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International Atomic Body To Look For U.S. Depleted Uranium In Kuwait
with
additional reporting by Abdulrahman Saad
KUWAIT CITY, Feb 14 (IslamOnline) - Kuwait said Wednesday that the International Atomic Energy Agency will send inspectors to survey Kuwaiti territories for depleted uranium (DU) possibly used by U.S. troops during the 1991 Gulf War after local outcries that Kuwaitis were facing a health hazard similar to that reported in the Balkans.
"Our agreement with the international agency is the only guarantee to verify whether there's depleted uranium in Kuwait," said Mohammed Sarawi who heads the Kuwaiti Environment Authority, adding that, "We should have carried out this survey long time ago."
The Kuwaiti move comes after several environmentalists in the small desert Arab emirate complained that Kuwaitis were at a serious health hazard from the radioactive material.
Neighboring Iraq has said that it too wants international tests to determine the effect of the use of the radioactive material.
An investigating team from a U.S. solidarity delegation to Iraq on January 18th found "extremely high levels of radioactivity" in soil samples in the Iraqi desert south of Basra. In that region during the 1991 war against Iraq, U.S. forces fired hundreds of thousands of shells reinforced with depleted uranium.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and New Mexican activist and researcher Damacio Lopez had separated from the main body of Clark's International Action Center's 50-person "Iraq Sanctions Challenge" to collect the soil samples.
A widely circulated warning last week by Masheal al-Mashan, a leading environmentalist, against a favorite Kuwaiti food, Faqaa, made of fungus and found above the ground in desert areas, alarmed Kuwaitis prompting calls for official action.
The possible danger of contamination from armor and other targets hit by cheap and highly effective shells tipped with depleted uranium during the Gulf War - and more recently in southern Serbia - has caused an outcry in some Western states, however, Britain and the United States have insisted any risks are minimal.
Both Kuwait and Iraq only recently joined countries worried that U.S. troops used DU during the Gulf War that pushed Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
Depleted uranium is the by-product of the process for converting (enriching) natural uranium for use as nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons. Depleted uranium is approximately 40% less radioactive than natural uranium.
The depleted uranium used in armor-piercing munitions is also widely used in civilian industry, primarily for stabilizers in airplanes and boats.
The 120mm sabot rounds fired from the main guns of U.S. Abrams series tanks figure prominently in most of the depleted uranium exposure scenarios and incidents investigated to date.
Heavy metals (uranium, lead, tungsten, etc.) have chemical toxicity properties that, in high doses, can cause poisoning and health effects.
Last month, Switzerland ordered labs to check DU weapons samples from Kosovo for plutonium amid concern - played down by defense experts - that the munitions may have posed health risks to peacekeepers, aid workers and civilians in areas of the Balkans where NATO used them to blast Serb tanks.
The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) sent a mission to Kosovo earlier this month as the storm broke in Europe over reports that troops who served in the Balkans and the Gulf over the past decade may have been exposed to contaminated sites that could cause cancer.
NATO has been criticized for using armor-piercing shells in the Balkans, which some ailing soldiers and anti-nuclear campaigners say have caused cancer.
The alliance and the United States, whose aircraft fired some 40,000 DU shells during the 1999 air raids against Yugoslavia in Bosnia in 1994-95 and earlier in the Arab Gulf, deny there is any link between the use of DU-ammunition and cancer.
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