Eideard

The armed forces minister has been forced to apologise over misleading statements he made regarding the legality and dangers of depleted uranium weapons…

Nick Harvey admitted that he had inadvertently misled MPs about a Ministry of Defence review that he said had concluded the weapons were permissible on humanitarian and environmental grounds under the Geneva conventions.

It subsequently emerged that the review had never happened, and Harvey has apologised for the error, which he said had been made “in good faith”. He has ordered that a review into the weapons’ legality be carried out by civil servants. The department is facing calls for the weapons to be suspended until it is completed.

The revelations come as a cross-party campaign is launched to pile pressure on the MoD to phase out the use of depleted uranium (DU). The tank shells that depend on it have to be renewed in 2013.

DU is a chemically toxic and radioactive heavy metal produced as waste by the nuclear power industry that is included in weapons because it is an extremely hard material capable of piercing armour. Once the frontline has moved on, however, it can contaminate the environment, and has been linked to health problems in civilian populations.

Uranium is a pyrophoric metal – which simply means if sufficient heat is generated to provide ignition, it will burn to completion leaving nothing behind but radioactive dust. Blowing in the wind.

In 1998 the UK government ratified additional protocol 1 of the Geneva conventions. Article 36 of that requires that all weapons are subject to a legal review to assess whether they are “capable of being used discriminately”, or cause “widespread and severe damage to the natural environment”…

Labour MP Katy Clark accused the MoD of misleading the public, and demanded a public apology. “Compliance with the Geneva conventions has been used to reassure people on the legality of DU weapons, however no review has taken place to ensure that the munitions used by UK armed forces meet the conventions’ criteria,” she said. “I am pleased that the government has stated that a review will now take place and believe it should use this opportunity to carry out a detailed study into the long term impact of DU use.”

Clark is one of the sponsors of an early day motion in the House of Commons calling on ministers to stop using DU weapons before Charm3 expires in 2013. The motion is backed by other Labour, Liberal and nationalist MPs, as well as the Conservative MPs Peter Bottomley and Zac Goldsmith.

The military predictably will try to justify every weapon that ever existed in the demented mind of any general. They are the stock in trade of Death and Destruction and care for the environment or [perish the thought] combatants or civilians doesn’t really enter the equation. Politically, yes. In reality – hardly.

More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels of radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found.

Areas in and near Iraq’s largest towns and cities, including Najaf, Basra and Falluja, account for around 25% of the contaminated sites, which appear to coincide with communities that have seen increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years. The joint study by the environment, health and science ministries found that scrap metal yards in and around Baghdad and Basra contain high levels of ionising radiation, which is thought to be a legacy of depleted uranium used in munitions during the first Gulf war and since the 2003 invasion.

The environment minister, Narmin Othman, said high levels of dioxins on agricultural lands in southern Iraq, in particular, were increasingly thought to be a key factor in a general decline in the health of people living in the poorest parts of the country…

“We have been regulating and monitoring this and we have been urgently trying to assemble a database. We have had co-operation from the United Nations environment programme and have given our reports in Geneva. We have studied 500 sites for chemicals and depleted uranium. Until now we have found 42 places that have been declared as [high risk] both from uranium and toxins…”

Scrap sites remain a prime concern. Wastelands of rusting cars and war damage dot Baghdad and other cities between the capital and Basra, offering unchecked access to both children and scavengers.

The United States continues to leave an unmatched heritage through the lands we “liberate”. From Agent Orange and landmines in VietNam and Cambodia – depleted uranium rounds in the Middle East – we continue to kill and maim generations well beyond the context of battlefields.

“Chemical Rummie”
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Doctors in Iraq’s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja’s over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems – are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

A group of Iraqi and British officials…have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war – including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted…

Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.

Falluja was the scene of the only two setpiece battles that followed the US-led invasion. Twice in 2004, US marines and infantry units were engaged in heavy fighting with Sunni militia groups who had aligned with former Ba’athists and Iraqi army elements.

The first battle was fought to find those responsible for the deaths of four Blackwater private security contractors working for the US. The city was bombarded heavily by American artillery and fighter jets. Controversial weaponry was used, including white phosphorus, which the US government admitted deploying.

Having supported efforts to prevent testing of depleted uranium projectiles here in New Mexico, knowing something of the residue from radioactive pyrophoric metals, I’m not surprised by any of this.

Presumably, most of you won’t be surprised by the protestations of innocence and patriotic rationales that will flow from the Pentagon, politicians and other pimps of our military-industrial complex. Those who authorized most of this, those who continue to do so, will not relent until we stop them, folks.

Three Chinese men have been spared jail after they smuggled a ball of depleted uranium into the country, ignorant the 274-kg shiny lump was a health threat, local media reported. The three scrap merchants bought the ball of low-radiation uranium metal in Kyrgyzstan last year, haggling a dealer down to a price of $2,000.

They smuggled it into China, evading customs checks but apparently ignorant the interesting metal could be dangerous. One of them hid it in his father-in-law’s home in Xinjiang.

“They were surprised that at night when the lights went out the treasure sparkled and glittered, and Wang chipped a piece from it and kept it beside his bed, sometimes playing with it,” the report said of one of the men…

Determined to make a dollar from their find, the men decided to have the ball priced by an expert and Wang took a piece thousands of kilometers to Beijing. “To prevent the sample being lost or stolen on the way, Wang used tape to stick the unidentified treasure to his body, and it never left him day and night,” the report said.

After an expert identified the substance as degraded uranium, the men were arrested on suspicion of smuggling. A prosecutor decided not to charge the men, accepting their argument that they did not know what they had smuggled.

The report said they haven’t come down ill – yet. I imagine it’s likely they will.

I’d love to see the trail back to where the DU originated?