- NEW DELHI -- An American
geoscientist has warned that India is "downwind" of Iran and
is, therefore, predisposed to the harmful, radiation-laded winds that will
blow eastwards if the United States were to attack Iran using depleted
uranium in dirty bombs or bunker busters like it did in 2003 in Iraq. A
bunker buster is said to contain about two tonnes of depleted uranium.
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- Ms Leuren Moret, a former employee of the Livermore Nuclear
Weapons Laboratory in the US, who now works as an independent activist
on the use of depleted uranium, warned of the health and environmental
effects of the use of depleted uranium by the US in armour-piercing shells,
which will have disastrous consequences for generations of Indians to come.
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- "India has [already] been contaminated by the depleted
uranium used in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Lebanon and Afghanistan, which is blowing
off the Himalayas all over northern India," she told this newspaper
during a visit to New Delhi. Ms Moret said, "What India [needs] to
understand is first of all they've been nuked, they've been completely
contaminated through contamination of the Himalayas... you don't have to
drop a nuclear bomb on a country to nuke it, you can contaminate the water,
the soil and the air, and no one even knows. India doesn't even realise
this."
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- She cautions that this "covert nuclear war"
extends to selling nuclear power plants to India and other "tiger
economies". "[Selling nuclear plants] is second covert nuclear
war... we will have a tsunami of chronic illness [and] humanity won't survive
this covert nuclear war," she observed. Ms Moret, who is a past president
of the Association for Women Geoscientists, warned of an exponential increase
in diseases like diabetes and cancer in India because of this contamination.
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- "India [has] a pandemic of diabetes and it is from
the atmospheric testing [conducted by certain countries] which contaminated
the Himalayas," she asserted. She cited Japanese, Norwegian and British
government data to suggest that there is a global increase in the incidence
of cancer, diabetes and other diseases. "We've got it all '"
obesity, cancer, low birthweight, etc '" and we're exporting it to
[India]," she told this newspaper.
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- Adviser to the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro),
Prof. M.G.K. Menon, says that what constitutes a crime against humanity
merits serious consideration. "We have a lot of depleted uranium in
India but we have never put it on armour piercing shells. We have used
tungsten," he said, referring to Ms Moret's claims. Prof. Menon added,
"The depleted uranium is used for its weight, burning capability and
armour piercing characteristic... The US used it in Yugoslavia and Iraq.
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- Uranium vaporises [and can contaminate] soil, water and
[can get] into humans. It is alpha-emitting and has a long life, therefore,
anything ingested is damaging for generations to come." A former Union
minister of state for science and technology, Prof. Menon has held several
important, posts including scientific adviser to the Prime Minister, scientific
adviser to the defence minister, director-general of the Defence Research
and Development Organisation and chairman of Isro.
-
- Ms Moret tells sceptics who label all of this as conspiracy
theory that there are "very well-established studies" on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki victims and on the Chernobyl survivors establishing that radiation
causes diabetes. "It's not just a correlation, it's a causal effect,"
she asserted.
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- Original article: www.deccan.com/home/homedetails.asp
- http://peaceinspace.blogs.com/peaceinspaceorg/2007/02/attack_on_iran_.html
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