MWC NEWS Special Features,

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND IN IRAQ
Walter A. Davis
 
Preface: The Sum of All Fears

      Thanks to Seymour M. Hersch (The New Yorker, April 17,2006), Jorge Hirsch (ZNet, April 10, 2006) and others we now know that the unthinkable is being actively contemplated by the Bush Administration; namely, the use of nuclear weapons in an upcoming assault on Iran.  Moreover, this action will mark the beginning of a period in which the use of tactical nuclear weapons will become an official part of U.S. policy.  If these things happen one reason will be our failure to understand the present and the past. The past I refer to is marked by the continued effort of Americans to deny the horror and immorality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki despite the efforts of historians to establish the truth about those actions and the admission by the architects of those actions that the official explanation that we dropped the bomb to end the War and save countless lives was a myth constructed to hide our actual motives: (1) to avenge Pearl Harbor, (2) to create a laboratory so that our scientific and military personnel could study the effects of the Bomb, (3) to justify the amount of money spent developing it, and (4) to impress the Russians and the rest of the world with this opening salvo of the Cold War.  The first act of global terrorism. * The present I refer to is the continued use by the U.S. of depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq.  A large conference on The Nuclear Future held last year in New York was dedicated to the question whether the U.S. would cross the nuclear threshold in the near future.  At one of the plenary sessions I suggested that it already had crossed that threshold and that we should not remain fixated on the Bomb as the term of reference in deciding the issue. Although I cited a number of studies as the basis of my claim, that claim was greeted with stern rebukes from the “scientific” members of both panel and audience and became a common reference point for jokes and jeers the rest of the conference. Subsequent studies of the effects of Depleted Uranium have only served to strengthen the argument I presented there.  And so I would submit once again that the evidence is in, is in fact overwhelming: that the U.S. has been fighting a nuclear war in Iraq and that the mainline media continue to avoid that story like the plague.  With obvious results: getting away with that kind of nuclear weaponry in Iraq emboldens the Administration to take the next step in Iran.  There still is time to try to stop this.  And the best way perhaps is to now make public in all media what the U.S. has done and is continuing to do in Iraq, and in effect to every American serviceperson who serves there.

In hopes of contributing to the effort to bring that repressed story to attention I’ve asked the editors of MWCNews to make available here the fourth chapter of my recent book Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (London: Pluto Press, 2006).

      Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Beckett.  Theodor Adorno correctly termed Beckett’s greatest work Endgame the first work of art of the nuclear age. It was so because of Beckett’s uncompromising effort to comprehend the historical, ontological, and aesthetic implications of the Bomb.  Beckett took up the challenge Einstein set when he said that “the Bomb changed everything—except the way we think.”  Because the latter has not yet taken place we today again face the unthinkable.  To reformulate a well known maxim: those who do not understand the present are condemned to its more horrifying future. 

      I. Laugh In Brings You the News:

      The US CODE, TITLE 50, CHAPTER 40 Sec. 2302 defines a Weapon of Mass Destruction as follows: “The term ‘weapon of mass destruction” means any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors, (B) a disease organism, or (C) radiation or radioactivity.”

      The reader over my shoulder can no longer withhold a fundamental objection. Renewing the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of understanding contemporary history may be speculatively satisfying, but what possible relevance can it have to actual U.S. policies and actions?  As Robert McNamara taught us, everything now is essentially a matter of technoscientific rationality1 and thus the function of a way of thinking that has nothing to do with deep psychological conflicts.  Political culture has in fact purged itself of such things.  Objective calculation within the world of Realpolitik is all that is the case today. Dark  forces in the psyche have nothing to do with it.  Confronted with such an objection the psychoanalytic historian can only reply by endorsing the wisdom of Wittgenstein: “look and see.”  If fact, let’s drench ourselves in the empirical.  Maybe it’s there that thanatos will reveal itself in its true visage.  

      Depleted uranium (DU) is a waste product of the uranium enrichment process that fuels both our nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear power programs. In fact, over 99% of the uranium enrichment process results in this waste product, which has a half life of 4.5 billion years. DU is both a toxic heavy metal and a radiological poison. The U.S. currently has over 10 million tons of DU. The disposal of nuclear waste is, of course, one of the unintended consequences of the development of nuclear power. Fortunately, a solution to the problem of DU has been found. DU is now used in virtually every weapon employed by the U.S. in Iraq (and earlier in Afghanistan and in Kosovo). To cite the most conspicuous example: every penetrator rod in a shell shot from an Abrams tank contains 10 pounds of DU. DU is selected for weapons for three reasons: it’s cheap ( made available to arms manufacturers free of charge) and easy to develop; it’s heavy, 1.7 times the density of lead and thus most effective at killing because it penetrates anything it hits; and it’s pyrophoric, igniting and burning on contact with air and breaking up on contact with its target into extremely small particles of radioactive dust which is dispersed into the atmosphere. The result: permanent contamination of air, water, and soil.2

      DU was first used by the U.S. in Desert Storm. The amount used was between 315-350 tons. Five times as much was used during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Over a third of the U.S. soldiers who served in the first Gulf War are now permanently disabled. The Department of Energy and the Department of Defense of course continue to deny that DU has any harmful effects. A U.N. sub-commission on Human Rights has ruled that DU, which fits the definition of a “dirty bomb, ” is an illegal weapon. 3

      Huge chunks of radioactive debris full of DU now litter the cities and countryside of Iraq. Fine radioactive dust permeates the entire country. The problem of clean-up is insoluble. The entire ecosystem of Iraq is permanently contaminated. The Iraq people are the new hibakusha. Their fate, like that of the “survivors” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a condition of death-in-life. The long term health effects of DU on the Iraqi people (and on our own troops) are incalculable. There is no mask or protective clothing that can be devised to prevent radioactive dust from entering the lungs or penetrating the skin. Moreover, DU targets the DNA and the Master Code (histone), altering the genetic future of exposed populations. Because it is the perfect weapon for delivering nanoparticles of poison, radiation, and nano-pollution directly into living cells, DU is the perfect weapon for extinguishing entire populations. The Iraqi’s are not alone. Vast regions of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Balkans have been permanently contaminated with radioactive dust and debris.4

      These facts are worth bearing in mind the next time we are told what has now become a bipartisan article of faith: the Iraqi people are better off with Saddam Hussein gone. Or as Bill Maher put it on his show of Sept. 24, 2004: “Eventually they’re better off.”

      We need a new term to describe our actions in Iraq. Genocide is inadequate. Thus: Ecocide [from Gr oikos, house; and –cide, the destruction of] Ecology has two referents. It refers to that branch of biology that deals with the relations between living organisms and their environment and that branch of sociology that deals with relations among human groups with reference to material resources and consequent social and cultural patterns. The destruction of both is the goal of Ecocide. Ecocide is the deliberate production of a condition of permanent radiological, biological, and chemical contamination whereby death comes to inhabit an entire ecosystem. A condition of ecocide exists when life itself and all possibilities of its renewal are being systematically destroyed in an identifiable geographical area, which is also defined in terms of specifiable racial and religious characteristics. As is now known, the cumulative result of such actions may bring about for the entire planet the condition of homo sacer described by Giorgio Agamben. 5 The European Council on Radiation Risk, for example, calculated the damage to human health of the low level radiation thusfar released into the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing to be 61, 600, 000 deaths by cancer alone. Moreover, in our wars since 1991 the U.S. has now released in terms of global atmospheric pollution the equivalent of 400, 000 Nagasaki Bombs. 6