(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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David Rose on Gulf War syndrome [1]
['Condé Nast', 'David Rose']
Date: 2007-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
The papers Rokke wrote describing his findings are more sobering. He recorded levels of contamination that were 15 times the army’s permissible levels in tanks hit by D.U., and up to 4.5 times such levels in clothing exposed to D.U.
The good news was that it was possible, using a special Department of Energy vacuum cleaner designed for sucking up radioactive waste, to reduce contamination from vehicles and equipment to near official limits, and to “mask” the intense radiation around holes left by D.U. projectiles by sealing them with layers of foam caulking, paint, or cardboard. (Such work, Rokke wrote, would naturally have to be carried out by teams in full radiological-protection suits and respirators.)
When it came to clothes, however, D.U. particles “became imbedded in the clothing and could not be removed with brushing or other abrasive methods.” Rokke found that even after he tried to decontaminate them the clothes were still registering between two and three times the limit. “This may pose a significant logistics impact,” Rokke wrote, with some understatement.
The elaborate procedures required to decontaminate equipment, meanwhile, would be almost impossible to implement in combat. “On a real battlefield, it’s not like there’s any control,” Rokke says. “It’s chaos. Maybe it’s night. Who’s going to come along and isolate contaminated enemy tanks? You’ve got a pile of rubble and mess and you’re still coming under fire. The idea that you’re going to come out in radiological suits and vacuum up a building or a smashed T-72 [tank]-it’s ridiculous.”
Large amounts of black D.U.-oxide dust were readily visible within 50 meters of a tank hit by penetrators and within 100 meters of the D.U.-packed Bradley that was set on fire. But less obvious amounts were easily detected at much greater distances. Worse, such dust could be “re-suspended” in the atmosphere “upon contact, if wind blew, or during movement.” For American troops, that meant that “respiratory and skin protection is warranted during all phases of recovery.” For civilians, even ones at considerable distances, it meant they might be exposed to windblown D.U. far into the future.
After Rokke completed the project, he was appointed head of the lab at Fort McClellan where it had been based. He resigned the staff physicist post he’d held for 19 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and moved south with his family. Early in 1996, after he began to voice the conclusions he was drawing about the future viability of D.U. weapons, he was fired. “Then I remembered the Los Alamos memo,” he says. “They’d wanted ‘proponency’ for D.U. weapons, and I was giving them the opposite.” I ask Dr. Kilpatrick, the D.O.D. spokesman on D.U., about Rokke’s test firings. His reply: “One, he never did that. He was in Nevada as an observer. He was not part of that program at all. At that time he was working in education at an army school, and his assignment was to develop educational materials for troops.” Rokke, he says, may have spent a few days observing the tests but did not organize them.
Documents from Rokke’s service record tell a different story. His appraisal from December 1, 1995, written by Dr. Ed Battle, then chief of the radiation laboratories at Fort McClellan, describes Rokke’s mission as follows: to “plan, coordinate, supervise and implement the U.S. Army … depleted uranium training development project.” He continued: “Captain Rokke has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to function well above his current rank and is as effective as any I have known.” He had directly participated in “extremely crucial tests at the Nevada Atomic Test Site,” and his achievements had been “absolutely phenomenal.”
Rokke was awarded two medals for his work. The citation for one commended him for “meritorious service while assigned as the depleted uranium project leader. Your outstanding achievements have prepared our soldiers for hazards and will have a vast payoff in the health, safety, and protection of all soldiers.”
Rokke’s work in Nevada helped persuade the military that D.U. weapons had to be dealt with carefully. On September 16, 2002, General Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army chief of staff, signed Army Regulation 700-48, which sets forth strict rules for handling items, including destroyed or disabled enemy targets, that have been hit and contaminated by D.U. “During peacetime or as soon as operational risk permits,” it states, local commanders must “identify, segregate, isolate, secure, and label all RCE [radiologically contaminated equipment]. Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be implemented as soon as possible.” Under pre-existing regulations, damaged vehicles should be moved to a collection point or maintenance facility, and “covered and wrapped with canvas or plastic tarp to prevent spread of contaminants,” with loose items placed in double plastic bags. Soldiers who carry out such tasks should wear protective equipment.
The burned-out tanks behind the 442nd’s barracks in Samawah may not have been the only D.U.-contaminated pieces of equipment to be left where they lay. In the fall of 2003, Tedd Weyman, a colleague of Dr. Durakovic’s, spent 16 days in Iraq, taking samples and observing the response of coalition forces to General Shinseki’s directive. “When tanks shot up by D.U. munitions were removed, I saw no precautions being taken at all,” he says. “Ordinary soldiers with no protection just came along and used chains to load them onto flatbeds, towing them away just as they might your car if it broke down on the highway. They took them to bases with British and American troops and left them in the open.” Time after time, Weyman recorded high levels of contamination-so high that on his return to Canada he was found to have 4.5 times the normal level of uranium in his own urine.
A Pentagon memo, signed on May 30, 2003, by Dr. William Winkenwerder, an assistant defense secretary, says that any American personnel “who were in, on, or near combat vehicles at the time they were struck by D.U. rounds,” or who entered such vehicles or fought fires involving D.U. munitions, should be assessed for possible exposure and receive appropriate health care. This category could be said to include any soldier who fought in, or cleaned up after, battles with Iraqi armor.
Still, the Pentagon insists that the risks remain acceptably small. “There isn’t any recognized disease from exposure to natural or depleted uranium,” Dr. Kilpatrick says. He tells me that America will mount a thorough cleanup in Iraq, disposing of any D.U. fragments and burying damaged vehicles in unpopulated locations, but that, for the time being, such an operation is impossible. “We really can’t begin any environmental assessment or cleanup while there’s ongoing combat.” Nevertheless, he says, there’s no cause for concern. “I think we can be very confident that what is in the environment does not create a hazard for those living in the environment and working in it.”
As this article was going to press, the Pentagon published the findings of a new study that, according to Dr. Kilpatrick, shows D.U. to be a “lethal but safe weapons system.”
In his Pentagon briefing in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick said that even if D.U. weapons did generate toxic dust, it would not spread. “It falls to the ground very quickly-usually within about a 50-meter range,” he said. “It’s heavy. It’s 1.7 times as heavy as lead. So even if it’s a small dust particle … it stays on the ground.” Evidence that this is not the case comes from somewhere much closer than Iraq-an abandoned D.U.-weapons factory in Colonie, New York, a few miles from Albany, the state capital.
In 1958, a corporation called National Lead began making depleted-uranium products at a plant on Central Avenue, surrounded by houses and an Amtrak line. In 1979, just as the plant was increasing its production of D.U. ammunition to meet a new Pentagon contract, a whistle-blower from inside the plant told the county health department that N.L. was releasing large amounts of D.U. oxide into the environment.
Over the next two years, he and other workers testified before both the New York State Assembly and a local residents’ campaign group. They painted a picture of reckless neglect. D.U. chips and shavings were simply incinerated, and the resulting oxide dust passed into the atmosphere through the chimneys. “I used to do a lot of burning,” William Luther told the governor’s task force in 1982. “They told me to do it at night so the black smoke wouldn’t be seen.” Later, many of the workers were found to have inhaled huge doses into their lungs, and some developed cancers and other illnesses at relatively young ages.
In January 1980 the state forced N.L. to agree to limit its radioactive emissions to 500 microcuries per year. The following month, the state shut the plant down. In January alone, the D.U.-chip burner had released 2,000 microcuries. An official environmental survey produced horrifying results. Soil in the gardens of homes near the plant was emitting radiation at up to 300 times the normal background level for upstate New York. Inside the 11-acre factory site, readings were up to five times higher.
The federal government has been spending tax dollars to clean up the Colonie site for the past 19 years, under a program called fusrap—the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Today, all that is left of the Colonie plant are enormous piles of earth, constantly moistened with hoses and secured by giant tarpaulins to prevent dispersal, and a few deep pits. In its autumn 2004 bulletin to residents, the fusrap team disclosed that it had so far removed 125,242 tons of contaminated soil from the area, all of which have been buried at radioactive-waste sites in Utah and Idaho. In some places, the excavations are more than 10 feet deep. fusrap had also discovered contamination in the neighboring Patroon Creek, where children used to play, and in the reservoir it feeds, and had treated 23.5 million gallons of contaminated water. The cost so far has been about $155 million, and the earliest forecast for the work’s completion is 2008.
Years before fusrap began to dig, there were data to suggest that D.U. particles-and those emitted at Colonie are approximately the same size as those produced by weapons-can travel much farther than 50 meters. In 1979, nuclear physicist Len Dietz was working at a lab operated by General Electric in Schenectady, 10 miles west of Colonie. “We had air filters all around our perimeter fence,” he recalls. “One day our radiological manager told me we had a problem: one of the filters was showing abnormally high alpha radiation. Much to our surprise, we found D.U. in it. There could only be one source: the N.L. plant.” Dietz had other filters checked both in Schenectady and at other G.E. sites. The three that were farthest away were in West Milton, 26 miles northwest, and upwind, of Colonie. All the filters contained pure Colonie D.U. “Effectively,” says Dietz, “the particles’ range is unlimited.”
In August 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a short report on Colonie. On the one hand, it declared that the pollution produced when the plant was operating could have increased the risks of kidney disease and lung cancer. Because the source of the danger had shut down, however, there was now “no apparent public health hazard.” Thus there was no need to conduct a full epidemiological study of those who had lived near and worked at the factory-the one way to produce hard scientific data on what the health consequences of measurable D.U. contamination actually are.
The people of Colonie have been trying to collect health data of their own. Sharon Herr, 45, lived near the plant for nine years. She used to work 60 hours a week at two jobs-as a clerk in the state government and as a real-estate agent. Now she too is sick, and suffers symptoms which sound like a textbook case of Gulf War syndrome: “Fourteen years ago, I lost my grip to the point where I can’t turn keys. I’m stiff, with bad joint and muscle pain, which has got progressively worse. I can’t go upstairs without getting out of breath. I get fatigue so intense there are days I just can’t do much. And I fall down-I’ll be out walking and suddenly I fall.” Together with her friend Anne Rabe, 49, a campaigner against N.L. since the 1980s, she has sent questionnaires to as many of the people who lived on the streets close to the plant as possible. So far, they have almost 400 replies.
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