THE ASIAN AGE
by Ramesh Ramachandran
New Delhi, Feb. 14, 2007: An American geoscientist has warned that India is "downwind" of Iran and is, therefore, predisposed to the harmful, radiation-laded winds that will blow eastwards if the United States were to attack Iran using depleted uranium in dirty bombs or bunker busters like it did in 2003 in Iraq. A bunker buster is said to contain about two tonnes of depleted uranium.
Ms Leuren Moret, a former employee of the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in the US, who now works as an independent activist on the use of depleted uranium, warned of the health and environmental effects of the use of depleted uranium by the US in armour-piercing shells, which will have disastrous consequences for generations of Indians to come.
"India has [already] been contaminated by the depleted uranium used in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Lebanon and Afghanistan, which is blowing off the Himalayas all over northern India," she told this newspaper during a visit to New Delhi. Ms Moret said, "What India [needs] to understand is first of all they’ve been nuked, they’ve been completely contaminated through contamination of the Himalayas... you don’t have to drop a nuclear bomb on a country to nuke it, you can contaminate the water, the soil and the air, and no one even knows. India doesn’t even realise this."
She cautions that this "covert nuclear war" extends to selling nuclear power plants to India and other "tiger economies". "[Selling nuclear plants] is second covert nuclear war... we will have a tsunami of chronic illness [and] humanity won’t survive this covert nuclear war," she observed. Ms Moret, who is a past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, warned of an exponential increase in diseases like diabetes and cancer in India because of this contamination.
"India [has] a pandemic of diabetes and it is from the atmospheric testing [conducted by certain countries] which contaminated the Himalayas," she asserted. She cited Japanese, Norwegian and British government data to suggest that there is a global increase in the incidence of cancer, diabetes and other diseases. "We’ve got it all — obesity, cancer, low birthweight, etc — and we’re exporting it to [India]," she told this newspaper.
Adviser to the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), Prof. M.G.K. Menon, says that what constitutes a crime against humanity merits serious consideration. "We have a lot of depleted uranium in India but we have never put it on armour piercing shells. We have used tungsten," he said, referring to Ms Moret’s claims. Prof. Menon added, "The depleted uranium is used for its weight, burning capability and armour piercing characteristic... The US used it in Yugoslavia and Iraq.
Uranium vaporises [and can contaminate] soil, water and [can get] into humans. It is alpha-emitting and has a long life, therefore, anything ingested is damaging for generations to come." A former Union minister of state for science and technology, Prof. Menon has held several important, posts including scientific adviser to the Prime Minister, scientific adviser to the defence minister, director-general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation and chairman of Isro.
Ms Moret tells sceptics who label all of this as conspiracy theory that there are "very well-established studies" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims and on the Chernobyl survivors establishing that radiation causes diabetes. "It’s not just a correlation, it’s a causal effect," she asserted.
Original article: www.deccan.com/home/homedetails.asp
URL of this article: http://peaceinspace.blogs.com/peaceinspaceorg/2007/02/attack_on_iran_.html
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