I'd like to believe Nato that depleted uranium is harmless. But I don't. And this is why...
by Robert Fisk
TWO MILITARY voices on the use of depleted uranium bullets in Kosovo. First from a K-For cove - a spokesman, no less, in Pristina - who insisted that "there's more risk from striking a match than from depleted uranium." Quote of the week, Quote of the year, perhaps. Then there was the former Nato officer to whom I talked that same night, a weapons expert, former RAF, whose job is to wander Kosovo in search of unexploded (and exploded) weapons. "I'm definitely suspicious any time I hear the word uranium," he told me. "A weapon isn't there to do you any good. The boffins have come up with this weapon. People who use it - or are on the receiving end - know only part of the facts. I'm very suspicious whenever I hear the word uranium."
So am I. On Wednesday, 14 April, Nato bombed a convoy of Kosovo Albanian refugees on the road between Djakovica and Prizren, saying - initially - that they may have been bombed by Serb aircraft. A day later, along with Julian Manyon of Channel 4, I found - beside the chopped-up corpses of the innocent dead - a series of craters in the soft earth beside the highway. "That's what the A-10 aircraft craters looked like in the Gulf," Manyon said. And - I prefer to forget the next bit - I dug with my bare hands into the craters to see if I could find any piece of ordnance that carried some trace of the weapon's manufacturer. I did. I found metal fragments with codes stamped on them. They were American.
And Nato then admitted that it had bombed the Albanians "in error", because it thought they were a convoy of Serb armour. But I put the pieces of shrapnel into a plastic bag, laid it on my hotel table in Belgrade. Small and burned they were, bright silver under my table lamp. Then I decided - too late, perhaps - that they might be depleted uranium rounds, and dumped them in my hotel rubbish bin. Did I carry U-238 in my schoolboy's shoulder-bag back to Belgrade that night, the detritus of nuclear fuel, the cause of all those cancerous tumours I saw breaking through the stomachs of Iraqi children less than a year before?
That question explains why I like to hear those K-For/Nato spokesmen telling me about the harmlessness - the absolute lack of hazard - of depleted uranium. I don't believe them. But I'd like them to be right. I don't think they are. Here's why.
After Britain began the test-firing of DU shells in Cumbria and south- west Scotland, radiation reports showed serious contamination near Eskmeals, Cumbria, and Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway. "Well above acceptable limits," the Ministry of Defence was to acknowledge later. At Eskmeals, they fire shells into a tunnel which is then washed out, the dust sealed in concrete containers. When a fire broke out at the Royal Ordnance Speciality Metals plant near Wolverhampton, where DU munitions are made, the National Radiological Protection Board said it had monitored "odd bits of DU".
In April, 1991, the UK Atomic Energy Authority expressed concern about DU contamination in Kuwait. "It would be unwise for people to stay close to large quantities of DU for long periods," it said. "There will be specific areas in which many rounds will have been fired where localised contamination of vehicles and the soil may exceed permissible limits and these could be hazardous to both clean up teams and the local population."
In Iraq in 1997, I discovered thousands of civilians dying of cancers, families never touched by cancer before, mothers giving birth to children with leukemia, monstrous births of deformed babies, old men who lived in the farmlands south of Basra amid the very armoured wreckage which we, the Allies, had blasted with our uranium shells, who talked to me of sudden cancer deaths, of daughters with breast and liver cancer.
My favourite is a letter from the Ministry of Defence, sent almost word- for-word the same to several readers of The Independent. The author was Doug Henderson, then a Defence minister, famous for his patriotic speeches during the Kosovo bombardment. "The Government is aware of suggestions in the press, particularly by Robert Fisk of the Independent," he writes, "that there has been an increase in ill-health - including alleged deformities, cancers and birth defects - in southern Iraq, which some have attributed to the use of depleted uranium (DU) based ammunition by UK and US forces.... However, the Government has not seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims."
I really like that bit about the "peer-reviewed epidemiological research data". Indeed, Mr Henderson has seen none. Because the British have no intention of carrying out any such survey. The World Health Organisation (now in Pristina) was originally asked by the Iraqis to conduct just such a survey. It never materialised. So much for the "epidemiological research data". But let's just remember the massive fire at the US ammunition storage base at Doha in Kuwait in July, 1991, when 3,200 kilograms of DU in tank rounds exploded. "Uranium particles when breathed can be hazardous," the US Central Command stated later. "11ACR (the US command at Doha) has been informed to treat the area as though it were a chemical area, ie stay upwind and wear a protective mask in the vicinity."
And let's recall, too, the cleanup of DU contamination at the DU manufacturers in Concord, Massachusetts, and at Sandia National Laboratory and Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico (a test-firing range); the topsoil had to be removed, the US army stated. And the cost of cleaning just 500 acres of an Indiana DU proving ground has been estimated at around #3bn. In the Gulf, the US Defense Department estimates 315 tons of DU was fired. And how much in Kosovo? We are not being told.
No details. No comment. No clean-up. Did the A-10s fire DU munitions around Pristina? Pec? Djakovica? Prizren? Mitrovica? And where did they fire these munitions in what we now like to call "Serbia proper"? "What we say about DU," K-For's spokesman told me, "is that it is harmful if you digest it, like any other heavy metal. The most dangerous period is 15 minutes after the explosion. Then it goes to the ground and sinks." Which is not true. The dust floats around, contaminates the air, almost certainly kills. I read to the spokesman an aid agency's warning about DU - the threat of contamination was very low, the warning said, but the residual dust "could pose an inhalation hazard. Children should not play on or near these vehicles. The minimum prescribed safe distance is no less than 50 metres." Yes, said the spokesman, "these are the official lines - I've seen this information in other briefings. There's nothing new in that, so to speak."
So to speak. Oddly enough, the K-For man had, without knowing it, captured the very essence of depleted uranium shells and bullets when he talked about the supposedly greater danger of lighting a match. For when they explode, DU rounds apply enormous kinetic energy over a small surface area of armour, igniting with a fire which veterans called "Dante's Inferno"; it burns and pulverises into a dust that soars into the sky in a heat column from a burning tank and drifts over the desert or fields. Over 90,000 US troops who served in the Gulf have reported medical problems. There is no legislation specifically outlawing DU. But Article 35 of Additional Protocol 1 of the 1977 Geneva Convention states that "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." So is DU legal?
Doug Rokke was a US army doctor who went to the Gulf to help clean up the DU contamination after the 1991 Gulf War. But now his lungs are scarred, he has kidney damage and breathing difficulties, like some of the cancer sufferers in Iraq. The aim of the Kosovo war, he said after the conflict had ended, "is to enable the Kosovars to return home. But unless the uranium is cleaned up, those that survive the Serb atrocities and the Nato aerial attacks will have to return to a contaminated environment where they may become ill." Nothing new in that, I suppose. So to speak. Strike a light.