Ouch! Talkpermalink
Disturbing news from Falluja
- First
- « Previous
- Next »
- Last
-
A special report in today’s Guardian tell of ‘huge abnormalities in children of city that saw some of the fiercest fighting – and largest quantities of munitions – of the Iraq war’. The children in question are, overwhelmingly, born since the 2003; but, more especially after the 2004 attacks on Fallujah.
Rather than get into a blame game; doctors in the city point to a raft of reasons that could explain the birth defects: malnutrition, the psychological status of parents, drug use, chemicals or radiation.
Let’s remember that Fallujah was involved in two of the fiercest and prolonged battles during the Iraq war. In 2004 the city underwent a two-month bombardment by the US occupying forces; many of the munitions used in Iraq are coated with depleted uranium (DU), a factor often cited when investigating anomalies such as those in Fallujah today.
The recent news from Afghanistan is bleak; and, it saddens me to hear of soldiers needlessly killed and injured. However, we should also hear the other side of the story, as casualties of war don’t all wear uniforms.
-
This is a reply to this message.
-
What a well thought out response, David.
This is a reply to this message.
-
>> What a well thought out response, David. <<
Strangely enough some of us here have coordination problems and occasionally hit the wrong button.This is a reply to this message.
-
DU (Depleted Uranium) is used in armour peircing rounds for use in tanks and Aircraft like the A-10 Thunderbolt. They would not have been used for bombarding the city of Falluja. That would have been high explosive rounds and probably cluster munitions from both aircraft launched bombs and artillery rounds.
This is a reply to this message.
-
>> The children in question are, overwhelmingly, born since the 2003; but, more especially after the 2004 attacks on Fallujah. <<
Any births in 2003 or early 2004 make linking this to the battles in Fallujah extremely tenuous. If a report can show me good science then I'll back its conclusions without hesitation, but births prior to the battles need to be explained and I don't see that happening here.
>> many of the munitions used in Iraq are coated with depleted uranium (DU) <<
To understand the issues we need to understand what DU is, why DU is used, how DU is used and how it might be a problem.
What DU is: DU is a waste product from the refining of Uranium into Enriched Uranium. Uranium contains two isotopes, the highly active U235 used by nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons and the weaker U238. Refined Uranium ore contains too little U235 to sustain a chain reaction, so it needs to be further refined into Enriched Uranium by splitting off some of the U238, this is usually done using gaseous Uranium Hexafluoride in centrifuges. Enriched Uranium comes out of one side of the process, DU out of another.
Why it is used: DU is used in weapons for three reasons: it's extremely dense, it's self-sharpening when it shatters and it's pyrophoric. The density and self-sharpening mean that it is good at penetrating armour, particularly in the form of a long-rod penetrator or Armour Penetrating, Fin Stabilised, Depleted Uranium (APFSDU) round fired from a tank gun. For the period between 1980 and the early 2000s, armour technology had reached the point that only APFSDU rounds could directly penetrate the best tank armour. Smaller calibre autocannon, the 20-30mm weapons used by aircraft and infantry fighting vehicles used DU based AP rounds to give them the best performance against more lightly armoured vehicles and the weaker spots on tanks. In both cases the pyrophoric nature of DU, that it spontaneously ignites when reduced to dust by impact with hard surfaces, served as a secondary kill mechanism. DU liners were also added to some shells and bomblets to take advantage of the pyrophoric effect.
How is it used? APFSDU tank rounds are used against armoured vehicles or to a lesser extent bunkers, for less heavily fortified buildings and vehicles explosive shells are better. The smaller autocannon can be used to suppress targets in heavily fortified buildings or to directly engage ones in lighter structures and against vehicles other than tanks.
Why is it a problem? DU's primary problem is not its radiactivity. U238 is a comparatively weak alpha emitter and alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper, but it is a significant heavy metal poison and data on its effects when present in the environment in significant amounts of dust are lacking.
What is being done about DU? There's a slow move away from DU. During the Cold War DU was the only substance both dense enough and cheap enough to be deployed in the quantities necessary. Now that militaries and the threats are smaller, tungsten has become a feasible replacement, despite its higher costs, but replacing the existing inventory would still cost hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars.
We also need to look at the specifics of Fallujah and what happened there. The insurgents in Fallujah had prepared the city to be defended house by house. This is perhaps the most intense kind of fighting imaginable and notoriously destructive, c.f. Leningrad, Stalingrad and Berlin in WWII (though the forces engaged in Fallujah were small scale in comparison). Clearing fortified buildings could sometimes be done with guided bombs or artillery fire, but as often as not the troops charged with clearing Fallujah only found that the building was fortified once they were inside. Autocannon and tank guns had some utility here, but primarily the battle relied on infantry clearing the buildings room to room with personal weapons, grenades and demolition charges. This means that there was considerable use of White Phosphorus grenades for room clearing, together with extensive use of incendiary devices by both sides (as IEDs by the insurgents and as thermobaric weapons and to enhance demo charges by the coalition forces) and that the city was subjected to extensive amount of fire, soot and smoke for almost two months during the second battle.
If there is a deformity cluster in Fallujah then obviously it needs investigating, but to simply lay the blame on DU without any kind of systematic analysis is poor science. Deformity births prior to the battle are a major problem and there are significant other factors that need to be investigated and eliminated. At a quick analysis research needs to look at white phosphorus, soot and similar particulates and carcinogens from the fires, the use of thermobaric weapons (I think this is unlikely, thermobarics are basically just exploding propane clouds with water and CO2 as the byproducts, but Fallujah was the first time the coalition deployed them extensively), other heavy metals used in, for example, the liners of shaped charges, and there are probably other factors an epidemiologist could come up with given both military and local knowledge. I'm not saying it's not down to DU, simply that we can't say that based on the science that has been done to date. And those pre-battle 2003 births are a major, major issue that absolutely needs to be explained.
Even if the responsibility for the deformities can be traced to the battles, there is a brutal calculus in war: how many lives do I save by sacrificing these lives? If I do X, then how many will die, and how many will live instead? It's starkest example is the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Operation Downfall, the Allied Invasion of Japan, was expected to generate between 250,000 and 400,000 allied dead (with a less favoured estimate of up to 1 million), and 5-10 million Japanese dead (widespread resistance by Japanese civilians was expected), by which metric the c200,000 atomic bombs deaths are justified many times over. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki debate is far more complicated than simply the raw figures, but they form a fundamental part of the analysis and similar logic must be applied in trying to analyse any military action, including Fallujah.
It's clear that Fallujah was a turning point in Iraq, the final defeat of attempts at open revolt as opposed to guerilla warfare. That means subsequent casualties have to be measured against the casualties likely in an extended conventional struggle if the city was not taken. The overwhelming likelihood is that an extended struggle would have developed in much the same way as we have seen Iraq develop historically, but over a longer period and with greater casualties.
War is about asking hard questions. If the fighting is responsible, then is it good that babies are being born with deformities? Obviously not. But if that fighting results in far fewer casualties overall, then was that fighting necessary? Justified? The only moral decision?
This is a reply to this message.
-
Thank you David, for your explanation.
This is a reply to this message.
- First
- « Previous
- Next »
- Last
Live community panel
Vote
Vote
© MMIX