Have DU — Will Travel: Interview with Leuren Moret

‘Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war.’

ICONOCLAST: What do you think of the Busby report? Do you think it’s pretty accurate?

MORET: Oh, I think it’s totally accurate. Those numbers are from the British government. There is absolutely no doubt at all that those numbers are completely accurate. That facility has been there for years. It was established out of concern for the public to monitor the nuclear powerplant emissions and the nuclear weapons facility emissions in Britain. They have the best equipment. They have the best technicians. They have the best scientists doing all of that monitoring, whose numbers have to be completely correct. If anything, they would be lower than the actual amounts that they were measuring. They would never make them higher.

ICONOCLAST: How would you describe what happened?

MORET: What happened is Dr. Busby is on a British government committee and he is an official scientific advisor on low level radiation to the British government. He also works with the European Parliament and they asked him to produce an independent report on low level radiation for the European Parliament. He produced something with 45 other scientists called the ECRR Report. It came out in January of 2003. I took it all over the Eastern U.S. and was introducing it and talking to it before they even had a press conference and released it in Britain. He went to Bosnia and Cosovo and collected depleted uranium samples and we’ve all been very concerned about the transport of these tiny particles all over the world. I am really the one who brought this issue out into the open. It was perfectly reasonable and justified for him to ask the Aldermaston facility for those numbers. They’d always given them to him before, but when he asked them two years ago, out of concern about the transport of these materials, they refused to give them to him. I asked him why and he said that. Three years ago, Haliburton took over that facility. I asked, did Haliburton take over a British government air monitoring facility and he said yes. That’s very interesting and they’re the ones who wouldn’t give you the numbers and he said yes. Last Jan.1, in 2005, the Freedom of Information Act went into law and was effective on that day and that’s the day he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the numbers. They still refused to give them to him and so there was a long delay. Finally, Haliburton gave him the numbers, but they wouldn’t give him any of the 2003 numbers for the Iraq war. When I saw how high that number was, 1,700, I understood exactly why they had taken the facility over three years before. It was too high.

ICONOCLAST: What should the numbers be?

MORET: Less than 30. We should only be measuring natural uranium in the air that is coming out of mineral sources and natural sources. There already is contanimation from nuclear weapons testing and even lower orbital space is contaminated with uranium and uranium decay products. I discovered a paper on it in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, which was written in 2002. That is a very, very small amount. What they’re measuring now are these horrendous peaks that exactly correlate with the battlefield events in Iraq and Kosovo and Bosnia and Afganastan. And there is even a piece during a Chechnya conflict in ‘98 and ‘99, which indicates the Russians are using it, too, in Chechnya.

ICONOCLAST: If you have shock and awe going on in Iraq and the readings are being monitored in the UK, is it like a sweep of these going through there and then you have your spikes and then it goes back down, is that in the air?

MORET: Yes. This is just pollution to have a point source, a battlefield or whatever that is releasing this into the air. On those filters in Britain, there were also sand and dust particles that were 1 to 5 microns that also came from the Middle East. These are well known all over Europe because sand and dust storms that originate in the Middle East and Central Asia and especially North Africa have been identified for centuries in Europe. They were called blood rains because in the hot desert conditions, iron oxide coats the grains of sand and dust and when they’re transported North over Europe and they’re rained out, those iron oxides stain the rain kind of the color of a weak wine and they were a bad omen. Boy, they sure are a bad omen now, because they’re also transporting radioactive isotopes. Now, that sand and dust, we already know where that’s coming from, were on the filters with the much smaller particles of depleted uranium, which the average particle size for atmospheric test is a tenth of a micron. These DU particles form at really high temperatures under battlefield conditions and they’re very tiny. They’re called nanoparticles.

ICONOCLAST: Do they land on the ground?

MORET: No. These are so small that the movement in the air currents and the big convection cells which are weather fronts and stuff, keep them suspended. They don’t settle out. They have to be rained out or snowed out or permanently suspended.

ICONOCLAST: If this is in the air in the UK and it rains, do they become part of the soil?

MORET: Yes. They rain on buildings and rooftops and on trees and leaves and on people. Because they’re wet, they stick to whatever they land on and it is almost impossible to remove it.

ICONOCLAST: They radiate when they’re there?

MORET: Yes. So, it’s causing an epidemic of melanoma, globally. That means skin cancer, especially in children. There are increases in infant mortality now being reported in the NEW YORK TIMES a couple of years ago. I saw an article in January of 2003, Mysterious Increases in Infant Mortality in 20 Regions of Europe. It’s a global disaster. There’s a frog dieoff going on. Frogs are dying off all over the world. The worst thing is the global increases in diabetes. Diabetes is an immediate response just within months to these depleted uranium battles. We can see especially huge increases in the Gulf states which are Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and then on up the east coast. Continued On Next Page Leuren Moret, of Berkeley, Calif., is an independent scientist who works on radiation and public health issues with communities around the world. She earned her B.S. in Geology at U.C. Davis in 1968, and her M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. Moret is a geoscientist who became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. She now dedicates her life to revealing and understanding the actual health effects of radiation exposure. She has worked extensively on the impact of radiation on public health from nuclear power plants and atmospheric testing and how radiation moves through the environment. Moret works with the Radiation and Public Health Project, a group of independent scientists and has written a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations subcommission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions. She has been trained on radiation issues by a former Manhattan Project Scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout. Together with Dr. Hari Sharma, they have studied high levels of depleted uranium measured in the tissue samples of 70 residents of Basra, Iraq, who died after the Gulf War from internal exposure to depleted uranium. She wrote the forword to Akira Tashiro’s award-winning "Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium," and appears in the recently released DVD "Beyond Treason" that was produced by Power Hour Productions http://www.beyondtreason.com/, an 89-minute film that presents comprehensive documentation from United States Government archives of a massive cover-up, including military and civilian experimentation, dating back over 60 years.

ICONOCLAST: How do you know they’re attributed to DU?

MORET: Because the increases correlate each year with the battles. When there aren’t battles or that stuff isn’t transported sufficiently across the Atlantic, then there is not much of an increase. It drops off or stabilizes.

ICONOCLAST: The reason the Gulf states are affected more is because of the Trade Winds?

MORET: Yes. These are not hurricanes. These are huge sand and dust storms that are a million square miles in size.

ICONOCLAST: Are the affects permanent or if they quit using this type of ammunition, would it reverse.

MORET: Well, it’s like atmospheric testing contamination of radioactive pollution of the atmosphere. As it’s rained out and snowed out, it’s deposited in the environment and it sticks to any surface where it lands. It’s removed from the atmosphere. The most harmful pathway of exposure is inhalation. If it is sticking to things, at least it’s not in the air and eventually it’s going to end up in the ocean. But that will be a long, long time.

ICONOCLAST: One thing that the TIMES article suggested was that radiation experts also said that other environmental sources were more likely to blame. What would they be referring to?

MORET: This is typical spin. They’ve been saying this for years and they say, well, it’s in your backyard. It’s in the soil. That’s true, but the concentration of uranium that occurs throughout the earth is like one part per two and a half million. So, it’s a very low concentration and a lot of it is in the ocean. It’s not getting these huge concentrations in Britain on air filters at atomic monitoring facilities because it’s from a natural source. This is airborne. The air monitoring station isn’t just measuring at one site. They had over five sites where they were measuring these numbers and they were actually higher away from the actual facility where the emissions are coming out. If it was from that facility, the numbers would have been the highest at the facility because it would have been the point source. The fact that you’re finding Middle Eastern dust and sand on the filters with the DU indicates that it is coming from the Middle East.

ICONOCLAST: You can tell what kind of sand it is by some kind of test?

MORET: Oh sure. All the nuclear facilities in every country in Europe — Greece and Romania and Italy — they monitor every single day, those sand and dust storms from whatever is coming from whatever direction. They’ve always done that. During the battle of Kosovo and Bosnia, the European Parliament requested that all those countries do air monitoring of radioactive pollution and of chemical pollution coming from the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia. These were very extensive reports and are available from the EU. I don’t think there is any place it’s more monitored than Europe because they just have the infrastructure and the facilities and they know everything.

ICONOCLAST: The spikes that occurred, when they occurred, were an oddity? You wouldn’t have spikes normally.

MORET: There has to be a point first, to have such high levels. The highs and lows from the weather conditions and the direction of the wind currents is consistent with these high levels in Britain.

ICONOCLAST: It says in this article that on two occasions, levels exceeded this ratio in which the Environmental Agency must be informed so within safety limits.

MORET: They say that, but none of it is safe. A report issued by the National Academy of Sciences came out in July. It’s the seventh report over the last 30 or 40 years, which is an official scientific academy report in the United States and it stated very clearly there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

ICONOCLAST: They also say in this article that other experts says local environmental sources, such as a power station,
were more likely at fault. Whatwould a power station be?

MORET: A nuclear power plant.

ICONOCLAST: Wouldn’t they have had
some kind of major. . .

MORET: It would have had to be a
Chernobyl event in Britain, which they
couldn’t hide because of their country’s,
you know, I told you they are all monitoring,
they would have been alarmed. It
would have had to been a huge accident.

ICONOCLAST: So, that doesn’t hold
any water.
MORET: No. By the way, the abundance
of uranium in the earth’s crust is
2.4 parts per million. Sea water is actually
smaller. It has a very low concentration.
What they always say is that it’s in
the soil all over your yard and you can
dig around and its there. Or, it’s coming
from another source. It’s coming from a
nuclear power plant nearby. It just can’t
be true because the air currents were
coming directly from the Middle East and
they weren’t being transported from
other power plants or sources in Britain.
Dr. Busby, because he’s an expert on
radiation and this kind of stuff, because
of how I told you this is transported all
over the world, it’s completely mixed in
the global atmosphere in one year, no
matter where they used it. It’s just mixed
that quickly. It’s amazing. In the report
that was produced after the first Gulf
War, it was from all the oil well fires and
all the munitions and all the battlefields.
That was a thick, black cloud that covered
the area for a whole year after Gulf
War I. That city had material that was
deposited globally in the ice record in
tropical glaciers, on the Antarctic Ice
Sheet, in Hawaii, in the Himalayas, in the
Alps, and a year later, it was deposited in
the ice record all over the world. What
happens is that the equator is very warm
and the poles are very cold and this temperature
gradient caused a mixing in the
atmosphere of hot and cold air. They
need to all be the same temperature.
That causes of this violent mixing and the
new particles are part of all of that. They
are just globally mixed in one year.

ICONOCLAST: What happens if the
levels get real high in the waters and fish
end up with . . .

MORET: They don’t need to be high.
Low level radiation is devestating. It’s a
thousand times more harmful, according
to Busby’s European Committee on radiation
risk report.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies
only considered cancer and birth defects
as legitimate diseases caused by radiation
exposure. They only considered the
exposure of the victims to neutrons and
gamma rays, which were external. They
said there was no internal contamination.
We know that that’s not true. Everybody
in Japan was contaminated by the
bombs. It wasn’t until Cherynobyl when
they could actually measure the radiation
and fields and dose. Then they looked at
each chromosome and determined that
the gamuts were 1,000 times higher than
what that ICRP model would have predicted.
Then they also counted the genetic
mutation in wheat and in mice.
They knew what the exact dose was and
they saturated from the ICRP model how
many defects there should be in the DNA
and they counted a dozen times higher
or a dozen times more than had been
predicted.
We know the ICRP model is faulty. It
can’t be used at all for internal exposure.
It wasn’t done correctly, anyway. It was
perfectly reasonable and legitimate for
Dr. Busby to request those air monitoring
numbers from Aldermaston, because
we know that that’s the dust from the
Middle East. We know it ends up in Europe
and Britain. I’ve been to England in
the morning and in the evening. I went
out in the street, and there was this red
sand all over cars and all over windshields
and in the streets. That was from
North Africa.

ICONOCLAST: Should the people in
Britain be alarmed?
MORET: Yes! But there is nothing they
can do. We have to stop these weapons.
They’re altering atmospheric testing.
The equilavent of 40 thousand
Hiroshima bombs have been released
into the atmosphere. The
amount of radiation included with
the emissions from the nuclear
power plants have created, according
to Dr. Roseleaf herself, the
death and mutilation and diseases
in 1.3 billion people. It’s had a global
effect. What they’ve released
since 1991 is the equalivent of at
least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs.
That’s 10 times more than during
atmospheric testing. We are having
a very serious public health
threat globally. You can see it in the
infant mortality increases. They
started down as soon as they
stopped testing in 1963. They kept
going down until these darn
unanium wars started in 1991.
We’re having a global frog die-out.
They’re living in the fresh water, rain
waters that is washing out. We’re having
a decline in fisheries globally. We’re just
stripping this beautiful planet of all these
diverse forms of life.

ICONOCLAST: This absorption into
the atmosphere globally, there is no safe
place?

MORET: There is no safe place. There
is no possible way to escape from it.
ICONOCLAST: Are there uranium detectors
that people can buy?

MORET: Yes. You’re going to have
much higher readings along the Gulf
Coast region, right where you are. I
looked at the diabetes rates in those
states and Texas really got slammed. It
goes up the East Coast. All of the nuclear
power plants in the U.S. are on the East
Coast. People are being exposed to various
products from the nuclear power
plants emission, but they’re getting exposed
to DU, too, the decay products.
What is the most harmful effect from
both exposures, surprisingly enough, is
particulate from the nanoparticle. That
is a nonspecific catalyst. Each one of
them has an enzyme effect. Catalytic or
enzyme poisons are biologically the most
damaging of all. That’s why the soldiers
and people who were exposed are sick
within 24 to 48 hours. It’s that catalytical
effect.

ICONOCLAST: If you live close to a
power plant there’s a chance . . .

MORET: You’re absolutely being internally
exposed 24 hours a day. Every
breath that you take. A 100 mile radius is
where you get the highest exposure. We
collected chicken eggshells and baby
teeth from people living around the Indian
Point Reactor and the levels in the
chicken eggshells was the same as in the
baby teeth. It’s just completely poisioning
the air, the soil, the food, the water, and
blood. These tiny particles go right
through your skin. They go through everything
and a really good example of the
horrible effect is the World Trade Center
disaster. All of the huge numbers of metal
and tiny particles, the highest ever measured
in the United States, in fact, I think
around the world, were measured in the
month after the Trade Center disaster.

ICONOCLAST: Is that because of fires
or explosions.

MORET: The fire. That building came
down and all this kinetic energy, you
know all the energy that it takes to build
a building and carry all those materials
up, when that building collapses, that is
kinetic energy which is released and it
created a very hot pile which continued
to burn for months.

ICONOCLAST: Did the EPA take action?
MORET: Well, the EPA scientists were
very alarmed about it and about the
nanoparticle pollution in the air, but they
weren’t allowed to say anything, because
of the administrator who was a coverup
artist. She and her husband had very
strong ties, including personal investments
in companies that were related to
the insurance companies in the World
Trade Center. The EPA scientists were
not allowed to say anything.

ICONOCLAST: So people breathed all
these particulates.
MORET: Yes.
ICONOCLAST: What do you think is
the significance of Busby’s report, overall.

MORET: It concerns everything that
I’ve been saying for five years. That this
pollution of depleted uranium particles
are traveling. They’re being carried on
air currents and they’re being transported
all over the world.

ICONOCLAST: The reports by the
military and the U.S. and Britain are
wrong?

MORET: Well, the military job is to kill
people and to destroy things. Depleted
uranium is a very effective weapon. They
are not responsible for anything that happens
after that point. So they’re going to
cover it up so that they can continue to
use weapons that kill lots of people and
destroy things. The U.S. government, the
British government, the Australian government
and countries that have used
DU are violating international treaties.
They are violating the Geneva and the
Hague conventions. They’re violating the
Geneva 1925 gas protocal that prohibits
gas weapons that kill indiscriminately.
We are violating our own federal laws. It
meets the definition under U.S. federal
code in two of three categories. It’s a
weapon of mass destruction under our
own federal law. It violates U.S. military
law. What they’re really worried about is
that they would be financially responsible
for these terrible weapons and it would
totally bankrupt any country. We can
never clean up the Middle East or Central
Asia. We can’t clean up the atmosphere.
They poisioned our world.

ICONOCLAST: What is the long-term
prognosis for Iraq?

MORET: Oh, Iraq, the former
Yugoslovia, and Afghanastan are completely
uninhabitable now. No one should
be living there.

ICONOCLAST: Where do these people
go?

MORET: Well, they’re just going to
slowly die. Their DNA is already destroyed.

ICONOCLAST: How long does a soldier
have to be in Iraq before he has
health problems.

MORET: What Major Doug
Rokke told me, he was in charge
of the depleated uranium
cleanup team in Iraq, he said we
were sick within 24 to 48 hours.
Many soldiers have described
that . . .

ICONOCLAST: What kind of
sickness is it? What are the
symptoms?

MORET: The symptoms are
all of a sudden they started feeling
sick and muscle and joint
pain and rashes. Just a general
malaise and losing control of
their body functions. Some of
them came back in adult diapers
after Gulf War I. The men
have burning semen and they
internally contaminate their
wives. VANITY FAIR magazine’s
David Rose did a wonderful article.
A very indepth, very hard-hitting
article, in the December 2004 issue. I’ve
been to panels. Some of them are so sick
that their heads are down on their arms
all of the time except when they are talking.
They have chronic fatigue. Any surgery
or wounds that they have will not
heal because their immune system is
completely damaged by the DU particles.
One breath of air can give you a fatal dose.

ICONOCLAST: If this is happening
through the Trade Winds coming up
along the Texas coast, how would people
tell if they’ve had exposure?

MORET: They can’t tell. Suddenly,
people are getting diabetes. Infant mortality
is increasing. These are ways that
they can tell or they can notice, for instance,
the frog die-off in the environment.
These are environmental
indicators. There is no way to clean it up
and there is no way to avoid exposure.

ICONOCLAST: There is no test you
can do?

MORET: Yes. You can get a urine test,
but you should have a geology lab measure
the uranium in the urine and then
look at the isotopic ratio to see if it has
the signature of depleted uranium. It
won’t be the same as on natural uranium.
I don’t know of any uranium mines in
Texas. It wouldn’t be coming from the
environment.

ICONOCLAST: Is there anything else
you want to add?

MORET: We’ve got over 12 or 14 depleted
uranium bills in the state legislatures
and we did that because we couldn’t
get anywhere with the Federal government.
It’s been a presidential coverup
under President George Herbert Walker
Bush, under Clinton who used it in
Yugoslovia. It was under George Herbert
Walker Bush when it was used for the first
time on the battle field by the U.S. government
in 1991 in the Iraq war. George
W. Bush is responsible for using it inAfghanastan and Iraq. These three
presidents are the three biggest war
criminals in the history of the entire
world. They’ve gotten away with it because
they’re spending hundreds of
millions of dollars on the coverup. As
long as they can keep people studying
it and there is no definitive proof and
stuff like that, statements like that are
coming out from established scientists
in the Pentagon, then the big lie continues.
We know by this horrific information
published by Dr. Busby that,
indeed, this is an environmental issue.
It is a global issue and its all being
transported all over the world. The
Aldermasten Report is the most important
one that has come out so far.

ICONOCLAST: What are the hopes of
the bills before the Legislature.

MORET: What I did was take the Connecticut
bill that got bogged down in the
Conneticut Legislature, requiring mandatory
testing by the state of returning
soldiers who want it, to Louisiana in April
of 2005. They had voted unanimously in
the House and in their Assembly and the
governor signed it into law within eight
weeks of me giving it to them on April 19.
That was just astounding. I was really
shocked. A week later, it was attached to
Congressman McDermott’s depleted
uranium bill before Congress and, in fact,
it was your interview with Doug and me
and Melissa Sterry in that whole issue of
the paper. I mean you’re President
Bush’s hometown newspaper in
Crawford, and your paper was attached
as a supporting document to that bill. So
everybody in the Pentagon and in Congress
read that, not to mention the VA
and probably the state department. Your
paper went all over the government.
That’s very important.

ICONOCLAST: But there are other
states that are following suit?

MORET: Yes. And now we have, actually,
the states have legal jurisdiction
over the National Guard so they’re able
to pass laws like specifically covering the
National Guard. They can’t do it for the
regular soldiers, they don’t have legal jurisdiction.
What we’re doing is forcing the
Pentagon and the Federal Government
to follow their own laws and directives
and orders to test soldiers; to train them
before they’re sent over there, soldiers
who’ll be handling it, and then to give
them medical treatment when they come
back and they’re sick. We’re forcing them
to do that for National Guard and then
the states are making the government
pay for it, the federal government, because
they’re violating their own laws
and mandates. It’s getting a lot of local
media attention. It’s getting activsts and
citizens all riled up about this issue and
then it’s making the other soldiers and
veterans who are not getting this treatment
angry because they’re entitled to
it too. So we’re pushing states against
Federal law.

ICONOCLAST: So about a third of the
states have moved forward on this.

MORET: We have it in the New York,
Vermont, Massachusetts, Legislature.
It’s going into California and Oregon.
It’s in Washington, Hawaii and I think
Michigan or Minnesota. Louisiana has
already passed it. Connecticut has
passed it into law. We’re really started
a snowball thing.

ICONOCLAST: Where do you start the
ball rolling. Does someone contact the
governor?

MORET: I think the most effective
thing is to find two Vietnam veterans.
They’ve already been through the Agent
Orange poision and all the lies of the government.
They’ve all been thrown in the
trash can and filed lawsuits that were dismissed.
The Vietnam veterans are really
the most dangerous group to the federal
government. They’ve been the most effective.
I gave it to two veterans in Louisiana
and they went into the Legislature
and looked them in the eye and said now,
you’re not going to turn down two Vietnam
veterans. It’s impossible to do that.
What happened just last week in the Hawaii
legislature is that Rep. Ito, who was
the chair of the Veterans Committee, refused
to introduce the depleted uranium
bill into the Legislature so Doug and I and
other experts started writing to the
Legislaters and encouraging the citizens
to put more pressure on Ito. A veteran
wrote a letter to Ito that said we’re a
group of 3,500 veterans that have agreed
to vote as a block and if you don’t put that
into the Legislature, we’re going to vote
you out. That’s effective. You have to do
something and you feel better already.
The hardest thing is to take that first step
and to do an action.

We need to remind people what Ghandi
said . . . "Even a small lamp dispells the
darkness."

Depleted uranium is the trojan horse
of nuclear war. It keeps killing and there
is no way to turn it off and there is no way
to clean it up. After we’re all dead and
wipe out our own species, the earth will
heal itself.

Leuren Moret, of Berkeley, Calif., is an independent scientist who works on radiation and public health issues with communities around the world. She earned her B.S. in Geology at U.C. Davis in 1968, and her M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978.

Moret is a geoscientist who became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. She now dedicates her life to revealing and understanding the actual health effects of radiation exposure. She has worked extensively on the impact of radiation on public health from nuclear power plants and atmospheric testing and how radiation moves through the environment.

Moret works with the Radiation and Public Health Project, a group of independent scientists and has written a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations subcommission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions. She has been trained on radiation issues by a former Manhattan Project Scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout. Together with Dr. Hari Sharma, they have studied high levels of depleted uranium measured in the tissue samples of 70 residents of Basra, Iraq, who died after the Gulf War from internal exposure to depleted uranium.

She wrote the forword to Akira Tashiro’s award-winning "Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium," and appears in the recently released DVD "Beyond Treason" that was produced by Power Hour Productions http://www.beyondtreason.com/, an 89-minute film that presents comprehensive documentation from United States Government archives of a massive cover-up, including military and civilian experimentation, dating back over 60 years.