| My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin
Joseph McAllister, was born in Battle Creek in 1895. He does not know that
his first grandchild is an international expert on depleted uranium. I
have worked in two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, and in 1991 I became
a whistleblower at the Livermore lab. Depleted uranium is very, very, very
nasty stuff:
Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of weapon of mass
destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal Code Title
50 Chapter 40 Section 2302.
DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements, Hague
and Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws and
U.S. military law.
Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity equivalent
of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10
times the amount released during atmospheric testing which was the
equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has permanently
contaminated the global atmosphere with radioactive pollution having a
half-life of 2.5 billion years.
The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars in Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since 1991, calling DU "conventional"
weapons when in fact they are nuclear weapons.
DU on the battlefield has three effects on living systems: it is a
heavy metal "chemical" poison, a "radioactive" poison and has a
"particulate" effect due to the very tiny size of the particles that are
0.1 microns and smaller.
The blueprint for DU weaponry is a 1943 Manhattan Project memo to Gen.
L. Groves that recommended development of radioactive materials as poison
gas weapons - dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets.
DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators, but even
more effective bioweapons since uranium has a strong chemical affinity for
phosphate structures concentrated in DNA.
DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war - it keeps giving and keeps
killing. There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it off because
it continues to decay into other radioactive isotopes in over 20 steps.
Terry Jemison at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs stated in
August 2004 that over 518,000 Gulf-era veterans (14-year period) are now
on medical disability, and that 7,039 were wounded on the battlefield in
that same period. Over 500,000 U.S. veterans are homeless.
In some studies of soldiers who had normal babies before the war, 67
percent of the post-war babies are born with severe birth defects -
missing brains, eyes, organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.
In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times higher levels of
gamma radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive body burden
daily of inhabitants. In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are
uninhabitable.
Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One
gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000
alpha particles per second.
Before my grandfather died, he told me that his generation had made a
mess of this planet. I wonder what he would say to me now I would tell him
to see "Beyond Treason" (www.beyondtreason.com), a new documentary about the
history of treason by the U.S. government against our own troops: Atomic
veterans, MK-Ultra, Agent Orange and DU. After Vietnam, Henry Kissinger
said, "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in
foreign policy. . ." (from Chapter 5 in the "Final Days" by Woodward and
Bernstein).
Leuren Moret is an international radiation specialist, with a B.S.
degree in geology from University of California at Davis, a M.A. degree in
Near Eastern studies from University of California at Berkeley and has
done post-graduate work in the geosciences at UC-Davis. She is
environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley, Calif.
© 2005 Battle Creek
Enquirer |
