U.S. Military Lacks Respect for the Environment

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

10th January 2003(ENS)

Few will dispute that our life giving oceans have been harmed by human activities. Fish contain toxic levels of mercury, bottom sediments in harbors around the world are chemical wastelands, dead zones devoid of life are getting larger, fisheries are being exhausted, and consumers are being harmed by the seafood they eat.

Yet even with all this knowledge at hand, the U.S. military, while being marketed by President George W. Bush as the protectors of the world, has been testing weapons by firing radioactive, toxic ammunition made of depleted uranium into prime fishing areas of the coastal waters of the United States.

Depleted uranium (DU) remains radioactive for about
4.5 billion years. That is how old astronomers believe
our solar system is today! When a DU round of
ammunition hits a hard target, as much as 70 percent
of the round burns on impact, creating a huge residue
of fine ceramic uranium dust. Spread by wind or water
the dust can be inhaled or absorbed into humans, plants
and animals, and eventually integrated into the food chain.

Phalanx rapid-fire 20 millimeter gun system.
(Photo courtesy U.S. Navy)

The weapon being tested is known as the Phalanx or Close In Weapons System, present on nearly all U.S. Navy combat ships.
The guns can fire up to 4,500 rounds of DU shells per minute. Navy spokesperson Cmdr. Karen Sellers told the “Seattle Post-Intelligencer” this week that these firings have been going on since 1977 and fire 400 to 600 rounds per test.

The tests take place on both the east and west coasts of the United States.

Depleted uranium has already been implicated in the Gulf War Syndrome that has sickened hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans, many of whom have died. A study by the Uranium Medical Research Center in Canada and the U.S. showed that DU can still be found in the urine of Gulf War veterans nine years after the war.

Sellers went on to say that Navy environmental experts said that depleted uranium dissolves very slowly in the ocean. “It would be too diluted to distinguish from natural background uranium in the sea water,” she said.

This is a bold claim, considering that no studies have ever been done to measure the effect of DU in the ocean.

Many environmentalists and anti-war activists are not convinced that these routine tests are harmless and the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action is one of the groups that is contemplating filing an injunction to stop the testing.

One of the test zones is 25 to 100 miles off the coast of western Washington state, prime fishing areas for salmon, as well as flounder and other bottomfish. Fish living on or near the ocean floor are the ones most likely to build up toxic contamination from material that settles to the bottom.

A number of organizations believe that the depleted uranium used in Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991 is responsible for a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in the region. In November 2002, United Nations experts found radioactive hot spots in Bosnia that resulted from the use of depleted uranium during NATO air strikes in 1995.

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