NOVEMBER 2005

According to Paul Craig Roberts......
Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University.

Mired in interminable conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration is moving toward initiating two more wars, one with Iran and one with North Korea. With no US troops available, the Bush administration is revamping US war doctrine to allow for "preventative nuclear attack." In short, the Bush administration is planning to make the US the first country in history to initiate war with nuclear weapons.
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already we have reports from the middle east:

EXTREME BIRTH DEFORMITIES FROM DEPLETED URANIUM AMMUNITION

 http://www.web-light.nl

EXTREME BIRTH DEFORMITIES

"Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA."

- Ross B. Mirkarimi, The Arms Control Research Centre, from his report: ‘The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with Special Reference to Iraq.’ May 1992

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I have recently received large numbers of photographs of  horrendous birth deformities that are being experienced in Iraq. I have not, quite frankly, ever seen anything like them. I urge you to copy this page / these pictures and circulate them as widely as possible.

In an act of stark cruelty, the US dominated Sanctions Committee refuses to permit Iraq to import the clean-up equipment that they desperately need to decontaminate their country of the Depleted Uranium ammunition that the US fired at them. Approximately 315 tons of DU dust was left by the use of this ammunition.The Sanctions Committee also refuses to allow the mass importation of anti-cancer treatments, which contain trace amounts of radio-isotopes, on the grounds that these constitute '...nuclear materials..'

The majority of the pictures were supplied to me by a source who prefers to remain anonymous at the current time. I was unable to acquire either original negatives, or prints from negatives. They arrived in the form of colour A4 copies. I scanned them into Photoshop and attempted to clean and sharpen them as best I could. There has not, and I repeat not, been any digital alteration other than the cleaning and sharpening process. No text documentation arrived with the pictures, so I have described them as accurately as I can. It is my understanding that the photographs were taken from 1998 onwards. I would be grateful to anyone who could potentially supply me with further information about these types of deformities; medical terms for them, etc.

Additional pictures were taken by Dr. Siegwart Horst-Gunther, President of the International Yellow Cross. Most appeared in his 1996 book  "URANIUM PROJECTILES - SEVERELY MAIMED SOLDIERS, DEFORMED BABIES, DYING CHILDREN" (Published by AHRIMAN - Verlag, ISBN: 3-89484-805-7). The book is a documentary record of DU ammunition after-effects, and they were taken between 1993 and 1995. Dr. Gunther also supplied me with additional photographs from his unpublished collection, some of which feature the birth deformities being experienced by Western Gulf war veterans' children. I have asked Dr. Gunther's permission for his pictures to be treated as 'Public Domain' and copyright free. He has agreed and you may reproduce them as you see fit.

Both the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence officially deny that there is any significant danger from exposure to DU ammunition. And whilst it is conceivable that the US led attacks on Iraq's nuclear power stations could be a contributory factor, most reseachers point to DU as the most likely source of both deformities and cancers. The rising number of cases in Iraq, particularly in the South where the greatest concentration of DU was fired, is simply staggering. Iraqi physicians have never encountered anything like it, and have made the perfectly reasonable point that similar increases in cancer and deformities were experienced in Japan after the two US atomic bomb attacks. Cancer has increased between 7 and 10 fold; deformities between 4 and 6 fold.

Yet the US was well aware of the potential effects on civilians and military personnel of the chemical toxicity and radiological properties of DU ammunition long before the Gulf war began, as the following excerpts of a US Army document categorically state:

"Aerosol DU (Depleted Uranium) exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects. [...] Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably ground troops that re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armour-piercing munitions. [...] We are simply highlighting the potential for levels of DU exposure to military personnel during combat that would be unacceptable during peacetime operations. [...DU is..]... a low level alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage. [...] Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been linked to cancer. [...] Our conclusion regarding the health and environmental acceptability of DU penetrators assume both controlled use and the presence of excellent health physics management practices. Combat conditions will lead to the uncontrolled release of DU. [...] The conditions of the battlefield, and the long term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic penetrators for military applications."

- Excerpts from the July 1990 Science and Applications International Corporation report: ' Kinetic Energy Penetrator Environment and Health Considerations', as included in Appenix D - US Army Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command report: 'Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Strategy Study, July 1990'

The US was also well aware of the long-term dangers of DU contamination, and played it down, as the following memo and document make clear:

"There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no-one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. I believe we should keep this sensitive issue in mind when action reports are written."

- Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehmn, Los Alamos National Laboratory memorandum, March 1st 1991

"Soldiers may be incidentally exposed to DU from dust and smoke on the battlefield. The Army Surgeon General has determined that it is unlikely that these soldiers will receive a significant internal DU exposure. Medical follow-up is not warranted for soldiers who experience incidental exposure from dust or smoke. [...] Since DU weapons are openly available on the world arms market, DU weapons will be used in future conflicts. The number of DU patients on future battlefields probably will be significantly higher because other countries will use systems containing DU. [...] DU is a low-level radioactive waste, and, therefore, must be disposed of in a licensed repository. [...] No international law, treaty, regulation, or custom requires the United States to remediate the Persian Gulf war battlefields."

- Report by the US Army Environmental Policy Institute: 'Health and Consequences of Depleted Uranium use in the US army', June 1995

DU ammunition is now possessed by more than 12 countries, and was used during the NATO led bombing of the former Yugoslavia. Western forces stationed in the region have recently been advised not to drink the local water or eat locally produced food. Yet the British MoD continues to deny any potential risks, stating: "We have not seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data to support these claims [that DU is dangerous.] [...] There are no plans to remove DU-based ammunition from service." (Source: Two letters to me from Simon Wren, Overseas Secretariat, Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London - 20th May 1999, and 22nd March 2000)

On a more personal level, I have heard stories of visitors to Iraq who spoke with mid-wives there. These mid-wives are purported to have said they no longer look forward to births as.... "We don't know what's going to come out."
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I omit The pictures which are extremely disturbing ; which are in fact terrifying.The huge crime of radiation sickness, the most well documented medical crisis in medical history is simply being perpetuated by two nations whose understanding of humane knowledge and life is apparently absent or totally corrupted..JBraddell, editor.
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Back to Paul Craig Roberts:
By bullying the 35 members of the IAEA, the Bush administration last week managed to get 22 votes that could lead to the referral of Iran to the UN Security Council. The Bush administration will now lobby for the referral. Once it has the referral, even if the Security Council does not act on it, the Bush administration can use it as an excuse to attack Iran. The Bush administration knows that few Americans have any knowledge of international law and procedures and will simply believe whatever President Bush says. The highly concentrated US media is a proven walkover for the war-mongering Bush administration.

As Dr. Prather has shown, Iran has gone beyond compliance to propose that new additional safeguards be established to monitor its nuclear energy program. The bad intentions are on the part of the Bush administration.
US cancels 'mini-nukes' programme

The US has abandoned controversial plans to develop a nuclear "bunker-buster" warhead, a key Republican senator has said.

Sen Pete Domenici said funding for the bombs - part of the Energy Department's 2006 budget - had been dropped.

He said research would now focus on conventional penetrating weapons.

The warhead had been the focus of intense debate in Congress, with opponents arguing against the US developing new nuclear arms.

An administration official, speaking on condition on anonymity, confirmed the move to the Associated Press news agency.

In Britain the Nuclear Fuel regime has been taken over by British Energy and is already in a financial down curve that seems unstoppable, in addition to the problem of nuclear waste in the Irish Sea that must be curbed:
WRITES

What can the nuclear industry do for us?

The nuclear industry has always seen itself as the saviour of industrialised society. The slogan of the 1960s, especially in the United States, was that nuclear power would deliver unlimited energy cheaply and safely, and that it would step into the breech when fossil fuel supplies became scarce. At the time, no one was thinking of the problem of greenhouse gases [12].         & nbsp; 

In its 1981 report on nuclear costs, the Committee for the Study of Nuclear Economics showed that a station such as Sizewell B would cost some £2 billion more (1980’s money) over its lifetime than a comparable-sized conventional thermal power station such as Drax B in Yorkshire [13], which would put nuclear power beyond the reach of privatization.

In 1996, for £1.5 billion, the newly created British Energy acquired seven Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) stations and the country’s only commercial Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). The actual cost of construction had amounted to over £50 billion, of which more than £3 billion had recently been spent on the Sizewell B PWR, newly commissioned in the mid 1990s.

The government sell-off in 1996 of what was to become the UK’s largest electricity producer might have seemed a give-away at the time, but in 2002, on account of having to compete for electricity sales against other non-nuclear generators, British Energy found its losses piling up with every unit of electricity sold. In less than a year, and in the biggest write-off of capital in the UK, the company’s market value plummeted to little more than £100 million. Basically, British Energy could not go on trading and had to call on the government to salvage it.

Despite complaints of favouritism from non-nuclear companies, the government agreed a loan of £410 million to British Energy, and a month later, upped it to £650 million. Meanwhile, as Energy Minister Brian Wilson reiterated in parliament on 27 January 2002, the government would provide the £200 million required to go into the fund for decommissioning.

Dale Vince, the managing director of Ecotricity, regards such support for the nuclear industry as economic nonsense. He said in an interview published in The Guardian [14], “If we were given £410 million instead of British Energy, we could have built enough onshore wind energy to power 10 per cent of the country’s electricity needs.”

Unfortunately, you cannot just shut down nuclear stations and walk away. You have to keep the safety systems, including core-cooling, up and running for as long as the fuel is in the core (see Box 1).

And then, when the spent fuel is extracted, you have to make multi-billion dollar decisions what to do with it [15] (see Box 2).

Do you send it to loss-making British Nuclear Fuels (BNF) for reprocessing, with all that entails in terms of discharges of radioactive waste into the Irish Sea and the atmosphere? That being the case, do you continue sanctioning the production of Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX), which makes economic nonsense, as well as a dubious saving on uranium and is a security nightmare (see below)? Or do you reduce costs by storing the spent fuel intact?

As to the use of MOX, many critics within and outside the industry have repeatedly pointed out that the gains are far outweighed by economic and environmental problems. In France, reprocessing spent fuel to extract plutonium for MOX fuel manufacture will save no more than 5 to 8 per cent on the need for fresh uranium. Meanwhile, as experience in both France and Britain has shown, reprocessing spent reactor fuel leads to a hundredfold or more increase in the volume of radioactive wastes. In the end, all the materials used, including tools, equipment and even the buildings become radioactive and have to be treated as a radioactive hazard.

It is also highly questionable whether the use of MOX fuel will actually reduce the amount of plutonium that has been generated after half a century of operating reactors, both military and civil. Worldwide, more than 1 500 tonnes of plutonium have been generated, of which some 250 tonnes have been extracted for making bombs and another 250 tonnes extracted as a result of reprocessing the spent fuel from ‘civilian’ reactors. Apart from its military-grade plutonium - plutonium relatively pure in the 239 isotope - Britain now has some 50 tonnes of lower quality reactor-grade plutonium contaminated with other, less readily-fissionable isotopes such as 241 [16].

Because of the continued reprocessing of spent reactor fuel in commercial reprocessing plants in Britain, France, Russia and Japan, the world will have some 550 tonnes of separated civil plutonium by the year 2010, enough to produce 110 000 nuclear weapons.

Mixed oxide fuel ideal for terrorists

Mixed oxide fuel, containing up to 5 per cent plutonium, is ideal material for terrorists, being no more than mildly radioactive compared with spent reactor fuel, and in a form from which the plutonium can be easily extracted. Just one MOX fuel assembly contains some 25 kilograms of plutonium, enough for two weapons. A reactor, modified to take the plutonium-enriched fuel for up to 30 per cent of the reactor core, has some 48 MOX fuel assemblies.

Currently, 23 light water (ordinary water) reactors - 5 in Germany, 3 in Switzerland, 13 in France and 2 in Belgium - have been converted to use MOX fuel. Five countries, Britain, Belgium, France, Japan and Russia, are manufacturing the fuel. With BNFL’s new MOX plant up and running, supply will exceed demand by a factor of two, at least until 2015.

BNFL claims that the use of MOX fuel will help burn up stocks of plutonium, including those from dismantled weapons. But the very operation of civilian reactors, with their load of the plutonium- generating uranium isotope, the 238 isotope, makes it inevitable that more plutonium is generated than is consumed. A 0.9GW pressurized water reactor which has been modified to take MOX fuel will burn a little less than one tonne of plutonium every ten years, whereas plutonium production will be about 1.17 tonnes, hence about 120 kilograms more.

Global warming and nuclear power

The new myth is that nuclear power is the only source of energy that can replace fossil fuels in the quantities required to fuel the industrial society, whether in the developed or developing world, while eliminating the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Economies of scale demand that nuclear power stations are large, at least one GW (electrical) in size. Their sudden shutdown can put a considerable strain on the overall electricity supply system. And if their shutdown is the result of a generic problem, that will have major consequences, including the necessity of bringing on stream a large tranche of spare capacity. Furthermore, that capacity is likely to be fossil- fuel based and relatively inefficient.

As reported recently in New Scientist [17], the UK’s advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) are showing signs of unexpected deterioration in the graphite blocks. These blocks serve the double function of moderating the nuclear fission process and of providing structural channels for nuclear fuel and control rods. The potential failure of the graphite compromises safety and in all likelihood the UK’s 14 AGRs, currently supplying nearly one-fifth of the UK’s electricity, will have to be shutdown prematurely, rather than lasting through to 2020 and beyond. Bringing reserve capacity to replace the AGRs will inevitably lead to a surge in greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s not the only problem the UK nuclear industry faces.

Devastating leak

On Sunday 12 June, 2005, the BBC reported that a leak of highly radioactive waste containing enough uranium and plutonium to make several atomic weapons had gone unnoticed for more than 8 months [18]. It appears that a pipe in British Nuclear Fuels’ thermal oxide reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria had fractured as long ago as last August, spewing nitric acid with its deadly load of radionuclides onto the floor. The leak, containing as much as 20 tonnes of uranium and 160kg of plutonium, was discovered only in April of this year.

British Nuclear Fuels has justified the use of the reprocessing plant as being essential for the production of mixed oxide fuel from the spent fuel taken from the UK’s Advanced Gas Reactors. As a result of the leak, the nuclear inspectorate has ordered British Nuclear Fuels to shut down THORP, the thermal oxide reprocessing plant. Just how the spilt waste can be removed remains to be seen, but once again the accident reinforces concerns that the nuclear industry, quite aside from its poor economic showing, can never be made safe enough.

In addition, the Environment Agency inspectors told BNF that it had to improve the way it discharged low level radioactive waste into the Irish Sea, now probably one of the most contaminated waters in the world. Some commentators estimate it will take considerably more than a century to clean up the radioactive waste that the industry has already discharged into the environment, at a cost of well over £50 000 million.