USA usage of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

A few days ago I heard a British scientist talking on New Zealand’s National Radio. He is here in NZ on a tour sponsored by some peace committee.

He was talking about the US forces in Iraq and their usage of a weapon of mass destruction. They used in the first Gulf War, and again in the second, spent uranium tipped shells, as anti tank weapons. Rather than put a dent on a tank these shells are so powerful they blow them apart and several dozen metres.

It is not the effect on he tank and the crew that is the immediate problem, but he says the after effects that is putting the Iraqi people and others at great risk.

The shells and everything that they blow up are highly radioactive. He said over the years scientists have tried to get theusage of them banned (I have seen this before on TV, including the then chief clean up guy for the fallout, who was dying himself rom radiation exposure).

This scientist says that the Iraqi countryside is literally littered with radiation zones around battle sites, and that the UN has done nothing to stop the usage because when they did their own enquiry, they measured the radiation levels wrong. He said the UN used Geiger counters, but apparently the type of nuclear fallout left does not register on a Geiger metre. He said you need something called a Scintillate Metre (sp?), and in an everyday setting this metre would measure about 2, but in the areas where these shells exploded in 1991, they get measurements of around 1600.

He was saying how he has worked in Chernobyl, Iraq and some other place where there was a leak (Romania perhaps) and this was the worst. He said farmers still use the land, kids play on the old tanks, etc, and because they cannot see, hear or smell radioactivity, they are totally unaware of what damage is being done.

This scientist also stated that the US and British forces fighting in iraq today are also at great risk because they have been camping and battling in radioactive areas, without ever realising it because their Geiger counters show nothing. He said in battle they have used tanks and trucks blown up in the first war as cover in the second, and are in fact being eradiated.

This man seemed a very sensible, learned scientist with a very, very important message. He wants the use of these weapons stopped. And lets face it, are they even that necessary over conventional weapons?

I think this raises a wider political and moral issue too. The fact that the USA (and perhaps Britain and others) have used WMD’s in a supposed crusade to stop a tyrant from using WMD’s he never had. What is with that?

Another point this scientist made was, there is nothing that can be done to treat th affected areas. They cannot go in, hose it down and say, it’s safe now. The weapons have ruined the area, the soil, everything, for good (or at least several million years).

I think there could be a very good case for treating the usage of these weapons as war crimes.How did they ever get sanctioned for use in the first place?

I’d like to hear what other people think. Sorry, I cannot recall the name of the man who was interviewed.