Depleted Uranium Interview With Whistleblower Geoscientist Leuren Moret

The Aishah Ali Interview
With Geoscientist Leuren Moret
Madame Chair Magazine (Malaysia) v.VIII 1aug2007
[More by Leuren Moret]

Ever since she knew about the devastating effects of
radiation and depleted uranium pollution on the world
as a result of nuclear weapons, geoscientist Leuren
Moret has been on a crusade to stop wars and weapons
testing.

The War Crimes Conference and Exhibition held at the
Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur recently was
eye-opening and conscience-raising in its condemnation
of the atrocities of war. During the three-day event,
attendees gained insight into the horrors of past
conflicts and the impending threat to our future if
wars continue. Among the many impassioned pledges was
a move to establish a War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia
this year and try US President George Bush, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime
Minister John Howard for their roles in initiating the
illegal Iraq war.

The Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War is a
global movement introduced several years ago by Tun Dr
Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia.
The February War Crimes Conference is the most recent
of the annual events organised by the Perdana Global
Peace Forum. The event fielded distinguished speakers
who shared their expertise and showcased a number of
war victims from Iraq and Palestine who gave a human
face to the grim discourse with their heartrending
testimonies.

Among the eloquent speakers was geoscientist and
international radiation specialist Leuren Moret, who
gave a startling revelation about the effects of
radiation and how our global environment has been
contaminated from atomic bomb testing since 1945 to
the present, and how this pollution has sharply
increased since the US introduced depleted uranium
(DU) weapons to the battlefields for the first time
with the 1991 Gulf War.

This, she says, has caused a world epidemic of cancer,
diabetes, neuro-muscular diseases, chronic fatigue
syndrome, diseases of the heart and brain and
infertility.

A US nuclear weapons lab whistle blower, Moret has
spoken in 46 countries as she feels it is her
obligation to share the devastating results of her
research, which she began after working at two nuclear
weapons laboratories in California from the 1970s to
1991.

What she has to say will not only shock, but also
answer the question we have always asked: why are so
many people suffering from cancer and unexplained
diseases of the heart, brain and nervous system these
days?

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Aishah Ali: Your talk was scary. Can I ask you to
elaborate on the effects of radiation and DU on our
health? First of all what is your role at this
conference?

Leuren Moret: My role is to introduce the radiation
issue as a world war crime. It is extremely important
for Malaysians to know because particles from
radiation and DU are everywhere in the air. We drink
the same water, we breathe the same air and we eat
food from soils that may have been contaminated.
That's why the pollution of the environment and the
atmosphere is so important for the future of humanity
and it is directly affecting public health here in
Malaysia. 1 have been reading about increased
infertility in Malaysia, which is part of the global
trend.

AA: Why us? We are so far away from the war zones.

LM: These tiny radioactive particles are all over the
world in two weeks. When a nuclear bomb explodes or
when a DU weapon burns, it produces radioactive poison
gas. Uranium when it burns is hotter than the sun and
it forms extremely tiny particles. These particles
stay in the air until rain or snow removes them and
they contaminate our soil and water. Areas where there
is high rainfall such as Hawaii, or the coastal areas
in Southeast Asia, have much higher levels of
radiation rained out into the local environment. Of
course, this damages all living things, not just
humans.

AA: How do they get into our body and damage our
health?

LM: You know why people smoke opium? When you inhale
the smoke, it gets into your bloodstream very fast. If
it's eaten, it goes through your digestive system. But
if you inhale or inject it into your blood veins, it
goes all over your body. What happens is, the tiny
particles in the lungs go into your bloodstream and
your bloodstream goes everywhere in your body — to
your bones, brain, even contaminating your hair. It
has devastating effects. The first is the heavy-metal
chemical effect. You know how lead and mercury are
very toxic? Uranium is also a toxic chemical. The
metal reaction will give your body horrible rashes and
allergies. Another is the radioactive effect where
nuclear particles disturb the cells. Our cells
communicate with one another but what happens is the
radiation damages the signals and cells start to
malfunction. The third and most serious effect of DU
is the nanoparticle or "particulate" effect. Because
the suspended DU particles which travel around the
world are so tiny, they disturb the signalling and
information flow in the cell processes and functions
of the body. You get what is called chronic diseases
like chronic fatigue syndrome where people get tired
all the time, that's from radiation damage; or obesity
which is caused by damage to the information flow in
the cell; or neuro-muscular diseases like
multiple-sclerosis where people are unable to walk
because their nervous systems are damaged. DU is a
systemic poison which causes a web of diseases that
cascade into many illnesses

AA: What exactly is DU?

LM: DU is radioactive trash from the atomic weapons
project and the nuclear power industry. It is a
radioactive metal and occurs in three isotopes (forms
of a chemical element differing in their atomic
weight) — Uranium 238, Uranium 235 and Uranium 234.
They all behave the same chemically because they have
the same number of electrons in the outer shell, but
they are slightly different in mass. The isotope that
scientists want is Uranium 235 because it will explode
in nuclear bombs like the Hiroshima bomb. Today they
mine the uranium and take 0.5 per cent out of U235
from the ore to make into nuclear reactor fuel. The
rest is trash. It's called depleted uranium or DU
because they have removed the half per cent of U235.
It's a bomb tester's term. It does not mean it is
depleted in radiation. It is depleted in U235 because
the vital half a per cent has been extracted.

AA: But it is still dangerous?

LM: Of course! This is in huge junk piles stored in
drums in solid metal at the Department of Energy sites
in the US. The US is using thousands of tons of DU in
dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets all over
the Middle East and Central Asia. We're importing it
from Canada, Belgium and South Africa. It is very
profitable and so investment firms invest in
corporations manufacturing DU weapons because they may
get as much as a 35 per cent return annually on the
investment. We have to take the profit out of war in
order to end this global, permanent war economy, which
is destroying the earth. Fortunately the Belgian
Parliament has just passed a law abolishing all DU
weapons manufacturing, testing, storage and sales. It
is the first country in the world to do this. This is
extremely significant because Belgium was exporting DU
weapons to the US; it is the headquarters of NATO and
the seat of the European Parliament.

AA: When I visited Iraq before the war, I saw babies
in hospitals dying of leukaemia. Would that have been
from DU exposure?

LM: Yes, the DNA is damaged but the babies were also
exposed while in their mothers' wombs. So they were
born with birth defects, underweight and not healthy
There are also babies born without eyes. It is an
extremely rare birth defect called anophthalmia and it
ranges widely from case to case in 20,000-40,000 live
births. But recently a doctor in Jordan reported 12
such cases in Iraqi babies and children. These babies
are born alive but their eyes are not developed. Eyes
in the foetus are formed in the first month, so in
such cases, particles of DU in the mother's body
interfere with the development of the baby.

AA: So this means the risks are more when you live in
the war zones?

LM: Jordan's next door to Iraq and so is Israel. So it
is like living on the battlefield. That is why DU
weapons are illegal firstly, they are radioactive
weapons, which make them illegal. Secondly, they arc
illegal because they travel off the battlefield and
poison the whole world with an invisible, silent,
tasteless, radioactive gas, like Chernobyl (Russia)
did. Thirdly they continue to act long after the
battle is over, 4.5 billion years is the half-life of'
DU. The fourth factor which makes them illegal under
international law is that they kill and maim
inhumanely not only enemy soldiers, but our own
soldiers, civilians and all living things. This makes
them completely illegal Weapons of Mass Destruction.

AA: You also mentioned some astounding figures on
rising cases of diabetes and cancer.

LM : Yes, the World Health Organisation announced in
April 2003 that cancer will increase globally by 50
per cent by 2020, and diabetes will increase from 30
million cases globally to 230 million cases over the
next 20 years. There is a global epidemic of lung
cancer now and a huge increase in diabetes cases,
which can only be explained by a global environmental
event such as global pollution of the atmosphere with
DU.

AA: Wouldn't the soldiers sent to the Gulf War suffer
even more?

LM: Yes, we have a 55 per cent disability rate for
those who served in the Gulf region. They didn't have
to be in the battlefield, they were just in the region
and yet half of them have DU poisoning. They have DU
in their bodies, in their semen and they contaminate
their wives and partners and cause babies to be born
with birth defects. There was a photo essay in Life
magazine recently on children and babies of the first
Gulf War veterans. It's titled "The Tiny Victims of
Desert Storm ". It shows horribly disfigured
(post-Gulf War I) babies playing with their normal
siblings, who were born before their fathers went to
war. These babies don't have legs, some don't have
arms or they have hands coming out of their shoulders.
The same has happened in many Iraqi, Afghan, Yugoslav
babies. It will soon begin happening in Israel to new
babies exposed to the DU particles drifting into
Israel after the July 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon
with thousands of American DU bombs. Already there are
large increases reported by Israeli doctors in
northern Israel, where the rainfall is highest in
Israel. It's very simple. You cannot use nuclear
weapons without nuking yourself. In fact, Israeli
soldiers were advised that if they wanted to have
children, to leave their sperm in sperm banks before
they went to Lebanon in the July attacks.

AA: What about people living close to nuclear power
plants or nuclear bomb-testing sites?

LM: Many studies have shown that children's health has
suffered as has that of living species like fish. I
was part of a group studying the level of radiation in
the teeth of children living around nuclear power
plants in the US, England and Japan. We collected baby
teeth and measured the radiation. Then we went to the
children's cancer hospital and got the baby teeth from
children living in the same area who were suffering
from cancer. They had twice as much radiation in the
baby teeth. And as the radiation levels go up and down
each year, the cancer rates go up and down exactly
following the radiation level in the baby teeth. So,
people who live around nuclear power plants do not
have healthy children. Adults also suffer rare
cancers, chronic fatigue, thyroid problems and are
giving birth to unhealthy and brain-damaged babies. I
call nuclear technologies "the death of birth".

AA: What happens to living species close to bomb
testing sites?

LM: There are severe effects on all living things near
a nuclear bomb testing site, but low-level radiation
exposure on the other side of the world also has very
severe effects. For example, the DU causes a drop in
the fishing catch in the ocean. A study showed a drop
to 50 per cent of the fishing catch over the North
Atlantic during bomb testing. As soon as the US,
Russia and England signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty
in 1963, fishing catch recovered from one million tons
to four million tons in four years. But in the Pacific
the fishing catch has declined by 65 per cent since
1970 and never recovered because some countries —
India, Pakistan, China and France continued
bomb-testing.

AA: So you've been around the world talking about
this? Why did you decide on such a crusade?

LM: (Laughs) I thought I was going to be a mother,
cook, sew and have a totally normal life. But once you
work in a nuclear weapons laboratory it's like joining
the Mafia. You can let go of them but they cannot let
go of you. I just learned the hard way that radiation
is forever. I didn't know anything about radiation
before. I'm a geologist and a geoscientist uses
radiation to determine the age of the rocks. I measure
the radioactive isotopes or minerals in rocks to
determine the age of the rock and formation of the
mountain range. "Then I went to work at two nuclear
weapons laboratories. At the Lawrence Berkeley Lab I
studied how magmas are created, and what happens when
volcanoes erupt and how the ash and dust go all over
the world. That helped me to understand how nuclear
weapons and the fallout, rainout or snowout can go all
the way around the world because it becomes a
component of atmospheric dust. Millions of tons of
atmospheric dust each year are transported all around
the world with a lot of "hitchhikers" like fungi,
bacteria, viruses and of course, radioactive isotopes.
That was interesting to me because I have been working
so many years with atmospheric dust!

AA: Did you leave the job?

LM: I wanted to travel and look for adventure. Then I
came back in 1984 and had my daughter, Zephyr. To
support her, I worked at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons
Laboratory in California. I was working on the Yucca
Mountains project, an ongoing project for the last I5
years to find a suitable repository to store nuclear
waste from the nuclear weapons, nuclear power plant
and the DU programmes. Even though they spent over
US$3 billion of taxpayers' money, the government
wasn't able to build a repository. Instead I observed
extensive Science and contractor fraud on the most
important public works project in the history of the
US. In fact, the radioactive pollution and the secrecy
of the nuclear weapons programmes in the end will
destroy all of the nuclear superpowers. That's because
there is another greater superpower, and that is the
superpower of public opinion.

AA: So you became a whistle blower?

LM: Yes, in I991. I became completely disillusioned
with Science in the United States because I discovered
in those two years at Livermore that most scientists
are "prostitutes" for the military or corporations. I
remember standing in my laboratory in 1991, looking
out of the window, and I said I didn't want to be a
science prostitute anymore. I packed everything into
my car, drove out the gate and said 'I'M OUT OF JAIL.
OH, THIS FEELS WONDERFUL!'

AA: Did they try to stop you?

LM: No, but little did I know that when you step over
that line, that invisible line, and you go against the
nuclear power programme, you get tangled in the
politics of radiation. I was completely devastated by
the retaliation by the University of California and
the Livermore lab. They bankrupted me, they broke into
my house, my car, they kidnapped my daughter when she
was I3 and I didn't see her until she was I8. They try
to run whistleblowers off the road and they have
killed some. They did everything to intimidate and
frighten me. All I can say is that when the going gets
tough the tough get going. I learned to be much
stronger and I'm lucky to be alive. The best thing of
all is that I lost all of my fear. Now they are afraid
of' me.

AA: You are an inspiration!

LM: What really changed my life was my first trip to
Japan in 2000. I was invited to the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Conference and in
those two Peace Museums I saw the truth about the
horrors of nuclear weapons. (In 1945 the uranium bomb
named "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima. A few
clays later "Fat Man", a plutonium bomb, was dropped
on Nagasaki.)

In the Hiroshima museum there are pictures of the
people with their skin dripping from them and the
shadows of the people on the stone walls and on the
steps where people were sitting when they were
vapourised by the effects of the bomb. It was
astounding to see that. I was okay until I was
standing under the model of "Little Boy", the bomb
they dropped in Hiroshima.

Because I was a nuclear weapons laboratory whistle
blower, I had all the cameras in my face and did so
many television and newspaper interviews. Then in the
Hiroshima Peace Museum I looked up and saw "Little
Boy". I felt so terrible because I knew that
scientists like me had made that possible. I started
to cry and I could not stop. That was the moment when
I decided that I had to spend the rest of my life
educating the public about the terrible health impact
of nuclear technologies. I could not do anything more
important as a mother, a scientist and a Pacifist. And
then a miracle happened, after seven years of constant
research and speaking out all over the world.

Tun Dr Mahathir invited me to the War Crimes
Conference in Kuala Lumpur because he believes that
radiation is the most important issue today. Of
course, he and his wife are both medical doctors, so
they could understand how devastating radiation can be
to biological systems. He is the first world leader to
take up the radiation issue.
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