[French version: Loi du silence sur l’uranium appauvri ]
The World Health Organisation's report on depleted uranium (DU) has still not materialised; since being announced, it was postponed several times and only put back on the agenda because of pressure from international aid agencies working in Kosovo. When news of "Balkan syndrome" first broke, the WHO published in January this year a four-page "fact sheet" that claimed to deal with the subject (1). Designed to calm the storm and reassure the public, the information it contains is vague and often at odds with current scientific knowledge. If there is any radiation, the fact sheet claims, it is within acceptable levels: "From the science it appears unlikely that an increased leukaemia risk related to DU exposure would be detectable among military personnel in the Balkans."
How could the WHO, the world's highest authority in health matters, have produced such a document? It recommends as "reasonable", for example, such unlikely "clean-up operations" as collecting the thousands of billions of invisible radioactive particles scattered over hundreds of square kilometres and mixed with hundreds of thousands of tons of earth.
In fact, an agreement entered into with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1959 prevents the WHO from dealing with radiation and public health matters without the former's approval. Approval that is hardly ever given.
In the 1950s in the United States the Eisenhower administration made much of the civilian spin-offs from military research in order to justify the enormous sums being spent on the nuclear arsenal. In 1954 it started the Atoms for Peace programme, promising the public electricity that was not only "clean" but so abundant as to be "unmeterable".
At the time many members of the scientific community, with little or no involvement in military research, recalled the work that had earned Herman Joseph Muller a Nobel prize in 1946. He had discovered the terrifying mutagenic effects of ionising radiation. It was this very radiation that the power plants envisaged by Atoms for Peace were to introduce into the heart of the civilian population. Yet Dr John W Gofman, who led the team that isolated the first milligram of plutonium in 1942, continued to hammer home his point that "by any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose" (2). In spite of such warnings the US pressed for the formation in 1956 of the IAEA - a UN organisation whose remit is quite simply to promote the nuclear industry.
In 1957 the WHO organised an international conference on the effects of radiation on genetic mutation; its basic premises, derived from Muller's experiments, are found in the papers presented to the conference and subsequently published (3). But in 1959 the debate was closed. The WHO accepted the agreement with the IAEA according to which "whenever either organisation proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organisation has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement" (4). That "mutual agreement" stipulation was to allow the IAEA to block almost every WHO initiative concerning the relationship between radiation and public health.
That is why, when the WHO proposed publishing a fact sheet on depleted uranium, nothing came of it. The generic study, still awaited, was to be confined to chemical contamination from DU as a heavy metal. Only when DU hit the international headlines did the WHO announce that the study would be extended to radiation. The additional work would be done by experts from such bodies as the United Kingdom's National Radiological Protection Board (much criticised by British veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome) and, of course, the IAEA. The humanitarian aid organisations working in Kosovo, such as the High Commission for Refugees (HCR), the World Food Programme, the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs and the International Organisation for Migration, have to refer to the WHO for all public health matters since they belong to the UN system. So they are still waiting.
The current standards for the "tolerable" radiation dose presenting no danger to the human organism were set on the basis of studies by the Pentagon's Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission on survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima; one of the major objectives of those studies, if not the main one, was to determine the bomb's effectiveness as a weapon of war. The studies (details of which were not published until 1965) began in 1950, when many victims who had initially survived had already died from the consequences of the bombings. The group studied consisted mainly of young sportsmen in relatively good shape. Those particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of radiation - children, women and the elderly - did not appear at all.
These studies of survivors were soon brought to an end: there was no waiting for the cancers that would take decades to appear. They were also carried out by physicists with no training in biology. At the time they knew nothing of the existence of DNA, let alone how it works, and they made no distinction between the effects of a single, sudden, intense explosion and those of radiation from an internal, slow, constant source - like that given off by particles of depleted uranium which enter the body by inhalation, ingestion or through open wounds.
The nuclear lobby has always claimed that the effects of low-level radiation are too small to be studied. They therefore extrapolated from the observed effects of high dose irradiation (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), on the basis that if 1,000 survivors became ill after exposure to a dose of 100 (an arbitrary figure), 500 would be ill when exposed to 50 and only one from a dose of 0.5. Thus, below that exposure no-one is affected (5).
'Safe' doses
But the British researcher Alice Stewart showed the danger of low-level radiation to the human organism in a study of children whose mothers were x-rayed during pregnancy. In the 1970s she reached the same findings for employees of the nuclear weapons plant in Hanford, US. In 1998, still going strong despite her 91 years, she published with George W Kneale an in-depth reappraisal of the studies made of the 1945 survivors, showing irrefutably the errors present in the work on which the present standards are based (6). But it is these standards that allow the WHO fact sheet to speak of a "tolerable daily intake" for persons exposed to depleted uranium. Likewise, Dr Chris Busby, a British researcher who has written a number of works on the effects of low-level radiation (7) (disputed by the nuclear establishment), has explained how chronic internal low-level radiation systematically destroys the DNA of cells to produce the mutations that lead to cancer.
The international standards have been revised downwards several times, most recently in 1965, 1986 and 1990, by the International Commission for Radiation Protection - which draws up the standards that are then applied by the IAEA. The 1990 revision cut the permitted dose by a factor of five. The US has still not accepted that revision. It is therefore on the basis of doses five times higher than accepted by the rest of the world that they claim their soldiers received "safe" doses during the Gulf war.
The highest authority in the matter in the US is the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a civilian agency but in fact headed up by the military high command, which in that way controls the development of all nuclear technology. All the main sources of ionising radiation are therefore controlled by persons and institutions with no interest in exploring their dangers. The four most eminent scientific authorities to have worked for the AEC were John Gofman, Karl Z Morgan, Thomas Mancuso and Alice Stewart. Each in turn was sacked for presenting findings showing that exposure to low-level radiation causes cancer (8). The WHO fact sheet therefore comes in the context of a history of general denial of which the affair of depleted uranium in Yugoslavia is only the latest episode.
In May 1999, during the Kosovo war, the UN arranged for representatives of all the agencies involved in the conflict to go and make an initial assessment of the situation. Each wrote a report that was then shared with the other agencies. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) took part, but its report was suppressed. After it was leaked, the document, penned by Bakary Kante, advisor to UNEP director general Klaus Toepfer, was made public on 18 June 1999 in two Swiss French-language newspapers, Courrier and Liberté. The report sounded the alarm on the pollution caused by the bombings, specifically mentioning depleted uranium (9).
Another report on pollution, funded by the European Commission and published that same June shortly after the end of the war, takes the trouble to identify its sources (experts in the field, literature, specialist monographs, etc.) but makes virtually no mention of depleted uranium (10). The only reference appears in a brief list of the types of pollution: "DU" followed by "in Yugoslavia - claimed". One might have thought that the working party had been unaware of the Kante report. But several paragraphs of its report reproduce it word for word, and the list of 80 or so shelled sites is identical to that compiled by Kante.
Not long after that, the UNEP set up a working party, the Balkans Task Force (BTF), to make a full report. Toepfer appointed Finland's former environment minister Pekka Haavisto to lead it. He was adamant that depleted uranium was part of the overall pollution picture and could not be left out of the enquiry. If he was barred from studying it as radioactive pollution, he would study it as chemical pollution (see box).
Where are the contaminated sites?
On completion, it was announced that the BTF report (11) would be released in Geneva on 8 October 1999. A journalist who went to the UNEP's Geneva office, where the BTF is based, expecting to obtain a copy, was received by Toepfer's spokesman and right hand man Robert Bisset, who refused him any contact with Haavisto's team. Eventually, he was told there had been a change of plan and that Haavisto would be giving a press conference on 11 October in New York. Since the journalists who were closely following the issue of depleted uranium in Kosovo were all based in Geneva, they were thus denied any possibility of interviewing the man who had written the report.
Reworked by Bisset, the final part of the report was cut from 72 pages to two (later, the missing parts were posted on the UNEP's internet site) (12). Its findings and recommendations spoke of cordoning off contaminated sites - while saying simultaneously that they could not be identified. The Canadian expert Rosalie Bertell had advised the BTF to take samples from the air filters of vehicles in Kosovo, from armoured tanks that had been struck and from sites likely to have been affected by DU weapons; but no such samples were taken while the teams were in the field.
Throughout this time a whole procession of people directly involved in the question came to Geneva. The HCR's special envoy to the Balkans, Dennis McNamara, spoke of refugees returning to a "secure environment". But by "secure" he meant "militarily secure", stressing at a press conference at the Palais des Nations on 12 July last year Nato's assurances that depleted uranium posed no problems. US under-secretary of state for population, refugees and migration Julia Taft came to Geneva to boast to the UN Economic and Social Council of the success of this "humanitarian war"; she admitted during another press conference (Palais des Nations, 14 July 1999) that she did not know what depleted uranium was.
IAEA spokesman David Kyd claimed in an interview that his agency's mandate did not allow it to investigate DU, saying that it was, in any case, perfectly harmless. Dr Keith Baverstock of the WHO regional office for Europe came out with the same weasel words about there being absolutely no danger, though he added that depleted uranium could cause problems in a battle situation. Finally, former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, now the UN Secretary General's special envoy to the Balkans, abruptly stated that depleted uranium was a "non-issue".
Last March the Military Toxics Project, an American anti-nuclear NGO, announced that Nato had, that January, sent the UNEP a map of targets affected by depleted uranium in Kosovo; and this was confirmed by a source at the Netherlands foreign ministry (13). Fearing a general outcry, Toepfer convened a crisis meeting in Geneva on 20 March to decide on a strategy. But he was too late. Switzerland's last independent French language newspaper, Courrier, published the map that same morning.
The next day Haavisto held a press conference. Although he tried to be reassuring, he referred to the recommendations of the October report - that contaminated sites should be cordoned off - while adding that the map available was not accurate enough to identify them. A press release referred to the WHO study that was still being prepared and another commissioned by the BTF from the UK's Royal Society (that has not been heard of since).
The map, purportedly showing the 28 sites affected by 30 mm anti-tank Penetrator missiles launched from A-10 aircraft, raised a number of questions. The targets were concentrated close to the Albanian border (areas occupied by Italian and German forces) where former Yugoslav leader Tito, fearing the irredentism of the then Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, had built substantial concrete military installations underground. According to Swiss military analyst Jacques Langendorf, who visited the area in Tito's days, 30 mm Penetrators would have little impact on the concrete, but DU-reinforced Cruise missiles might be effective. And according to British analyst Dennis Flaherty, one of the aims of the war was to test such missiles equipped with a new technology (known as Broach) allowing as many as ten Penetrators to be fired at a time in order to penetrate underground bunkers more effectively.
Following insistent demands from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Nato gave Toepfer a new map in July last year. It showed 112 targets and had a list of the munitions supposedly released there. For about 20 sites, the type of munitions was given as "unknown", which seems unlikely given the computer tracking systems available to Nato and the Pentagon. Apparently the map was kept from Haavisto until September. When he discovered it, he wanted to send a team of investigators to Kosovo straight away. Toepfer apparently vetoed such a move before the 24 October elections, fearing a massive exodus like the one during the war if worrying findings were made.
Whatever the case may be, tired of waiting for the WHO, the High Commission for Refugees has drawn up its own instructions for its staff (14): no pregnant woman will be sent to Kosovo, anyone approached about going there must have the option of being posted elsewhere, and any official sent to Kosovo must have his file marked "service in the field" to facilitate any claim for compensation in the event of illness resulting from contamination. According to Frederick Barton, deputy high commissioner for refugees, the HCR's efforts to draw the civilian population's attention to the risks of contamination met with tremendous resistance both from Albanian politicians and from Nato and Unmik (UN Mission in Kosovo) administrators.
For
Rosalie Bertell, the "non-issue" of depleted uranium is just the latest
episode in a long story that is far from over. Watch this space.
(1) " Fact sheet No. 257, Depleted Uranium ", 12 January 2001, World Health Organisation (WHO), Geneva.
(2) Taken from his monograph " Radiation Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure " and quoted in an open letter dated 11 May 1999 signed John W Gofman, MD, PhD.
(3) "Effects of Radiation on Human Heredity: Report of a Study Group convened by WHO together with Papers Presented by Various Members of the Group", WHO, Geneva, 1957.
(5)
Rosalie Bertell, " The Hazards of Low Level Radiation",
http://ccnr.org/bertell_book.html
(6) "A-bomb survivors: factors that may lead to a re-assessment of the radiation hazard", International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume XXIX, No. 4, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, pp 708-714.
(7) Including Wings of Death : Nuclear Pollution and Human Health, Aberystwyth, Green Audit 1995.
(8) Jay M Gould, director, and Benjamin A Goldman, assistant director, Overview: Deadly Deceit, Low-Level Radiation, High-Level Coverup, Radiation and Public Health Report, New York, December 1989.
(9) Bakary Kante, Senior Policy Advisor to the Executive Director of ENUP, "United Nations Inter-Agency Needs Assessment Mission to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Environment and Human Settlements Aspects", United Nations, May 1999.
(10) "Assessment of the Environmental Impact of Military Activities During the Yugoslavia Conflict: Preliminary Findings", June 1999, prepared by the Regional Environmental Centre for Central and Eastern Europe, Szentendre, Hungary, for the European Commission DG-XI - Environment, Nuclear Safety and Civil Protection (Contract No B7-8110/99/61783/MAR/X I.1).
(11) "The Kosovo Conflict: Consequences for the Environment & Human Settlement", United Nations Environment Programme and United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, Geneva, 1999.
(12)
http://www.grid.unep.ch/btf/pressreleases/unep21032000.html
and
http://balkans.unep.ch/du/du.html
(13) See maps on Le Monde diplomatique's site.
(14) File of instructions of the HCR personnel department.
Translated
by Malcolm Greenwood