Saturday May 17, 2003

This is horrific news - the scene of yellow cake (i.e.
refined uranium ore) contamination at Al-Tuwaitha, Iraq.
The news was on air as a part of the Fuji TV Midnight News
program. I saw US troops with a Geiger counter guiding
reporters in the Al-Tuwaitha Nuclear Complex while a
running telop reads,
“the counter registers a value 700 times higher than that
of the background radiation.”

What happened there?

At the Al-Tuwaitha Nuclear Complex, the largest nuclear
facility in Iraq, dozens of drums containing natural
uranium called
“yellow cake” were looted and their contents were
discarded all over the site. Radioactive contamination
due to the discarded uranium has been expanding into
neighboring residential areas and beyond. The looters did
not want to steal uranium, but the drums! For them,
uranium was just useless material.

Yellow cake is refined uranium ore, which contains not
only natural uranium but also thorium, radium, radon and
other radioactive elements that occur in the uranium decay
process. Among them, radon is gaseous, so that its
high-concentration gas may have filled the warehouse in
which yellow cake had been stored for a long time. The
looters invaded this building. They must have been
exposed to and severely affected by this radioactive
contamination.

It is very dangerous to approach such a contaminated site.
To my dismay, the guiding US troops and our reporters from
Fuji TV were all without protection – no mask, no
protection gear. They approached the entrance of the
warehouse. Around its slightly opened door, I saw a heap
of yellow cake discarded. It looked like the US army
stationed there had not done anything about it.

The scene changed to an interview with a family in a
neighboring town, who claimed that they had stored water
in one of those looted yellow-cake drums. The drum was no
longer there, but their small children started to get
rashes all over their bodies – the symptom of
uranium
’s metallic toxin. This symptom was also claimed by
their grow-ups. Clearly, the situation is very serious.

At the Al-Tuwaitha complex, there are many eroded drums
with holes, discarded in the open. Because they look like
they have not been under supervision for a long time, they
may contain nuclear waste. If no protective measures are
taken, the waste will contaminate soil as well as deep
underground water.

According to this TV report and the Asahi/Kyodo news
flashes, such contamination did not occur when the Iraq
army was in charge. It looks like the looting occurred
after the Iraq army ran away with the US army approaching.
But, this explanation is not plausible. It is reported
that there were about 1,000 nuclear engineers at that time
and a small amount of looting could not cause such
devastation. It is probable that when the US army invaded
the complex, they broke the security system and after that
they took no measures. So, there was no way to prevent
armed residents from looting the complex. This is one of
the war crimes committed by the US forces in Iraq.

There is another point of view for this incident. The
Al-Tuwaitha complex was the center of the Iraq nuclear
program and has kept various facilities necessary to
operate the nuclear reactor destroyed in the 1981 bombing
by Israel. So, if Iraq had wanted to make atomic bombs,
the complex would have been the center of the operations.
Why did the US army take no measure to prevent looting at
the place in which the wanted WMDs were most likely
hidden? We can draw the conclusion that the search for
WMDs was just a convenient excuse to fend off the
international opposition to the Iraq invasion.

Although yellow cake is useless without enrichment, it
should be strictly supervised as material for nuclear
weapons. But, the US forces took no measure, leaving it
to be looted. This cannot be excused. They are heavily
responsible for this possible nuclear proliferation, along
with the radioactive exposure mentioned above.

Finally, I want to make an important point about this
incident. Yellow cake and depleted uranium (DU) are both
dangerous radioactive materials. It is possible that the
official US claim that DU is not dangerous has led to this
irresponsible treatment of yellow cake in Al-Tuwaitha.
Because the US forces have denied the danger of DU and
used it all over Iraq, they cannot or don
’t want to emphasize to their troops the danger of yellow
cake. They cannot or don
’t want to take any measures related to this incident.

Consequently, the same symptoms that Mr. Douglas Rokke
described about DU related disorders would spread among
residents in Al-Tuwaitha. Many cases of skin rash have
already reported. It is predictable that
respiratory-organ and whole-body symptoms, like
multiple-organ disorders, peripheral-nerve paralysis,
asthma, and dyspnea, will increase and frequent
occurrences of cancers will be reported in the long run.

Immediate measures to be taken include collecting anything
contaminated, such as yellow cake scattered over the
complex and drums brought out of the site, removing
contaminated soil, relocating and conducting health checks
on the residents of the contaminated areas, and giving
medical treatments to those with any symptoms. The
occupation army is definitely responsible for these
measures. Financial aid is also necessary because people
in Al-Tuwaitha have no means of making a living outside of
there.

Even if those reports show just the tip of the iceberg, we
are at least informed that not only DU contamination but
also this type of radioactive contamination is spreading
in Iraq. However, the residents of the contaminated areas
are left uninformed. This is also not excusable.

(For more information, please contact Mt. Yamazaki at
SDI00872 (at) nifty.com)

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(translator　Yukiko Maruta / TUP）