Irish Times

Earlier this year Lara Marlowe reported on the alleged after effects of radiation contamination in Iraq. There appears to have been a considerable double standard in operation during the Gulf War, she writes from Paris.

Iraq: British authorities have taken extreme care to protect workers and the local population from contamination by depleted uranium (DU) shells tested at the Ministry of Defence (MOD) firing range at Eskmeals, on the Cumbrian coast within the Lake District National Park, as doc umented in a recent report by the British Department of the Environment.

But the MOD's safety measures, described below, contrast starkly with the indifference of the British and US governments to the effects of an estimated 300,000 tonnes of DU dust left on the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War. Except for an appeal by the British Labour MP, Mr George Galloway, to investigate the dramatic increase of cancer in southeastern Iraq, there has been no suggestion on the part of the governments who used the weapons that Iraqi civilians should be protected from the long-term effects of DU contamination.

Depleted uranium is an extremely dense material used in armour-piercing shells. When a DU projectile explodes, 70 per cent of it burns, leaving radioactive and chemically toxic dust in and around the target, Mr Dan Fahey, a US legal assistant for the Swords to Ploughshares veterans' group has written. The US army was aware of the health hazards posed by DU: a report issued six months before the Gulf War said inhaling large doses of DU dust could be fatal, "while long term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer".

The MOD has been firing DU projectiles at Eskmeals since 1981, but workers at the firing range, and residents of nearby Monk Moors, may be reassured to learn that 90 per cent of the weight of the projectiles was recovered for the first 13 years, 94 per cent since 1994. None of the 300,000 tonnes of radioactive waste in southeastern Iraq has been recovered.

This is the recovery process used at Eskmeals: some 200 DU shells are fired every year in an area known as the VJ battery, where they are exploded into a semi-enclosed hillock, "the target being contained in an open-sided concrete building known as the 'tunnel'," the Department of the Environment report says. "The tunnel was added in 1987 in order to improve containment of material after impact. . . Doors to the tunnel. . . which contain a window through which the projectile is fired, are designed largely to contain the resultant contamination from each firing. . . The tunnel has a filtered extract system and surfaces are pressure washed with water to minimise suspension. The target and target stand are also high pressure washed to remove loose contamination. The washings are transferred to collecting tanks for eventual disposal in cemented drums to Drigg."

When the projectile sticks in the armoured plate it is fired into, the plate too is sent to the Drigg radioactive dump in Cumbria. Other safety measures include an on-site Health Physics Laboratory and seven high volume air samplers in and around the firing range, from which 1,000 samples are analysed annually.

British citizens - and those near the world's only two other DU firing ranges in the US and France - are infinitely better protected from the effects of DU than Iraqi civilians, who never benefitted from cemented drums or air samplers. Yet the Department of the Environment report notes that 1.5 tonnes of DU shells are fired into Solway Firth at Kirkcudbright each year, and that the projectiles remain on the sea bed. Five years ago, an attempt to recover some of these shells failed.

Furthermore, the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee which drew up the report found "there is a finite limit to the amount of debris and contamination which could be collected after each impact; some of the contamination would become air-borne and dispersed. The As Low As Reasonably Practicable principle has been adopted. . ." The maximum doses to the public and the work force are "within accepted limits", the report claims.

There has been no attempt to decontaminate the killing fields of southeastern Iraq, and the US government has rejected veterans' claims for DU-related ailments.

AFP adds from Baghdad: Iraq is demanding compensation from Britain over the reported use of depleted uranium shells by British forces during the 1991 Gulf War, newspapers reported yesterday. A spokesman for the British Ministry of Defence in London said it had not received any approach from Baghdad and was not aware of the reported complaint.