Dr Chris Busby is scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, and sits on the UK government's Depleted Uranium Oversight Board. He is an international expert on low-level radiation, and Green Party Science and Technology speaker. He spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly about nuclear terrorism and his recent journey to Iraq in search of evidence of the effects of depleted uranium In September 2000, I was approached by Yousri Fada, the London bureau chief of Al-Jazeera. He wanted to interview me about how depleted uranium might be able to cause harm, even at radiation levels which were conventionally believed to be far too low. There was plenty of evidence, both through Gulf War syndrome, and through the effects seen in Iraq, of some enormously powerful agent causing ill health. Congenital malformations, cancers, various other illnesses -- all seemed to point to radiation as a source. Since about 1995 I've been suggesting that Gulf War syndrome is partly or wholly caused by exposure to depleted uranium, through high local doses from particles to tissue. This is not a model which is used by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, though this is beginning to change. At that time, it was believed that uranium had a very low radiological impact, because it was an alpha emitter, and because it was a very weak emitter (ie had a very long half life). On the other hand, the amount of radiation involved in the Gulf was very great, because the quantities used were huge. DU is not very radioactive, but they were chucking it about in very large quantities. The 350 tonnes of uranium dropped in Iraq are equal to about a kilogramme of plutonium. If somebody dropped a kilogramme of plutonium on this country, there would be hell to pay. Yousri asked me how I would convince scientists that these kinds of illness were due to DU. I said the obvious way was through an epidemiological study. You find the people who are ill, and show that they've been contaminated in some way, by measuring the contamination in the area where they live. Then you compare them with people who are living in areas that are not contaminated. Shortly afterwards, Yousri got back to me, and said: the Iraqi government would like you to come out. I was a bit nervous: it seemed to me that Iraq was a really dangerous place to go, and I'm not a fantastically brave person. But in the end I thought I'd go and see what was going on, because I felt sorry for the people. I flew to Jordan, and from there I travelled by taxi to Baghdad, where I met up with the film crew. On the Saturday, I was taken to see the director of public health, and then I was given a tour of the public hospital, and visited the radiotherapy and oncology departments. The hospitals in Iraq are in a terrible state. They can't get the drugs, they can't get the parts for the radio- therapy machines, they can't repair their computers -- they can't even get bloody pencils. They have to cut all their pencils into little sections, and then work out the calculations they can't do on their computers with a tiny stub of pencil on a piece of paper. It makes me cry to see what they're doing to them. When the World Health Organisation sent Dr Max Parkin out there to report on the alarming increase in cancer, his response was: "They don't have proper computers. All we found was a 286, so their cancer registry can't be of a sufficiently high standard for us to believe their figures." That was just so arrogant! Whatever computers they may have, they can certainly count! The Iraqis I met were very nice people. It's terribly sad the way that they've been treated. They're just very nice ordinary human beings, who are being destroyed on the basis of some concept of "culture". It's enough to make a cat laugh, that people like George W Bush consider America more cultured than this civilisation which goes all the way back to Babylon. I looked at their public health records, and found some things in them which nobody would have thought of inventing. For example, if you look at the number of cases of childhood leukemia by age cohort, in any place where there is no change in leukemogenic stress -- radiation or chemicals -- you would expect to find the peak in the 0-4 age group. There are various theories about why this is, but this is what you find. In Iraq, in 1998-99, the peak in childhood leukemia was in the 5-9 age group -- the group that was born immediately after the war. I think that's a real result. And since then I've seen various papers sent me by people in Iraq showing that the increases in leukemia and other malformations are quite general, and point to contamination by some radiological agent. I've got the results by district, and you can correlate the increases in leukemia in children with the districts where they used DU. The next day we travelled down south to the desert near Basra, where "The Mother of All Battles" was fought. All the dead tanks were still lying there. We found a lot of contamination. I'd already measured the levels of alpha emitters in the air in Baghdad. I found that there was a 20-fold increase in alpha activity in the air in the desert round the Desert Storm area. In Basra itself, it was already 10 times higher than it was in Baghdad. For me, taken together, the cancer registry information and the radioactivity readings constitute strong prima facie evidence that these illnesses and deaths were being caused by depleted uranium. The military know perfectly well that DU has all these effects, but they want to use it because it wins them the battles. It's actually destroyed tank warfare. Tanks are of no use any more, because they can come down with an A10 with a Gatling gun, fire these cheap bits of nuclear waste, and just wipe them out. I've seen a picture where they've put a bullet through one tank and it's gone out the other side and destroyed the tank behind it as well. This is just a piece of DU, which the nuclear industry should be paying them to take away! Professor Doug Rockie says that the corpses they discover after these tanks have caught fire are called "krispie critters" -- they're like little bits of charcoal, but highly radioactive. Anyone who handles them gets the disease. It's awful. Most countries, even countries that don't have nuclear weapons, could create weapons of mass destruction. It's a catch-all phrase. Certainly the Iraqis had a nuclear programme, and they have nuclear physicists, who I met, who know all about how to make nuclear bombs. If it comes to that, I could make a nuclear bomb, given the parts. I think it's possible that Saddam Hussein has got enriched uranium from somewhere. But I can't imagine that he would use it. And to be honest, I can't imagine that terrorists would use it either. Because I think if they were going to, they would have done so by now. Nor do I think that Saddam has got any more weapons of mass destruction than he had at the time of the last Iraq war, and he probably has a lot less. The Israelis, on the other hand, have certainly got WMD, they admit to it, and so have the South Africans, and the Koreans, and the Indians and the Pakistanis, and Uncle Tom Cobbly and all... So what the hell are we doing, going to war with the Iraqis, for no good reason? The Green Party isn't just about environmental justice. You cannot have environmental justice without social justice. And we don't have social justice. So we should support people because we believe that it is right to do so under the circumstances. Morally right. And it's morally right to oppose the imperialism of the Americans, their attempt to spread the American dream all over the planet, and all the craziness that comes with that. Just as it is right to oppose the way in which the Israelis are behaving against the Palestinians. We must always support those people who are fighting for freedom and their own rights. For more information on his research, see: www.llrc.org www.greenaudit.org Buying up the world New Labour, new empire?
