U.S. USED RADIOACTIVE ARMS IN GULF WAR

First use of depleted uranium on battlefield suspected in ills of U.S. troops.

Depleted uranium, a highly toxic and radioactive material, is being blamed for extending the legacy of disease and death of the 1991 Gulf War, the first time the substance was used on the battlefield.

Operation Desert Storm carried tons of depleted uranium into the Iraqi desert, according to U.S. weapons experts. The residue from those attacks, says a controversial German epidemiologist, is causing an outbreak of radiation sickness and death among Iraqi children.

In addition to the hundreds of Iraqi children dying each week from malnutrition and other maladies related to the international economic blockade against Iraq, a disturbingly high number are experiencing apparent kidney and liver failure that leads to huge, swollen abdomens, according to Dr. Siegwart Horst Gunther.

Gunther believes the symptoms surfacing in Iraqi children can be pegged to the allies' use of depleted uranium during the bombing. According to interviews with Iraqi medical personnel conducted during a May visit to Iraq and extensive telephone interviews in the United States, a picture emerges of a growing debate over the effect of this sinister new player in the battlefield arena.

While the U.S. military and some independent experts dispute the long- term effects and severity of DU -- depleted uranium -- a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the substance was used in war for the first time by U.S. forces in the Gulf War.

Most of the couriers of the depleted-uranium ammunition -- U.S., British and possibly Saudi soldiers -- did not know what they were delivering or that it could have lingering effects.

Depleted uranium is the radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process used to produce nuclear fuel for power plants. When used on the battlefield, DU is released as a very fine particulate after exploding.

The Concord, Mass., group Citizen's Research and Environmental Watch stated in a 1994 publication, "The most serious threats to health from particulate DU are through inhalation and ingestion."

"Gulf War Disease"?

Gulf War veterans have been grappling for four and a half years with the postwar onslaught of an array of mysterious symptoms, including memory loss, headaches, low blood pressure, fever, blurred vision and a high rate of birth defects among newborns.

In a recent government study of 10,000 Gulf War veterans, investigators found no clinical evidence of any kind of the mysterious "Gulf War Disease." According to printed reports, Dr. Stephen Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said the yearlong investigation showed that the symptoms from which Persian Gulf War veterans are suffering almost invariably involve multiple diseases that do not stem from any one cause. The study was immediately denounced by veterans groups, some of which have suggested that the Pentagon may be trying to cover up evidence of a mystery disease.

In its "Persian Gulf Registry Report," the Veterans of Foreign Wars reported that veterans who responded to a survey reported exposure to toxins in the following order:

smoke from oil well fires(82 percent), parasites endemic to the region (46 percent), chemical/biological warfare agents (35 percent) and depleted uranium (23 percent).

However, a Government Accounting Office report makes it clear that most veterans did not know they had been exposed to or were handling DU weapons.

With the supply of medicine, medical equipment and spare parts choked to a trickle under the blockade, Iraqi physicians are unable to conclusively diagnose or treat the symptoms in children. The children die, usually from secondary infections that result when their immune systems shut down, according to the physicians.

Iraqi Health Ministry officials say their records show that aplastic anemia and leukemia among children have risen dramatically over the past four and a half years; liver and kidney disease are now ranked as the fourth and fifth causes of death among children over the age of 5. The number of congenital birth defects is almost 28 percent, up from 8 percent before the war, and late-term miscarriages are also spiraling upward.

It is impossible to verify the statistics, and ministry officials claim that the figures are actually low because most women no longer give birth in hospitals or are able to take their children there for treatment.

Skeptical of claims

Weapons consultant William Arkin, a columnist for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and who visited Iraq in February 1993, is one of the skeptics. He said he was unable to document widespread DU contamination on the former battlefields. "But one of the things I did find," said Arkin in a telephone interview, "was that if DU was causing any kind of identifiable cancers, the Iraqi health authorities don't have the diagnostic equipment to detect it. So there's a bit of contradiction.

On the one hand, they're shedding crocodile tears about how terrible the state of their medical services are. And on the other, they're saying they're detecting minute amounts of . . . cancers."

DU is just one of the ingredients in what Arkin calls the "toxic soup" that soldiers are believed to have been exposed to during the war. He said he now believes DU is a less significant factor in Gulf War syndrome than initial theories indicated. He said urine tests of U. S. troops showed no traces of DU unless the soldiers were actually hit by DU shrapnel.

However, New York physicist Leonard Dietz, a 25-year veteran in the field of radiation and a specialist on DU, said because of the way it deflects, uranium is very difficult to detect in the field using standard instruments. Dietz said only in a highly controlled laboratory environment can a scientist accurately determine the amount of uranium on a given surface.

Dietz, formerly a scientist for General Electric at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., said that during the war it would have been extremely difficult to prevent anyone within miles of the shelling from breathing DU oxide particles. "You'd have to use extremely fine filters," he said, "so fine you'd have difficulty breathing through them, thick and very uncomfortable.

Clothes, vehicles, ground, air, everything is contaminated with this uranium dust."

Gunther, an epidemiologist and specialist in infectious disease who has studied these illnesses in Iraq since 1991, believes the children are dying from contamination by depleted uranium. Gunther literally stumbled upon his theory in 1991, when he found several spent DU shells as he strolled in the desert during a road trip from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, Iraq. He took one home with him to Germany and didn't think much more of it until later that year when, on another visit to Iraq, he observed a high rate of illness and death among children in the southern part of the country, many of whom had collected shells similar to the one he had found.

Parallel symptoms

Gunther, who heads the International Yellow Cross, a relief agency headquartered in Vienna, points out that previously unknown symptoms and illnesses have appeared in Iraq since the Gulf War, primarily in areas that were heavily bombed. The symptoms parallel conditions surfacing in U.S. Gulf War veterans and their children conceived since the war.

"I am very concerned about this," Gunther said after a trip to Iraq last spring. "These Iraqi children have abnormal abdominal distention that may be related to disturbed kidney or liver function. But we have no way of knowing because there is no way to examine them thoroughly.

These children usually die within three months. Because of the impossibility of treatment, they die of secondary infections."

Gunther has written extensively on the issue for scientific and medical journals, but there has been limited coverage in the general media. His claims have drawn criticism from some quarters, and in 1991, after he brought a depleted-uranium shell to Germany for testing, he was jailed for refusing to pay a fine of 3,000 deutsche marks for exposing the public to radioactive material.

Gunther has traveled to Iraq several times each year since the end of the Gulf War and this year accompanied two television film crews, one from Germany and a second, in June, from Japan.

Cheap and effective With a half-life of 704 million years, DU's radioactive properties are about half that of natural uranium, and its toxicity is similar to lead, which is considered highly toxic. Its potency makes DU subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety and environmental regulations.

DU is cheap, readily available and so dense it can pierce steel -- all factors that make it an extremely attractive weapon for the U. S. military, which uses it as a solid encased in a munitions shell and sandwiched between pieces of armor plate in tanks.

Weapons consultant Arkin estimated in May 1993 that the allied forces had fired 300 tons of DU in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf War from tanks and aircraft.

Other estimates put the total at closer to 800 tons.

According to a publication of the Progressive Alliance for Community Empowerment and the Military Toxics Project, an Army fact sheet states that when DU munitions hit a target surface, "a large portion of the kinetic energy is dissipated as heat. This results in smoke that contains a high concentration of DU particles. These uranium particles can be inhaled or ingested and are toxic."

As stated in the Citizen's Research and Environmental Watch 1994 publication, "According to pioneering radiation biomedical researcher Dr. J.W. Gofman, particles of uranium smaller than 5 microns in diameter can be permanently trapped in the lungs. Once trapped, a single particle of this size can expose the surrounding lung tissue to 1,360 rem per year . . . . This is 800 times the annual radiation dosage permitted by federal regulations for external whole body exposure. . . . Particles not trapped in the respiratory system may be ingested and find their way into the kidneys and reproductive organs." (A rem, short for roentgen equivalent in man, is a unit for measuring absorbed doses of radiation. )

Damacio Lopez is a Vietnam War veteran and coauthor of Uranium Battlefields Home and Abroad:

Depleted Uranium Use by the U.S. Department of Defense. He is also a founding member of the National Depleted Uranium Citizens' Network. Lopez said those exposed to DU during the Gulf War are now in the "ingestion phase," in which DU makes its way into the bloodstream and is deposited in organs, such as kidneys and liver and in bone.

"As time goes by," said Lopez, "DU will become more apparent, particularly with the possibility of lung cancers developing in Gulf War veterans who inhaled a significant amount of DU oxide particles." Such cancers, Lopez points out, would develop 15 to 20 years after ingestion.

Like Lopez, Gunther also predicts dire things to come: "In the relative short term," he said in a recent telephone interview, "DU produces disturbances in the kidney and liver functions such as those we're now seeing. But then you also have indirect long-term genetic effects, which include congenital malformation very similar to those now being detected in babies born to American Gulf War veterans."

The number of allied soldiers exposed to the substance probably will never be known. The army acknowledges that 29 of its combat vehicles were contaminated after being hit by "friendly fire" rounds of DU, when ammunition containing DU was accidentally ignited during tank fires or when the vehicles were struck by Hellfire missiles fired from U.S. helicopters.

Army unprepared

In a January 1993 report by the General Accounting Office, titled "Operation Desert Storm: Army Not Adequately Prepared to Deal with Depleted Uranium Contamination," army personnel say they didn't know they were dealing with depleted uranium. According to the report, a maintenance sergeant with the army's 24th Infantry Division-Mechanized, who was in charge of recovering three Bradley tanks hit by Abrams tanks firing DU,told GAO investigators his personnel unloaded all the ammunition and stripped the tanks of usable parts and highly sensitive equipment with no knowledge of the potential for DU contamination. DU risks and necessary precautions had not been part of his training or included in guidance provided to him. He said he had not been provided at the time of the incident, or since then, a medical evaluation for radiation exposure.

Another maintenance sergeant who helped repair one of the vehicles said he didn't know it had been contaminated and was unaware that the Abrams tank fire contained DU. The GAO investigators reported: "This maintenance sergeant told us after the vehicle was repaired, he had stayed in it, along with other personnel, for several days until the ground war was over. He said he had never been told that he might have been exposed to DU, nor had he been provided a medical evaluation for radiation exposure."

According to Lopez, magnesium is added to DU to make it burn faster. Because magnesium occurs naturally in humans, he said, the body won' t reject it, permitting it to move freely and to cross organs such as the placenta, which could explain increases in reported miscarriages and birth defects in the offspring of exposed veterans.

Dietz, the physicist, says that "the military knows very well that no protection can be given to troops in the field when you have a huge amount of this stuff being fired.

Therefore, they're not going to bother. Why? Because it won't kill the soldiers immediately. But it is going to have a long-term effect."

Furthermore, Dietz said, if a child happened to find a spent DU shell weighing, for example, two-thirds of a pound and held the shell close to his body for one hour, he would receive the equivalent of 50 chest x-rays. "Now if a child has several of these and brings them home and puts them on a shelf, everybody in the room is getting irradiated at a low level."

Lopez, too, decries any effort to down-play the significance of the use of DU, which he sees not as a receding issue but an emerging one that will affect the long-term health of Gulf War veterans as well as the course of future conflicts. Lopez points to the proliferation of DU weapons as cheap conventional arms available to U.S. customers around the world.

The U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute reported to Congress in June 1994 that, among others, Britain, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Thailand, Israel and France have developed or are developing DU-containing weapons systems. Arkin says any country that has DU weapons already probably got them from the United States.

Earlier this year, President Clinton approved the sale of DU-enhanced weapons to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Gunther, meanwhile, believes rain has carried DU particles into the ground water in Iraq and possibly in Kuwait, and that it is likely that DU has infiltrated the food chain. He cites the bizarre 1993 lambing season in Iraq, in which an estimated 10 percent of new lambs were unable to walk or had distorted faces and mouths.

"We must investigate all of this," he said, "because this is affecting the children. They don't know if they are Iraqi or American, Muslim or Christian. They're just children."

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Ammunition said to be the radioactive type used by allied forces during the Gulf War is held by German epidemiologist Siegwart Horst Gunther.

Gunther said he learned the items were radioactive only after the photo was taken.

Francisco Lopez Reuda