Birth Defects on the Rise in Fallujah

White phosphorus. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Let's not forget about the burn pits around military bases while we're at it. All kinds of goodies in those.

It's the DU and the NDU, dear. Phosphorus just burns the skin on contact when it drops. It's the uranium that sticks around. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, DU and NDU amount to a permanently available contaminant randomly distributed into the environment.

In order to produce nuclear weaponry, naturally occurring uranium has to be enriched to increase the level of fissile uranium, U-235. The leftover product is depleted uranium. In depleted uranium (DU) the level of fissionable uranium 235 has been reduced from 0.7% to 0.2% by the enrichment process. Uranium 238 makes up over 99% of the content of both natural uranium and depleted uranium. Depleted uranium is roughly 60% as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium. Since the beginning of the Nuclear Era, America alone has produced a waste stockpile of depleted uranium in excess of 1.1 billion pounds.

Rather than burying this toxin to protect the genetic future of the human race, the DOD's answer to waste disposal, is to give depleted uranium for free to arms manufacturers for use in armour and munitions.

Why would they want it, you ask?

Well, tank armour reinforced with depleted uranium is virtually impervious to conventional shells. And conversely, shells reinforced with depleted or non-depleted uranium slice through targets like a super-sharp knife through warm butter.

Uranium is preferred by arms manufacturers over other ballistic materials such as iron, lead or tungsten because of it's unique metallurgical properties. It is extremely dense, and pyrophoric. In other words, it's dust burns spontaneously at room temperature. Solid metal uranium is auto-igniting at 170 degrees Fahrenheit. And most importantly, solid metal uranium has a property not available in any other metal — it is “self sharpening”. Meaning, that when it hits a target at high velocities, it breaks in such a way as to continually sharpen at it's point. The leading points of all other warhead metals flatten or mushroom under these conditions. These properties give uranium superior performance as a penetrating warhead capable of punching through the hardest and thickest armor plating, retaining penetration capabilities at 15% greater distances and lower speeds than the most common alternative, tungsten. Specifically, they can bore through 20 feet of super-reinforced concrete bunkers. When detonated, these types of weaponry essentially shatter/combust into diamond hard microparticles forming a radioactive dust which is released into the air with the explosion. 60% of this aerosol of fine uranium particles are less than 5 micron in diameter – 10 microns is a respirable size. When inhaled, DU and NDU goes into the body and stays there, slicing through DNA. And while it's true that this “dust” falls quickly to the ground, the dust storms inherent to the Middle East mean that what might typically be distributed over a relatively small area, instead gets blown around throughout an entire region.

The DOD's common excuse for this is that “while such things may be true, the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere is negligible.” This is what is more commonly referred to as a convenient half-truth. While such a contention might be correct when speaking about a single bomb dropped into an area, it no longer remains true when you're dropping roughly 4 MILLION POUNDS of it PER YEAR on a target area.

The other half of that truth is a bit… inconvenient. It's called “aggregate toxicity”. And it means that in Iraq alone, we've dropped what amounts to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs PER YEAR in Iraq since the start of the war. In Afghanistan, it amounts to roughly 100,000 Nagasaki bombsworth of radioactive material.

From a health perspective, this has led to the following:

- Fully 100% of Afghan civilians tested for exposure were found to have levels of non-depleted uranium in their system between 400% and 2000% higher than normal. Subjects also presented identical symptom profiles and chronologies. Victims reported pain in the cervical column, upper shoulders and basal area of the skull, lower back and kidney pain, joint and muscle weakness, sleeping difficulties, headaches, memory problems, and disorientation, as well as burning of the nasal passages, throat, and upper respiratory tract;
- Cancer rates in Iraq have increased 1000% between 1989 and 2001, as a result of the use of DU and NDU in the First Gulf War. Since the start of the current Iraq War, they have increased exponentially;
- More than 240,000 Gulf War vets are on permanent medical disability, and more than 11,000 are dead;
- A U.S. Government study conducted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs on the offspring of Gulf War Vets revealed that 67% of the babies had serious birth defects (born without eyes, without ears, missing whole organs, missing legs and arms, fused fingers, thyroid or organ malformations) or other adverse health effects;
- Among Iraqis, cases of anophthalmos (babies born without eyes) was literally 250,000 times greater than the natural occurrence of this particular birth defect (20 cases per 4,000 births, as opposed to the normal 1 in every 50,000,000 births), and women there often give birth to babies born without brains, with organs outside of their little bodies, or they simply give birth to pieces of flesh.
- In wheat-growing area north of Mosul, Iraq, the crops are producing stunted blades of grass. This is the grain breadbasket of the area. A region that would normally feed nineteen million people.

One of the worst symptoms being something which some of our own soldiers are encountering now, namely, “burning semen syndrome”.

Yeah. Ouch.

Not just for the dudes either. It not only hurts them, but for obvious reasons, it's no easier on their wives or girlfriends.

Oops. I stand corrected.