Quello che segue è la bozza del discorso preparato da Marco Saba, per conto dell'OEA e di ENADU, alla conferenza di Manchester. Alcuni dei punti illustrati faranno da linee guida per l'attività dell'Osservatorio nel 2001.

Something Untold About DU Weapons:

- uranium rounds are little atomic bombs?
- DU military and non-military accidents are allways covered up: Remscheid 1988, Amsterdam 1992. What about London 1999?
- the two most important radiation studies were flawed
- WHO and IAEA can't be changed? So we must close them (WHA12-40) [This was very well exposed by Fernex]
- we need a watchdog authority, money for damages is not enough
- our proposal: to provide health care to people exposed by looking inside therapies that improve immunitary system (an example: vitamins) [I distributed several books in many languages about the Di Bella's work in Italy, during Manchester Conference]
- a call to all (OUR) democratic institutions to help us in the DU fight (Polices, Secret Services, Politics, Defense, etc.)
- a call for international coordination between NGOs in actions against DU use and production
- Mister Bankenstein may be our enemy: WHO PAY TO PROMOTE NUCLEAR ENERGY? BANKS!

1) THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992
In The Name Of World Peace
Atomic Tests In Both Hemispheres
Lecture by Prof. Jim Falk, main technical expert witness in the first case of a Maralinga veteran vs. Commonwealth of Australia.

"...could we make this thing [atomic bomb] smaller? Well, we knew that beryllium reflected neutrons, so if we shoved some beryllium around the outside, we could decrease the amount of uranium because the neutrons would be denser, and so you'd need less atoms in there, so we could make the bomb smaller. (...) We can alter the materials we make the bomb from -- what about plutonium? You only need six kilograms of plutonium to make a critical mass, you need ten of uranium, we can make a much more efficient little bomb, which can be used in all sorts of different ways."

2) Plutonium:
Letter from David Michaels, Assistant Secretary, Environment, Safety and Health, US Department of Energy to Tara Thornton, Military Toxics Project, 20 January 2000:

"...One may normally expect that depleted uranium contains a trace amount of plutonium."

3) And from Oak Ridge, James Phelps say:

"Oak Ridge is also hiding the effects of Depleted Uranium kinetic energy penetrators. DU is composed of 0.3% of U-235, a very unstable fissionable isotope of uranium, that can fission with slow thermal neutron capture and explode into many fissile isotopes that are very toxic. Even U-238 and other atoms can fission with fast neutron effects illustrating the kinetic energy effects promoting fission. U-235 with the high energy of impact in DU penetrators can get enough energy to promote fission energy releases. Tests done with higher levels of U-235 in penetrators at Dougway have shown increasingly higher energy from the force cone of the impacts as the level of U-235 increases---showing the energy is not just the oxidation reaction of uranium---but involves the amount of U-235 in the mixture---this showing the fissile energy release dependence. This means the soldiers on battle fields have been exposed to some of the most deadly and highly retained toxic isotopes on earth that destroy the immune health.

Oak Ridge managements runs on pure deceit and treachery and they don't care who gets hurt, just so long as the managers get huge pay checks for lying and stay out of jail another day. The Oak Ridge Y-12 management and inventors are fully aware of these tests indicating kinetic fission in DU penetrators, Y-12 has many of the patents on DU penetrators..."

From: BIO-MEDICAL "UN-KNOWLEDGE" AND NUCLEAR POLLUTION:
A COMMON-SENSE PROPOSAL
By John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D.
On the occasion of the Right Livelihood Award,
Stockholm, December 9, 1992.

SEVENTH RULE:   No Changes of Input after Any Results Are Known. One of the fundamental rules in an on-going study is that no one is allowed to make retroactive alterations, deletions, or additions to input-data after any of the health-response results are known. If there is an opportunity for health results to influence a study's revised input, there is clearly an opportunity to falsify the real cause-effect relationships (if any) between dose and response. A study becomes properly suspect if retroactive changes have been made in diagnosis or dose, if cases have been shuffled into new groupings (cohorts), if any data or cases have been suddenly dropped from the study, or new cases suddenly added "as needed" from some reserve.

Violation of Rule 7, in the Atomic-Bomb Survivor Study

   These maneuvers with the previous A-Bomb Study database completely break Rule Seven, against retroactive alteration of a study's input at a time when the new input could be influenced by the original results. Such behavior has the potential for making the revised results fit a preference or a pre-judgment.

  We complained to Dr. Itsuzo Shigematsu, who is the Chairman of RERF, about this massive alteration of the study's input after much of its output is known.
......
SECOND RULE:   A Real Difference in Dose. If disease-rate is being compared in two groups, it is essential to achieve a reasonable certainty that the compared groups have appreciably different accumulated doses. If the compared groups truly received nearly the same total amount of radiation, it is pre-destined before the study even begins that analysts will find "no provable difference in disease-rates between the groups."

THIRD RULE:   A Sufficiently Big Difference in Dose. The dose-differences between compared groups must be large enough to allow for statistically conclusive findings despite the random variations in numbers and in population samples. Analysts can cope with the random fluctuations of small numbers both by assuring sufficiently large dose-differences between compared groups, and by assuring large numbers of people in each group.

FOURTH RULE:   Careful Reconstruction of Dose. Obviously, false conclusions will be reached if supposedly non-exposed people in a database really received appreciable doses, and supposedly high-dose people received lower doses than the database indicates. The non-uniform nature of the Chernobyl exposures makes this scientific pitfall into a real possibility, unless careful and objective dose-reconstruction is substituted for assumptions. Fortunately, there are several techniques of biological dosimetry which can reduce uncertainty about dose, even decades after the dose first occurred.

Violation of Rules 2, 3, and 4:   The 1991 Study of Chernobyl

   By 1989, claims about multiple health problems in Belarus and Ukraine were reaching the press, and were attributed to radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. At the request of the Soviet central government, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) organized a study.

The IAEA is a branch of the United Nations directly charged with trying to make nuclear energy acceptably safe worldwide. Leadership of the Chernobyl study was conferred upon Dr. Itsuzo Shigematsu, also the chairman of RERF.

 The results of the IAEA study were announced with massive publicity in May 1991:   The international experts said they could find no health disorders which could be attributed to radiation.
---
NINTH RULE:   No Pre-judgments. Prejudgments are seldom compatible with objective inquiry.

Violation of Rule 9, the Rule against Prejudgments

  In 1989, prior to arrival of the IAEA's international experts to study Chernobyl, another branch of the United Nations -- the World Health Organization (WHO) -- sent in an international team of radiation experts to give an opinion about the health problems.
(...)
Would the WHO scientists be entitled to declare, in advance of any careful study, what effects this combination of exposures cannot have during the first three years of exposure ... and to disparage the local scientists for refusal to adopt the prejudgments which they were offered?

   The 1989 WHO report concluded, among other things, that "... scientists [in Belarus and Ukraine] who are not well-versed in radiation effects have attributed various biological and health effects to radiation exposure. These changes cannot be attributed to radiation exposure ... and are much more likely to be due to psychological factors and stress" (as quoted in the IAEA's 1991 report, page 1).

The WHO statement appears to be a gross violation of Rule Nine against pre-judgments. A scientifically valid basis for the WHO pre-judgments was and is simply non-existent.

   We have documented many additional examples of pre-judgment in radiation research in our 1981, 1990, and 1994 books [1]. Almost invariably, pre-judgments are favorable to nuclear pollution.

Achieving the Height of Foolishness

   The effort by nuclear-committed governments to keep control over every significant radiation database continues.

   For instance, the central Chernobyl database is already under construction by the International Program on the Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident (IPHECA). Arrangements have been signed with the governments of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to permit this. The main sponsors of the IPHECA study are the governments of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia. So once again, we mention reliance on the tobacco industry to handle research on the hazards of smoking. The sponsors of IPHECA will conduct the Chernobyl study through the World Health Organization.

 In addition, international arrangements were made in 1992 to construct a database on radiation health effects for the very contaminated Russian region near Chelyabinsk, a center for nuclear weapons production. Accidental and deliberate releases of radiation were exceedingly high there, especially in the 1950s. And who has acquired a central role in creating the Chelyabinsk database?   RERF -- the foundation sponsored by the Department of Energy (USA) and the Japanese Ministry of Health to control the Hiroshima-Nagasaki database ... and its retroactive alterations.

   As for the databases on military and civilian nuclear workers and veterans, they have long been under the non-supervised control of governments.

It is unacceptable -- and unnecessary -- that key radiation studies be conducted under circumstances which can either totally compromise the studies or which can permit their use to produce un-knowledge.

Foolish ... or Negligent?

   Politely, we call the current situation in radiation health-research "unacceptable." We would think society had achieved the height of foolishness if it allowed the tobacco industry to control all databases on the hazards of smoking. But we have done something comparable with radiation health-research.

   If future generations could speak to us now, they might call the current situation worse than the height of foolishness. They might accuse us of criminal negligence.

Marco Saba add: "They may wish to do more than simple accuses."

We need, as soon as possible, a "watchdog authority" to prevent huge damages from 'someone'. Concentrated benefit and diffuse injury always operate to assist the polluter.

We need to investigate more the role of Mr. Bankenstein (I call Bankestein the joint role of Central Banks on nuclear energy policy). Here in Italy, actually, the Republic President is Carlo Azeglio CIampi. He is the former President of Bank of Italy, a private owned bank who borrow the money to the Italian State. Further more, our Foreign Affairs minister, Mr. Lamberto Dini, is the former Governor of Bank of Italy. A similar pattern may be found in the US, where the Federal Reserve, a private owned bank, lend the money to american citizens. No different is in the UK, with the role of the Bank of England.

May this be the cause because Italian State overlooked the whole depleted uranium problem?