a survey in the Journal of the American Medical
Association (AMA) which was very interesting. They could see the variation
on the effect of mental functioning. In Japan it was 8.8 percent; in
Nigeria, 4.7 percent; Ukraine (where they had Chernobyl) 20.4 percent; Spain
9.2 percent; Italy 8.2 percent; France (where there is 75 percent reliance
on nuclear power) 18.4 percent; Mexico 12.2%; the United States 26.2
percent, the highest. We have to remember that we have done a lot of nuclear
testing in the U.S. and we are paying the price.

We are looking at a threat to the whole world population, that includes all
living systems: the plants, the animals, the bacteria. . . everything is
being affected. It is in the air, the water, and the soil. It comes across
not only in hurricanes, but in what we call the stratosphere such as where
the spacecraft go. DU has been found on the surface of spacecraft. So it’s a
little bit different than the upper atmosphere. We can call it the
lower-orbital space. It is coming across very high up and then comes down in
the rains.

In the U.S., water and milk have 15 times the amount of DU that vegetables
do. Animals concentrate the DU in their cells at 30 times the level of their
environment. It is imperative that we consider whether we want to consume
flesh food in the light of this reality.

Depleted Uranium is used by a variety of countries, about 17 at this point.
These countries are CURRENTLY using/stockpiling DU weaponry: U.S., Great
Britain, France, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, Bahrain, Israel,
Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Greece,
Turkey, and Kuwait. So it is not a small thing. Helen Caldicott has said,
Never in my wildest dreams did I think that the U.S. would be donating
nuclear shells to poison it own soldiers and surrounding several civilian
populations with radioactivity.

In 1996 the UN passed a resolution specifically about DU, that DU weapons
are Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). They are illegal under all
international laws and treaties, and the European Parliament in 2001 passed
a resolution against DU, and that resolution was actually the result of the
use of DU by NATO in Bosnia. NATO and peace personnel had much higher rates
of leukemia as a result.

At this moment, the countries of Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan are
radiologically/radioactively uninhabitable due to the military application
of these nuclear weapons. The amount of birth defects in Iraq has
distinctly increased, based on data from a variety of studies by Iraqi
physicians. What we are dealing with is a high level denial, even though we
are getting very powerful data, particularly from Iraq. In Bastra, after
Gulf War I, there was maybe one baby a week born with birth defects, now it
is 10-12 a day. There have been International Conferences where they have
reported their data, such as the World Uranium Weapons Conference
at the University of Hamburg, Germany in October, 2003. After Gulf War I,
the frequency of cancer cases increased five-fold, with lung, leukemia,
breast, skin, lymphoma, and liver cancer cases being the biggest. Solid
tumors were more frequent.
 
But there was a sharp increase in most types of cancers. Lung was a
five-fold increase and now we are looking at possibly a six-fold increase in
the U.S. this year (2006). Lymphoma is four-fold, breast was six-fold,
larynx was four-fold, and skin was an eleven-fold increase in cancer. Among
the less common cancers the incidence was sharper: uterine cancer ten-fold;
colon six-fold; hypernephroma (kidney) seven-fold; malignant myeloma
(bone cancer), sixteen-fold; liver, eleven-fold; ovary, sixteen-fold;
perinatal tumor twenty times greater. These are horrendous statistics.

The results clearly show a change in the pattern of different types of
cancer as well as the increasing cancer rates. What we need to also
understand is that these rates come on very specifically, such as
four years later you have an increase in leukemia which is typical of what
you would see with radiation exposure. You have an increase in still births,
congenital abnormalities, and infertility. The still births increased
190%. Congenital abnormalities 520%; infertility 570%. The same kind of
results are being reported in Bosnia.

If we look further, basically a planetary problem we start to look at some
other studies that are going on. In Iraq, looking at some of the
epidemiologies of the Iraq doctors, what we are seeing is basically an
incredible ten-fold average increase in all cancers.

In Italy, the Italian/Kosovo Study showed that although the normal risk for
leukemia is 1.5 deaths per 100,000, that according to the Royal Society the
Italian/Portuguese Peacekeepers had up to 42 leukemia deaths per 100,000 a
significant increase from 1.5. This is what got people so upset in Europe
over the use of Depleted Uranium, and why the European community has voted
against the use of DU weaponry.

In 1997-98 the Balkan medias reported a dramatic increase of leukemia and
other cancer development within the population of Srpska as well as an
increase in malformations.

So again, not just Iraq, but in the Balkans we are having this kind of
thing. Cows in this region showed reduced and bloody milk production, and in
other cows their production stopped completely. In
several cases, calves had malformations, born without skin, missing hooves
and tongues, similar levels of defects to what we are seeing in the human
population all over the world.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports that DU has an effect on the
shape of chromosomes in terms of increase of [sister-chromated exchange].
People from all over the world have expressed concern. The Gulf War Syndrome
is a result of a kind of political non-thinking as Henry Kissinger put it
succinctly: Military men are just dumb. Stupid animals to be used as pawns
in foreign policy. Kissinger’s position is one of total moral bankruptcy.

This is what we are facing. The Gulf War Syndrome includes chronic fatigue,
headache, rashes, joint pain, muscle pain nerve damage, neurological damage,
kidney damage, cardiovascular disease, thyroid disease, multiple cancers,
autoimmune deficiencies, fevers and night sweats, fluid build-up, sleep
disturbances, abnormal births and birth defects, menstrual problems, reduced
IQ, confusion, memory loss, blood in stools, Epstein-Barr Syndrome, genetic
alternations, sinus diseases, loss of smell, unusual hair loss, chemical
sensitivities, asthma, and vision problems,  just to name a small portion.

This is very, very serious, and we need to look deeply and investigate: why
are people doing it, and is this even legal, using the perspective of
International Law and the international legal community.

The biggest concern when we look at the Depleted uranium issue, and the use
of atomic energy in general, is that this affects every single living thing
on the planet. The genome for the entire planet for all humanity -
potentially for all time - is being affected by DU. We are still arguing
about whether or not nuclear radioactivity causes a problem. There was a
study done in the U.S. that if you are within 100 miles of a nuclear plant -
and we have 110 nuclear plants in the US (the most of any country in the
world)  they found, according to the Center for Disease Control on Breast
Cancer Deaths between 1985 and 1989, that anyone within 100 miles of a
nuclear plants is where two-thirds of all breast cancer deaths occurred in
the U.S. DU is adding insult to that injury.

Other high-radiation places that we should be concerned about are Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico; the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Lab in
Idaho; and Hanford in Washington State, where Plutonium is used.
Some people feel they have contaminated the entire Columbia River Watershed,
almost the entire state of Washington.

So the immediate effects of this exposure is a metallic taste in the mouth.
Our soldiers are experiencing: muscle aches, loss of energy, incontinence,
destruction of the neuromuscular system. As the Uranium decays, it
turns into other radioactive isotopes. Teeth start to fall apart because the
Uranium competes with calcium. It is an extraordinary problem and they say
there is no treatment, but I think there is. And for
certain there is prevention. Stop using DU. Let us look at the problem a
little bit more, and take a look at what needs to happen.


On a psycho-spiritual level the cause of the problem is EGO. Ego takes us
into the very darkest regions of the causes of war, which we can call greed,
profit, racism, religious injustice, ethnocentrism, etc. But now we have
taken things to a new level, because we are at this point finding that the
EGO has become a planetary parasite that threatens to kill and destroy a
whole world.


The laws and customs of war (humanitarian law) includes all treaties
governing military operations, weapons and protection of victims of war as
well as all customary international law on these subjects. In other words,
in evaluating whether a particular weapon is legal or illegal when there is
not a specific treaty, the whole of humanitarian law must be consulted.


What has happened to our civilization? Have we lost contact with the meaning
of life, or what it means to be a human being? Have we lost contact with the
basic laws of human interaction. Are we willing to take responsibility to
turn this around? Do we want to turn this situation from a lose-lose
situation, to an inspiration to shift world consciousness so that we are not
destroying the planet?

We do have some ways to do this. I hope in time, depending on funding, we
should be able to start certain programs to clean up the environment of
radioactivity. Such things are available, and will be discussed when we
put them into action. In the meantime we have discussed some preventatives.

One of the simplest, and least expensive is Natural Cellular Defense (NCD),
containing a form of  zeolite, which was used in Chernobyl to neutralize the
radiation after nuclear incident polluted the entire environment. In over 40
people examined at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center , 39 of the 40 had
DU in brain, breast and liver, and in
one week in our detox fasting spiritual program, 99 percent of the
participants were DU-free.  Zeolites, in the form of this patented product,
Natural Cellular Defense, are indicating a very high affinity for DU through
its’ initial testing.  Currently there is a double blind, placebo study
taking place at the V.A. hospitals with fifty veterans returning
from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is hoped that this study
will be completed and published by the end of this year, which will verify
the efficacy of this product for the removal of DU from the body.

More info on NCD.

But this will not solve the root cause of the problem, which is the ego that
leads us to crimes against wisdom as it manifests in use of DU in war and
use of radiological and nuclear weapons. Depleted Uranium is a Nuclear
Weapon.

Below is a series of some organizations that you can contact to raise the
consciousness and bring this to a reality. The work must be done at the
governmental level, including national and international at the UN. This
letter is to strongly encourage you, as people who care more than just about
your personal health - but for the soul of the planet to take action.

Peace be with you, and the whole living planet.

 

APPENDIX 1: AN INTERNATIONAL APPEAL:
This is a draft by former United Nations Attorney General Ramsey Clark: An
International Appeal to Ban the Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons

Depleted Uranium Weapons are an unacceptable threat to life, a violation of
International Law, and an assault on human dignity. To safeguard the future
of humanity, we call for an unconditional International Ban forbidding:
research, manufacture, testing, transportation, possession, and use of DU
for military purposes. In addition, we call for the immediate isolation and
containment of all DU weapons and wastes, through classification of DU as a
radioactive and hazardous substance, the cleanup of existing DU contaminated
areas, comprehensive efforts to prevent human exposure, and medical care for
those who have been exposed.

This is an eloquent and very clear statement of what must happen. It has the
moral, physical, and spiritual aspects that reinstate our dignity as human
beings and as a part of the intelligent cosmos and expression of God at its
highest level.

 

APPENDIX 2: ORGANIZATIONS TO CONTACT
The International Action Center: Depleted Uranium Education Project
Website: http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm Action Guide:
http://www.iacenter.org/images/du_snafu.pdf

The Traprock Peace Center World Uranium Weapons Conference Website:
http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium_hamburg03.html
Action Guide: http://traprockpeace.org/award_winning_du_film.html#actions
103A Keets Road
Deerfield, MA 01342 (413) 773-7427

Military Toxics Project:
The mission of the Military Toxics Project is to unite activists,
organizations, and communities in the struggle against military pollution,
to assure it’s clean up, to limit the transport of hazardous
materials, and to advance the development and implementation of preventative
solutions to the toxic and radioactive pollution caused by
military activities.  The MTP mission is based on mutual respect and justice
for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias.

The purpose of the Military Toxics Project is to provide information,
education, networking and organizing resources. MTP serves as a bridge and
facilitator for organizations concerned with military pollution issues. MTP
fosters a relationship of mutual respect and support with its members,
networks, and collegiate campaigns around the country. MTP works to assist
local communities, not for them but with them. MTP activities focus on
both service and organizing efforts. MTP helps member organizations and
networks to project their individual voices nationally and internationally.

MTP has been organizing around depleted uranium issues since 1993, when it
formed the Depleted Uranium Citizens Network and released Uranium
Battlefields at Home and Abroad, a report by network members Rural Alliance
for Military Accountability, Citizen Alert, and Progressive Alliance for
Community Empowerment. MTP organized the first international conference on
DU munitions, which brought together community activists, military veterans,
and technical experts opposed to the use of depleted uranium weapons.
MTP has produced a variety of other reports and fact sheets on DU, supported
scientific research into the health effects of DU, and founded an email
discussion list about DU that serves over 150 activists in two dozen
countries. MTP is a founding member of the International Coalition to Ban
Uranium Weapons, and continues to support local organizing around DU and
network local organizations who want to work together to oppose
DU on the national and international levels.

Please visit www.miltoxproj.org

Contact: P.O. Box 558 Lewiston, ME 04243
(207) 783-5091 http://www.miltoxproj.org

Researched and Edited by Tree of Life Vegan/Live Food Nutrition Masters
Graduate David Rainoshek (www.nutrientdensenutrition.com). For more on the
Masters Program in Vegan and Live Food Nutrition, and all
Educational Programs at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, visit
http://www.treeoflife.nu/education.html.

For full documentation of this conference: http://www.traprockpeace.org/
depleted_uranium_hamburg03.html

Source: The Trojan Horses of Nuclear War, http://www.traprockpeace.org/
depleted_uranium_hamburg03.html