The work of one researcher in the United States that strongly suggests links between depleted uranium and the Gulf War syndrome--a condition affecting many U.S. soldiers and working people in Iraq--has gained a wider audience in the wake of the growing alarm in Europe.

Depleted uranium is an extremely hard and heavy substance used in antitank projectiles. It characteristically ignites upon impact, boring a hole through the steel armor-plating used in military vehicles. A by-product of processing uranium for nuclear power plants, it is relatively low in radioactivity and cannot penetrate the body through the skin.

The U.S. military brass has used these facts to back up claims that there is no link between the ammunition and health problems of soldiers.

Recently, however, U.S. authorities, including a Pentagon spokesperson, acknowledged findings released by the United Nations showing that depleted uranium contains traces of highly radioactive plutonium, neptunium, and americium. The Pentagon official said this was due to "production flaws." Laboratories in Switzerland and Finland also announced that shrapnel they had examined contained small amounts of uranium 236, a substance that can only be produced inside a nuclear reactor and is commonly found in spent fuel rods.

"The problem," said French physicist Pierre Roussel, "is that this [uranium 236] isotope can only be produced in a reactor, where it is accompanied by far more radioactive elements."

After these facts became known, "Germany's ambassador took the highly unusual step of calling in the acting U.S. ambassador in Berlin to complain about the information the U.S. supplied about weapons containing depleted uranium," wrote the Financial Times January 18. "It was not just a friendly discussion," one German defense official told the media. The Times wrote, "A U.S. official added that the possibility of plutonium traces had been factored in to risk assessments by experts."

Cover-up, double-talk, and misleading statements have for decades been hallmarks of the response by the U.S. government and nuclear industry to concern about the effects of radiation. But Washington's wars on the European continent against the people of Yugoslavia, its growing rivalries with other imperialist powers there, and strains within the NATO military alliance are making it harder to maintain a unanimous official line that there is no link between the ammunition and widespread illnesses among civilian populations and troops alike.

Evidence suggesting links between the Gulf War syndrome and depleted uranium has resulted from the researches of Asaf Durakovic, a retired United States Army colonel who worked as a chief of nuclear medicine at the Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, in the 1990s.

Durakovic says that when he started tests on 24 Gulf War veterans referred by a college in New Jersey, urine samples were lost and his efforts to get more precise tests were discouraged. He was eventually dismissed and the post abolished in 1997. A VA spokesperson said, "we did not need a full-time nuclear medicine physician."

Durakovic is respected in his field, having worked for 30 years in Britain, Canada, and the United States. He has won praise from the Defense Nuclear Agency and has presented papers to international forums on nuclear medicine. Following his dismissal he has continued his work with privately funded research in Canada, examining the body fluids of more than 40 soldiers who were deployed in the Mideast during Washington's assault on Iraq.

Using the technique of mass spectrometry, which measures the relative abundance of each isotope in the body, Durakovic says that he is finding evidence of depleted uranium and uranium 236 in 62 percent of the veterans he examines, including in urine and in bone material. When depleted uranium is blown up, he explains, "it changes into uranium oxides --tiny, hard particles that are microns in size. They can stay airborne as aerosols, be blown around by the wind, and fall down as dust. Because they are the size of microns people can inhale them." Once in the bloodstream, they can be carried to bones, lymph nodes, lungs, or kidneys, lodge there, and cause damage as they emit low-level radiation over a period of time.

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