New Delhi
13 February 2007
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.
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, warns 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.
"India has [already] been contaminated by the depleted uranium used in Iraq,
Yugoslavia, Lebanon and Afghanistan which is blowing off the Himalayas all over the
northern India," she told this newspaper during a visit to New Delhi. (A bunker buster is
said to contain about two tonnes of depleted uranium.)
Ms Moret says, "What India [needs] to under stand 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".
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 observes.
Ms Moret, who is a past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, warns of
an exponential increase in diseases like diabetes and cancer in India because of this
contamination. "India [has] a pandemic of diabetes and it is from the atmospheric testing
[conducted by certain countries] which contaminated the Himalayas," she asserts.
She cites 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.
Adviser to Indian Space Research Organisation Prof MGK 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 says, referring to Ms Moret's claims.
Prof Menon adds, "The depleted uranium is used for its weight, burning capability and
armour piercing characteristic ... The US used it in Yugoslavia and Iraq. 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 Prime Minister, scientific adviser
to Defence Minister, director general of Defence Research and Development
Organisation and chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation.
Ms Moret tells skeptics 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 asserts.
"There are also studies around nuclear power plants linking radiation in the emissions
from nuclear power plants to diabetes. We've a lot of studies in the US [where]
hypothyroidism in babies is linked to nuclear power plants," she told this correspondent
when asked about the veracity of her claims.
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