February 28, 2006 7:33 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.

‘To my mind, it’s a human rights issue.’

Iconoclast Interview With Chris Busby

ICONOCLAST: What impact do you think the report will have on the United States?

BUSBY: I think the most important thing is that it makes clear that the use of depleted uranium involves indiscriminate effects on civilians. And so it takes it away from being the weapon of legitimate use in a military situation and puts it in the same category as weapons like nerve gas that affect large populations. So that, to my mind, would make it illegal under the considerations of the Geneva Convention.

ICONOCLAST: The London Times did an article last Sunday and the Ministry of Defense said that it is unfeasible that depleted uranium could have traveled so far.

BUSBY: 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 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. The American NOAH website has a computer program that enables you to model the origin of air masses that coordinate on the globe and we use the NOAH system to back track material that was in the Aldermaston field over the period and a lot of that material did come from Iraq according to the calculations of this computer program.

ICONOCLAST: Is monitoring still going on on a frequent basis and are you following the models?

BUSBY: Uranium is still being measured.

ICONOCLAST: How are the people of London taking this news?

BUSBY: There are a lot of different responses to our paper, from the Ministry of Defense and from the Royal Society and from the Environment Agency who are the people who deal with this in our country. They all seem to be different responses. None of them seem to be very sensible. The Environment Agency at one point said they thought it was somebody digging the road up. The Royal Society said that it might be from Iraq but actually it’s probably natural uranium from a sandstorm. The Ministy of Defense is just saying it’s unfeasible for it to come all that distance.

So really it’s kind of knee-jerk denial, for, because as far as the MoD is concerned, it makes quite a big difference to the ethical basis of their use of uranium as a weapon.

ICONOCLAST: If they say it’s from other local environmental sources, such as a p ower station, wouldln’t that have alerted authorities to be on the lookout.

BUSBY: The problem with the argument about the power station is that we’ve looked at the data from 2000 to 2004, and there’s data every two weeks. In that whole period from 2000 to 2004, there’s only one enormous increase in radiation, in uranium, and that’s during the time of the Iraq war. It would be quite extraordinary that the power station happened to produce these releases just at the same time as the war occurred, and, secondly, there aren’t many power stations. The nearest nuclear power station is at Sellafield and the wind was blowing north at the time. It was blowing from the south so anything that would have come out of there would have gone north. It wouldn’t have gone to Reading which is about 600 miles southeast of the power station.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think the result of this report will be. Do you think it will get people’s attention?

BUSBY: I think it will have tremendous impact. At the moment, what happens is that they’re just going to go off and think about it and try to bury it. There’s a legal case in this country at the moment relating to some activists who damaged a B-52 bomber that was carrying depleted uranium to Iraq. It’ll certainly be used in this court case. They’ll argue that the U.S. was using weapons of indiscriminate effect. I hesitate to say mass destruction, because it’s not quite in that category, but certainly it’s a very toxic substance that can cause genetic damage and congenital malformations and cancer. And even if it’s a very small risk of all of these things, and this is what they argue, if you are contaminating people in the United Kingdom, then you’re clearly contaminating people in Turkey and Greece and Italy and France — a hugh swathe of Southern Europe, and so the population that has been contaminated is extremely large. So you are likely to have had some effect.

And in any case, it’s a human rights issue. People don’t actually want to inhale uranium, strange as it may seem.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think that the health of a good number of Londoners has been effected by this?

BUSBY: Not just Londoners, it would be people over the whole of Southern Europe. And the answer is that I don’t know. We will certainly look, and the first place that we will be looking will be in infant mortality, congenital malformations.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think that there will be an uprising against DU?

BUSBY: There’s already an uprising against DU. Everybody thinks that DU should be an illegal weapon. 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.

I mean, after all, the military says, “Oh, we need this weapon because if enables us to win wars.” Well fair enough! But you might as well use nerve gas, or biological weapons. The same argument applies.

ICONOCLAST: Here in the United States, very few people are aware of what DU is. It doesn’t mean anything to them. So what do you think we need to do in the United States?

BUSBY: You people in the media need to make it more clear that the United States is the major user of this weapon and that it should be banned, because it’s a very serious, and what goes around comes around. You can be sure that if it has come to the United Kingdom, it’s certainly gone to America.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think your paper will open the eyes of many people in the government in Europe?

BUSBY: I think so. I think it will have a big impact. It might not have quite sunk into them yet, but over a period of time they will have to accept that this is the first clear evidence that this stuff is capable of traveling such large distances, and therefore it is capable of contaminating huge populations.

ICONOCLAST: Scientists have been saying that DU travels and that it is a global problem. Can they look at your study as being proof?

BUSBY: A lot of people have theorized that it travels long distances, because these particles are very small and they can be kept in the atmosphere, in motion and by electro-static effects and so on. There was always the fear that this was the case, and the military has argued that this was not true. I’ve been in Kosovo where I measured these particles, but this is the first really strong evidence that they can travel long distances, and irony is that the evidence has actually come deployed by the military themselves around the atomic weapons establishment.

To my mind, it’s a human rights issue. Originally, it was an issue relating to whether or not it should be used in Iraq and if the population of Iraq is being contaminated and possible the Gulf War veterans being contaminated, but now we are seeing that everybody is being contaminated. We are all Gulf War veterans.