August 8, 2006


Brevity may be the soul of wit in the original meaning of that term: the act of intelligence. (I.e., the act that cuts through all the ideological bullshit and goes straight to the heart of horror.)

Today is the 61st anniversary of the dropping of an Atomic Bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The first act of global, state terrorism. (The second three days later on Nagasaki, the city with the largest Christian population in Japan.)

Today a new kind of nuclear war is being fought-- as harbinger to the next kind of nuclear war, which will be fought tomorrow.

The suppressed story about the Iraq War is the use by the U.S. of depleted uranium weaponry. The cut to the chase: the U.S. littered Iraq with between 315 and 350 tons of depleted uranium during Operation Desert Storm. Five times as much was used during the 2003 invasion. Every shell shot from an Abrams tank contains 10 pounds of DU.

The result: all of Iraq is now littered with radioactive dust from DU. The Departments of Energy and Defense, of course, continue to argue that there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that DU is harmful. Massive evidence exists to the contrary. (See online, for example, Depleted Uranium Watch, the Uranium Medical Research Center in Toronto and the Traprock Peace Center. See also chapter 4 of Death’s Dream Kingdom.) The result, for Iraq, is a condition beyond genocide. I term it eco-cide: the deliberate production of a condition of permanent radiological, biological and/or chemical contamination whereby death comes to inhabit an entire ecosystem.

Desert Storm was not, however, the first use of DU. DU was used by Israel under U.S. army supervision in 1973! Nor is Iraq the latest territory subjected to DU radiation contamination. At the end of last month the U.S. rushed shipments of at least 100 GBU28 "bunker buster" bombs containing depleted uranium warheads to Israel for use against targets in Lebanon and Gaza.

And so, with due regard for all semantic considerations, what we have today in Lebanon deserves to be classified as a Nuclear War. Fixation on Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs has blinded us to the steady advance by the military-industrial complex of alternative nuclear weapons. The logic of their use is, of course, always the same: the justification of the next step. DU in Iraq and Lebanon today. In Iran tomorrow…? And then…? But have no fear, the only country that ever dropped an Atom Bomb will continue to preside over deciding who gets to be a member of the nuclear club, no matter how many countries it has to nuke to retain that hegemony.

These are thoughts to keep in mind as we remember again those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What’s that adage about those who fail to understand the past?