Podcast with LT Smash
Glenn had dinner and interviewed LT Smash, blogger, soldier, and contributor to a new book, The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During dinner at Calhoun's (there seems to be a theme that we take all bloggers out for barbecue), LT talks about Cindy Sheehan's fast, his part in a book of military bloggers, his travels and his face-off with Code Pink protestors at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Ahh, yes, if only a Hug-In could end this little Middle Eastern problem.You can listen to the podcast here -- no download needed, just click on the gray Flash player -- or download directly here. If you have dial-up, you can listen here. Visit our archive at GlennandHelenshow.com for past episodes and to check for updates.
This podcast is sponsored by VolvoCars.us. If you buy a Volvo, tell them that we sent you!
posted by Helen at 8:06 AM
23 Comments:
Interesting stuff, but it needed more Dr Helen.
You should have come. It wasn't that late; we were home by 9pm.
This was our third time to pass through Knoxville in as many years. Every time we're in town, Glenn has us over or buys us dinner. And still, we have yet to meet the legendary Dr. Helen. You're always "busy," "out of town," or "not feeling well."
Tell the truth: Glenn keeps you locked up in the basement, doesn't he?
Smash,
No, Glenn does not keep me locked in a basement--if only he could--his life might be easier! I am really sorry I did not get to meet you. Please accept my apology and I hope we can meet up next time you come through or when Glenn and I are in your neck of the woods. Thanks for doing the interview and for standing up to groups like Code Pink who not only do not support our troops but who actively seek to undermine their moral.
No hard feelings, Helen.
I know that hospitality is taken very seriously by y'all down South, and you're probably mortified that your absence was noted. Well, I know I shouldn't tease a lady, but I confess that I was just giving you a hard time.
That's not to say that we wouldn't have enjoyed your company. But we certainly understand that you have a life of your own, and you can't always drop everything to have beer with every one of Glenn's blogger friends who passes through East Tennessee.
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Holy cow!
Well, this seems like the place to bring this up...
I've been doing a lot of reading on DU weapons and armor & it's scary stuff. The Kerr Magee connection set off alarm bells but I was really appalled by the disability rates of Gulf War I soldiers (467 wounded in combat, 325,000 now on disability of some kind or other--almost 60% of the total force involved.)
"Gulf War Syndrome" symptoms are strikingly similar to those suffered by Japanese survivors or Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And the volume of DU weaponry expended in GW II rather exceeds that of the previous contact, I believe. Correct me if I am wrong. Exposure is certainly higher--3 1/2 years with slow troop rotations makes for bad juju.
Afghanistan and the Balkans are a little harder to gather data on, as is the current war.
Ongoing military conflicts are not conducive to health research.
I have scrounged some reports regarding birth defects (increases in) amongst locals in all the regions saturated by DU weapons. Weird Mutant Birth Defects--babies without spines, flipper feet, that sort of thing. There're some scary ecological reports from the area surrounding Kerr Magee's Oklahoma nuc plant--frogs with 9 legs (I kid you not), that sort of thing...and pretty much all of it is in or near DU containment facilities.
For the record, Depleted Uranium (the crap left-over from Uranium enrichment procedures) is 60% as radioactive as U-235, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and is not only fantastically hard, but compustible at temperatures over 600 degrees.
From an operational standpoint, this makes for a primo anti-armor weapon (or armor source--new Abrams tanks usually have DU plates as part of their layered defensive scheme).
To the best of my knowledge, DU is mostly used in 105mm & 120mm tank rifles and 20 to 40mm rotary guns with high cyclic rates--the kind the AC-130H & AC-130U Spectre/Spooky's mount, for instance.
I don't know how much danger DU armor represents but there's a lot of evidence that suggests that DU dust, which is what you get when those heavy rounds start exploding, is extremely dangerous. In low-dose/slow-dose exposure situations you tend to get Gulf War Syndrome fatigue-type symptoms, cellular mutation which can lead to birth defects.
I'll drag up studies and posts as I find them.
All I want to say here is that if you've been exposed to DU dust for any length of time, PLEASE go to your doctor and ask for a full medical work up. Urine and fecal analysis, as I understand it, is the best way of detecting DU contamination. I should think that a skilled phlebotomist could probably find a way of tracking DU contamination in the blood. If they know they're looking for heavy metal contamination, that is.
Again, this is not a statement for or against the war. It's just a request that those amongst y'all who've served in the military in recent conflicts in areas where depleted uranium ordinance has been used go get yourselves checked out--regularly.
For your own sakes. I've a fair amount of friends who were in Afghanistan, Kosovo & Iraq. Good friends. I want them well & healthy.
Depleted uranium isn't significantly radioactive, so the Hiroshima and Nagasaki comparisons are just silly. It can produce heavy-metal toxicity, but so can lead. There's a lot of hysteria on this subject, mostly peddled by people who are selling bogus remedies. There's not much in the way of actual evidence that it's harmful, though.
There's actually a pretty fair amount of evidence. Tracking birth defect rates in areas it has been used is a good metric. I couldn't say whether the DU armor is significantly dangerous but the weight of evidence strongly suggests that exposure to vaporized DU in low-dose/slow-dose environments is something to be avoided. Areas where it's been liberally used as ordinance.
It's not as volatile as plutonium, but a heavy metal that's 60% as radioactive as bomb-grade plutoniom is not something you want to inhale or make physical contact with. Soft tissue exposure (especially internal organs--lungs are probably most vulnerable, but that's speculation).
The Gulf War long-term disability list is particularly troubling. More then 325,000 of GW I vets experience some kind of chronic disability and there is enough continuity in the symptoms to suggest that radiation poisoning is the primary culprit. The levels and nature of the symptoms of folks suffering from Gulf War Syndrome sound an awful lot like the sort of chronic problems that folks working in Hiroshima and Nagasaki AFTER the blasts were prone to. Relatives, rescue workers, etc. Low-dose/slow-dose exposure tends to manifest rather differently then high-dose/fast-dose exposure:
Instant death from immersion. Being vaporized. That sort of thing. Kind of hard to get people who've had a few kilotons go critical on their heads to fill out a questionaire.
A definite hole in my data, this. That I must grant.
From what I've been able to gather--and it's best to regard me as an educated layman, nothing more or less--Low-level exposure to vaporized DU does not appear likely to be fatal in the short/mid-term (we've only got 15 years of studies) but it does seem to make a lot of people very sick for a very long time.
The UN regards it as a WMD. Not that I hold the UN in terribly high regard, but I am disinclined to believe studies produced by people who have something they want to sell me, whether it's a drug, a bomb, a war, or a car.
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Don't have to take my word on any of this. Drag up the data and studies, yourself. And always get the raw data. If someone releases a commerical or gov't study, especially if that someone has a vested financial or political interest & that someone refuses to produce data and metholodology, listen to what they say and take a contrary stance proportionate to the vehemence with which they back up their claims.
Expended DU rounds are not a threat to anyone, let alone comparable with the two nukes in Japan. As for the disability rate, are you just quoting all people who seperated with disabilities or specifically ones which can be attributed to DU (0 BTW)? Most AF personel retire with some kind of disability (hearing, hemmerroids, & back injuries being the most common)- there is a financial incentive to be at least partially disabled since the percentage of your disablement is the percentage of your retirement pay that is NOT taxed. It's been 15 years since GW I and the bulk of the troops which fought in that war have retired/left the service. Not all the disabilities were caused by there action in GW I. So you numbers are way, way off.
You are correct that DU makes great armor killing rounds though. Also, BTW, tanks hit and killed are very toxic (fuel, oil, all kinds of heavy metals and coatings etc) reguardless if hit with a DU round or not.
DU 60% as radioactive as weapons-grade plutonium? Bullshit.
Reference: World Health Organization.
WHO is pretty reliable. Hey, this shit is available by the shitload. I should think that it wouldn't be very hard for an independent source to do a very basic test. Again, the main risk with DU exposure appears to be to people who have come into contact with or inhaled quantities of vaporized DU munitions. Short-term health risks are high for someone who is dosed (like drenched). Long-term health risks are more insidious, easier for the press & gov't to conceal or ignore. But the fact remains that as of 10/1/06, 325,000 of 580,000 surviving GW I vets are on permanent disability. Birth defects and cancer rates are higher in civilian areas which have been saturated by DU munitions. Doctors in Iraq reporter a huge upsurge in incidences of simultaneous cancers: lung cancer is #1 I believe. The kidneys and liver, which process what we consume/absorb, are next in line. I'm still scouting for more information on public health in the areas of the Balkans where the largest volume of DU munitions were expended.
Hey, it's entirely probable that insulated DU could still serve as reasonably safe armor in an insulated/layered defensive array. And it's probably reasonably safe for use in close-in weapons arrays on naval vessels (although this might put me off fish for awhile). But the stuff is not safe to breathe, especially in areas heavily saturated by DU munitions & skin contact poses a risk, especially to kids, whose developing cellular structures are more suscpetible to developmental mutations caused by outside sources--that's what growing up IS, after all.
Anon 1:52, research it yourself. Provide contradictory evidence. I'd be glad to see some.
I can't do all the thinking here.
Cheers,
G
buffpilot,
The disability figure is wobbly, I admit & should have noted as such in my first post on this subject. I confess to being guilty to a certain amount of apples-to-oranges analysis in this case. Your point regarding the benefits of claiming some level of disability upon discharge is a good one. This is middling-level correlative data.
The sheer volume (after only 15 years) is what struck me.
My strong suspicion is that the major danger is to people exposed to either vast quantities of the stuff (as I mentioned in the previous post), to environments saturated by vaporized munitions and leaky DU dumps and to civilians and soldiers exposed to considerable quantities of vaporized DU. There's a pretty alarming piece at the VAIW website--and this raises a flag of course. Partisan reviews always do. I suspect it's a little over the top myself. But I think it's worth the reading nonetheless.
I rather doubt that contact with unexploded DU rounds or DU shells is terribly dangerous for a healthy adult. It's a hard metal, sheathed & adults are less susceptible to soft tissue contamination then children.
I prefer data from the CDC, Red Cross, WHO, etc. for information on observed and likely long-term environmental and health impact on areas and on individuals exposed to DU dust.
The folks responsible for the clean-up of the munitions are probably a pretty reliable source, too. They've been dying off and getting sick at a pretty hideous pace since GW 1.
Remember, folks, it wasn't so long ago that Agent Orange was considered an A-OK way to defoliate areas enfiladed by the VC in areas situated near US troops. They were neither appraised of the danger nor were they equipped to deal with the threat of the lingering toxins. Maybe the gummint didn't know then. Wouldn't be the first time.
People don't think much about second-order effects of things like pesticides and radioactive material, even the people who should know better. I through a halter on my X-rays recently (I had surgery for testicular cancer last year & have been doing the watchful waiting thing) after adding up my Rems for the year and realizing I was approaching the safe limit very fast.
"The good news is that the seminoma is gone, son. The bad news is...er, well, you seem to be glowing..."
This hasn't happened. But the radiologists weren't keeping track nor were they referencing basic information on safe exposure levels. I was.
The evidence is pretty clear ( intuitively so, I should think) that inhaling huge quantities of moderately radioactive material is very bad for you. And that it's not a good thing to saturate an environment with the stuff.
Hard DU, I don't have a strong opinion on one way or the other to date. Not something I want to be around, but the evidence I've found has not suggested that unexploded DU munitions or armor pose grave risks. Just leaky waste storage sites and vaporized munitions.
Kerr Magee's early involvement in the weapons program makes me more suspicious of DU overall due to K-M's notorious track record at the Oklahoma breeder plant in the '60s & '70s. Leaky containment, wretched worker safety awareness, involvement in the Silkwood case (and possibly her murder). This is cause for reasonable doubt.
Rule of thumb: Never trust anyone who tries to sell you something, especially if it's the gummint. And NEVER trust anyone who is trying to sell something TO the gummint.
The VA did a study of veterans who had DU in their bodies. They didn't have any increase in cancers. The Red Cross hasn't found any increase in areas where it's been used. Arizona has a high concentration of natural uranium in its dust (uranium is actually present in the soil everywhere to some degree), but Arizona doesn't have a higher incidence of cancer. Neither do miners who actually extract the stuff, except for lung cancer due to radon.
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