February 28, 2006 7:26 PM

HAVE DU WILL TRAVEL

Dr. Chris Busby, who obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of London, has served as the scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and director of the environmental consultancy Green Audit.

DU Radiation Travels, Says UK Scientist

LONDON — A new study conducted by Dr. Chris Busby, Ph.D. and Saoirse Morgan has revealed that radiation detectors in Great Britain recorded spikes in radiation in the days immediately following the “shock and awe’ bombing campaign in Iraq in March 2003, when in the first 24 hours more than 1,500 bombs and missles were launched.

The “occasional paper” produced by Busby is entitled: “Did the use of Uranium weapons in Gulf War 2 result in contamination of Europe? Evidence from the measurements of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), Aldermaston, Berkshire, UK.”

Busby, who obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of London, has served as the scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and director of the environmental consultancy Green Audit.

Busby contends that depleted uranium from munitions used in the opening days of the Iraq war was carried by wind currents to the UK, and bases his findings on figures that were obtained from the British government through freedom of information inquiries.

In his paper, Busby writes:

“The use of battlefield uranium weapons has been classed by some as weapons of indiscriminate effect; as such they would be implicitly illegal under various conventions of war.

“Those who defend or justify their use do so by arguing that the uranium is localized at the point of impact or nearby and that exposure of large populations does not occur.

“The history of disclosures of the data in this case supports the idea that AWE were aware that their filters provided evidence of the long range movement of uranium. They were first reluctant to release any data; it required a Freedom of Information Act request to force them to release the results of the monitoring. But significantly they did not send initially the block of data relating to the Gulf War period, and a second request was necessary. The long wait between this second request, and the appearance of the data, and the fact that the missing data came from a different organization, the Defence Procurement Agency in Briston, suggests that there was significiant attention being paid to the interpretation of the results, and decisions had to be made about what the data would show and its political implications for the military.”

Busby continued, “Despite many pieces of evidence that the uranium aerosols are long lived in the environment and are able to travel considerable distances, this is the first evidence as far as we know, that they are able to travel thousands of miles.

“The distance traveled from Baghdad to Reading following the wind patterns implicit in the pressure systems at the time is between 1,700 mmiles and 2,400 miles. Although this transport may be hard to believe at first, the regular desert sand events which occur in the UK should teach us that the planet is not such a large affair, and that with regard to ceretain long lived atmospheric pollutants, no man is an island.

“This was a lesson first shown graphically and alarmingly by the atmospheric nuclear tests of the 1960s and the subsequent Strontium-90 mimlk, and more recently by the Chernobyl accident. However, like the atmospheric tests, the use of battlefield uranium weapons, especially the new bunker busting bombs which are alleged to have more than one ton of uranium in the warhead, are events which are controlled by man; they are not accidents.

“The results of the AWE filters should teach us that the consequences are not restricted to the areas where they are used. Indeed, on the basis of the results reported here, there would have been a significant exposure to the public in many countries.

“Uranium is a powerful genotoxic stressor. In view of the many reports of heritable genetic effects in areas where uranium has been used, and in the Gulf veterans, time series analysis of infant mortality and congenital malformation rates assuming exposures to the fetus or the pre-conception parents in mid-march 2003 in European databases might be worth carrying out.”

According to the paper, sampling was reported at several control sites, which revealed increased radiation activity as compared to traditional baseline readings.

Busby told The Iconoclast in an interview that there is “already an uprising against DU.”

“Everybody thinks that DU should be an illegal weapon,” he said. “Everybody. I don’t know anybody, except the military — who say that it’s a valuable weapon in tank warfare. I can’t think of anybody who thinks that the use of a radioactive weapon like that is justified under any circumstances,” he said.

“You might as well use nerve gas, or biological weapons. The same argument applies,” he added.

The UK Ministry of Defense, as noted in an article appearing in the Feb. 19 edition of The London Times, has taken exception to Busby’s theory that depleted uranium could have traveled so far, calling it “unfeasible.”

Other critics have said that other environmental sources could be responsible, including the charge that the spikes could have been caused by natural uranium in the massive amounts of soil kicked up by shock and awe, according to Brian Spratt of the British Royal Society, or from emissions from a local power station, noted the Times article.

Busby countered, telling The Iconoclast, “The point is that material from Chernobyl which is 1,800 miles to the east of Great Britain traveled to Great Britain and contaminated Wales, Scotland, and various parts of the United Kingdom. And they might as well have said that it was equally unfeasible for it to travel that distance in the opposite direction to the general flow of the wind, but we have examined computer models of wind directions over the period of the Gulf War and it’s quite clear the material from Iraq could have come through the United Kingdom because of the particular types of depressions and anticyclone systems that were there.”

He called the Ministry of Defense’s attack a “knee-jerk” denial.

“It makes quite a big difference to the ethical basis of their use of uranium as a weapon,” he added.