[NuovoLab] Mystery of Israel's secret uranium bomb by Robert…

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>Mystery of Israel's secret uranium bomb by Robert Fisk
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>Original:
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>Information Clearing House:
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>Mystery of Israel's secret uranium bomb
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>Alarm over radioactive legacy left by attack on Lebanon
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>By Robert Fisk
>
>10/28/06 "<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1935945.ece>The
>Independent" -- -- Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in
>southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than
>1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians?
>
>We know that the Israelis used American "bunker-buster" bombs on
>Hezbollahís Beirut headquarters. We know that they drenched southern
>Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens
>of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every
>week. And we now know - after it first categorically denied using such
>munitions - that the Israeli army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons
>which are supposed to be restricted under the third protocol of the Geneva
>Conventions, which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.
>
>But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam
>and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and
>Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions
>may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory - and were used
>against targe ts in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British
>Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil
>samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated
>radiation signatures". Both have been forwarded for further examination to
>the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry - used by the
>Ministry of Defence - which has confirmed the concentration of uranium
>isotopes in the samples.
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>Dr Busby's initial report states that there are two possible reasons for
>the contamination. "The first is that the weapon was some novel small
>experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a
>thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation
>flash ... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional
>uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted
>uranium." A photog raph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large
>clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.
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>Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel
>for nuclear reactors. A waste product of the enrichment process is
>depleted uranium, it is an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles
>for penetrating armour. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural
>uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.
>
>Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of
>weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on
>civilian areas - until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians
>whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air.
>
>I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West
>Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into
>flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during
>the summer - except for "marking" targets - even after civilians were
>photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with
>phosphorous munitions.
>
>Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the
>truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of
>government-parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were
>used in direct attacks against Hezbollah, adding that "according to
>international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorised and the
>(Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms".
>
>Asked by The Independent if the Israeli army had been using ura
>nium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli
>Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "Israel does not use any weaponry which
>is not authorised by international law or international conventions."
>This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law
>does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when
>humanitarian rules such as the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and
>because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can
>cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in
>the area of the explosions.
>
>American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU)
>shells in Iraq in 1991 - their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured
>from the waste products of the nuclear industr y - and five years later,
>a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq.
>
>Initial US military assessments warned of grave consequences for public
>health if such weapons were used against armoured vehicles. But the US
>administration and the British government later went out of their way to
>belittle these claims. Yet the cancers continued to spread amid reports
>that civilians in Bosnia - where DU was also used by Nato aircraft - were
>suffering new forms of cancer. DU shells were again used in the 2003
>Anglo-American invasion of Iraq but it is too early to register any
>health effects.
>
>"When a uranium penetrator hits a hard target, the particles of the
>explosion are very long-lived in the environment," Dr Busby said
>yesterday. "They spread over long distances. They can be inhaled into the
>lungs. The military really seem to believe that this stuff is not as
>dangerous as it is." Yet why would Israel use such a weapon when its
>targets - in the case of Khiam, for example - were only two miles from the
>Israeli border? The dust ignited by DU munitions can be blown across
>international borders, just as the chlorine gas used in attacks by both
>sides in the First World War often blew back on its perpetrators.
>
>Chris Bellamy, the professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield
>University, who has reviewed the Busby re port, said: "At worst it's some
>sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose
>of which we don't yet know. At best - if you can say that - it shows a
>remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products."
>
>The soil sample from Khiam - site of a notorious torture prison when
>Israel occupied southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, and a frontline
>Hezbollah stronghold in the summer war - was a piece of impacted red earth
>from an explosion; the isotope ratio was 108, indicative of the presence
>of enriched uranium. "The health effects on local civilian populations
>following the use of large uranium penetrators and the large amounts of
>respirable uranium oxide particles in the atmosphere," the Busby report
>says, "are likely to be significant ... we recommend that the area is
>examined for further traces of these weapons with a view to clean up."
>
>This summer's Lebanon war began a fter Hezbollah guerrillas crossed the
>Lebanese frontier into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed
>three others, prompting Israel to unleash a massive bombardment of
>Lebanon's villages, cities, bridges and civilian infrastructure. Human
>rights groups have said that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked
>civilians, but that Hezbollah was also guilty of such crimes because it
>fired missiles into Israel which were also filled with ball-bearings,
>turning their rockets into primitive one-time-only cluster bombs.
>
>Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was
>a wea pons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who
>respectively supply Israel and Hezbollah with munitions. Just as Israel
>used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were
>able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese
>coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it
>suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.
>
>What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of
>potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is
>their effect on civilians.
>
>© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
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Paola Manduca, Prof.
Genetica
Di.Bio.
Università di Genova
4°piano, Palazzo delle Scienze
26, C.Europa
16132, Genova
Tel. 0039-010-353 8240
Email man-via@???