IN THE MICHAEL MOORE MOLD

Australian filmmaker David Bradbury hopes his "documentary" Blowin' in the Wind will reignite the Depleted Uranium munitions controversy. Former US soldier Doug Rokke features prominently:

"If I can detect high levels of radioactivity in the deserts of Iraq ten years after the bombing and I can take ordinary road dust from Kosovo where children are playing 13 months after the bombings there, then this stuff is going to stay around for a very long time to come. All I can say is that this is a complete disaster not only for the people of Iraq but for people who live anywhere in the world. "

That Rokke found high levels of radiation on the ground seems, well, a bit strange since the penetrators are less radioactive than natural uranium and as the dust produced by DU penetrators is claimed to disperse over vast areas:

The depleted uranium's radioactive particles don't just stay, impassive, at the point of impact depending on the circumstances, they can easily move into the lower and upper atmosphere. So, while an area of about 30 kilometres around the point of impact is most directly affected by fallout, effectively, a depleted-uranium-capped shell fired in Iraq, the Balkans, or Afghanistan can result in radioactive particles being carried anywhere in the world, via winds in the upper atmosphere.

Also featured in the film is former "weapons scientist" Leuren Moret, who claims Depleted Uranium has caused a dramtic increase in Iraqi birth defects:

"Right after the first Gulf war maybe one or two babies a day were being born with defects. Now it's seven, eight, nine, ten babies a day who are born without heads, without limbs, horrible tumours. Just lumps of jelly." She rightly declares, "It's a nightmare!"

There are, however, alternative explanations for these birth defects:

Critics have attempted to attribute an alleged increase in the rate of birth defects in the children of Gulf War veterans and in Iraqis to depleted uranium. A report written by an Irish petrochemical engineer stated that in Iraq, death rates per 1000 Iraqi children under 5 years of age increased from 2.3 in 1989 to 16.6 in 1993 and cases of leukaemia have more than quadrupled in areas where DU was present. Dr Richard Guthrie, an expert in chemical warfare at Sussex University, argues that due to the fact that no pathological evidence exists linking depleted uranium to birth defects, a more likely cause for this increase in birth defects was the Iraqi Army’s use of mustard agents during its war with Iran. Sulphur mustard is also known to cause cancers, leukaemias and birth defects, even for relatively low exposures levels. The children of the residents of Halabja as well as those of Iranian veterans of the Iran Iraq war have developed cancers and birth defects. Neither groups had been exposed to depleted uranium, but both groups had been exposed to sulfur mustard agents.

Further studies by the New England Journal of Medicine analyzing 34,000 babies of Gulf War veterans, as well as by the Department of Veterans Affairs found no evidence of an increase in the risk of birth defects among the children of Gulf War veterans.

Anway, I'll leave it to Evan Shapiro, who reviews the film for New Matilda, to sum up how an informed viewer should react to the sensationalist nonsense that's being passed off as a documentary:

When you leave the cinema after seeing David Bradbury's new documentary Blowin' in the Wind it's hard not to be enraged.

Ask for your money back, Evan.

For reputable information on Depleted Uranium – with links to a number of sources – go here.