Depleted Uranium: A Looming Worldwide Calamity

TomClash

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Sat Jan-28-06 09:33 PM
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Depleted Uranium: A Looming Worldwide Calamity

DU is currently used in Iraq, causing radiation sickness to our brave American soldiers as well as innocent Iraqi civilians. Brought to you by the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons - the United States of America - now under Bush rule - Imperial War without end Amen.

Depleted Uranium: A Looming Worldwide Calamity
Written by Stephen Lendman
Thursday, 26 January 2006

Forget about Avian bird flu. The threat of it becoming a pandemic is more a political scare tactic and potential bonanza for drug company profits and its major shareholders' net worth (including Gilead Sciences, the developer of the Tamiflu drug and its former Chairman and major shareholder Donald Rumsfeld) than a likely public health crisis - unless you live around infected chickens or take an unproven safe immunization shot. There are much more other likely killer bacterial and viral threats than Avian that get little attention. Don't worry about possible or unlikely threats. Worry about real ones. Bacteria and viruses untreatable by anti-biotics are good examples. So are global warming and many others. But, there's possibly one threat that tops all others both in gravity and because it's been deliberately concealed from the public - never discussed, explained or had any action taken to remediate it. It's the global threat from the toxic effects of depleted uranium (DU), and like global warming; DU has the potential to destroy all planetary life. How can something so potentially destructive be hidden and ignored and why?

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DU is a "dense metal" that increases its ability as a weapon to penetrate a target, thus enhancing its destructive capability. Pentagon propaganda and disinformation falsely describe all DU weapons as only being coated. In fact, they are solid missiles, bombs, shells and bullets weighing up to 5,000 pounds in a single "bunker buster" bomb. All these weapons have solid DU projectiles or warheads in them, and their use in combat as the U.S. military has done in 4 wars and is now doing every day in Iraq is the "de facto" use of nuclear bombs. From Nagasaki in 1945 until the 1991 Gulf War, these weapons were effectively banned by common consent (and common sense) and never used (except for one time in the 1973 Yom Kippur war). This is the case no longer.

Above I asked why are these weapons used if they're so deadly and dangerous well beyond the areas they target? The answer's simple - because they work so well, and the enemy forces attacked don't have them and can't retaliate against us with them. The fact that we understand the danger from their use and the "externalities" left in their wake is someone else's problem to deal with. Just like a public corporation worries only about meeting Wall Street estimates of next quarter's earnings, our government and the military only worry about winning the next battle and next war - too bad if in the process we irradiate the planet and threaten all future life on it. That's someone else's problem later on. That's how big business thinks and also how our political and military leaders do as well.

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DEPLETED URANIUM - WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT'S USED

To use uranium as a fuel for commercial reactors or for nuclear weapons it must be enriched. The enrichment process is then followed by gaseous diffusion in two streams - one is enriched and the other depleted. Before a use was found for it, DU was just stored in vast amounts as a byproduct. However, when it was discovered that solid "dense metal" DU projectiles in all forms (missiles, bombs, shells and bullets) greatly increased their ability to penetrate and destroy a target, the Pentagon had a new technology it hoped to use in combat and now has for the past 15 years.

http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/734/