Endgame Vol.1 (11 page)

The fourth premise of this book is that
civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur it is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

This is true when we talk about the acceptability—the expectedness, normality, necessity, even desirability (only when victims force their hand, of course)—of the U.S. military and its proxies killing civilians the world over and the unthinkability of counterattacks in kind. It is true when we talk about the acceptability of routine police violence against civilians and the fetishization of police officers killed on the job (“All gave some, some gave all,” read the bumper stickers, but no one ever mentions, at the huge police funerals or elsewhere, that garbage collection is far more dangerous—with a far higher mortality rate—than police work; and don’t hold your breath waiting for the next Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise action flick about courageous garbage collectors putting their lives on the line to clean up the mean streets of New York or L.A.). This is true when we talk about humans extirpating sharks and other species almost unnoticed while trumpeting the rare cases when sharks or others bite humans (usually when the humans have already either destroyed the creature’s home, backed it into a corner, and/or physically tormented it): despite propaganda from books and movies like
Jaws
, the ratio of humans slaughtering sharks to sharks even attacking humans is approximately 20 million to one.
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It is true when we talk about CEOs making decisions that lead to profits for the corporations they run and death for those humans (and nonhumans) they poison, and the victims of these CEOs for some reason refraining from similarly poisoning the CEOs, the politicians who protect them, and the families of both. And it’s true when we talk about more intimate forms of violence, like those perpetrated en masse by men against women and children, and the relative rarity with which the women or children fight back. I wrote a book about the violence that took place within my family when I was a child. The violence was rigidly one-way: my father beat his wife and children with impunity. I remember the only time my brother defended himself by returning a single blow: he received the worst beating of his miserable childhood. Why? Because he had broken a fundamental unstated rule of our family (and of civilization): Violence flows in only one direction.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about depleted uranium, in part because of some pictures I’ve seen. First the depleted uranium, then the pictures.

So-called depleted uranium is what’s left of natural uranium after the “enriched uranium”—the fissionable isotope uranium 235—has been separated to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. The term
depleted uranium
is something of a misnomer in that it implies that the remaining uranium has become significantly less dangerous, more, well, depleted. But depleted uranium—99.8 percent uranium 238—is just as toxic and about 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. And with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, it will truly be one of this culture’s trademark gifts that keeps on giving: it will kill essentially forever.
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The United States has made a lot of it, well over a billion pounds. Beginning in the 1950s, the feds started trying to figure out what they were going to do with all of this stuff. Providentially, uranium is extremely dense—about 1.7 times heavier than lead—and so can be used to make an artillery shell
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that easily penetrates steel. Even better, it’s pyrophoric, meaning heat from the impact causes it to vaporize, releasing huge amounts of energy. If you don’t mind toxifying and irradiating the surrounding countryside and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, depleted uranium makes a tank-busting shell extraordinaire.

What this means in practice is that leaders of government and industry solved the problem of disposing of U-238 in typical win-win (for them) fashion by giving it away free to both national and foreign arms manufacturers (perhaps it never occurred to anyone in power that the planet had already come up with the best solution for storing uranium: keep it in its natural state underground). I suppose we should be thankful that the researchers didn’t deem DU’s most effective use to be in forks or the heating elements of toasters, or else we’d be up to our glowing eyeballs in it at home. But this gratitude is in truth unfounded, because that plan has long been floated by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences and many others as a way to get rid of various radioactive wastes. They want (note the use of present tense) to redefine certain forms of radioactive waste as “Below Regulatory Concern,” recycle them (it’s great to be green!), and thus give citizens “authorized doses” of radiation.
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We should also be grateful, I guess, that they didn’t just decide to put the DU in our water supplies and tell us it’s good for our teeth. Oops, they’ve already done something like that, too. As is true for DU, fluoride is a toxic byproduct of this way of living (in this case the production of aluminum, fertilizer, cement, and weapons-grade plutonium and uranium). Also as is true for DU, fluoride is
extremely costly—if not impossible—to dispose of safely. The feds didn’t know what to do with it. Perhaps because fluoride didn’t work very well either in artillery shells or toaster ovens, those in power decided to get rid of it by adding it to our municipal water supplies and toothpaste, which means that the old John Birchers were right when they averred that fluoridation was a dangerous plot (“to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids,” as General Jack D. Ripper might have put it): they just had the wrong conspirators. Another similarity between fluoride and DU is that both are dangerous: not only does fluoride derived from toxic waste contain impurities such as lead and arsenic, but even at relatively small doses fluoride itself can cause cancer, osteoporosis, skeletal fluorosis, arthritis, and brain damage, among many other conditions.
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Here’s another thought: just for grins, if you’re ever in your grandparents’ basement, see if you can find an old container of rat poison. Check out the toxic ingredient—the killer. Yep, you guessed it, sodium fluoride. Happy brushing.
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The list of countries using or purchasing weapons or shells made with depleted uranium is long, and includes, among others, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Israel, the monarchies in the Persian Gulf, Taiwan, South Korea, Pakistan, and Japan.
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Spreading these toxic, radioactive materials around the world is bad enough, but the real danger comes when the weapons are used. And they are used often. In 110,000 air raids against Iraq during the so-called First Gulf War (“so-called” because my understanding is that for something to be called a war the other side has to actually be able to fight back: casualties in the First Gulf Massacre corresponded closely to premise four of this book), U.S. A-10 Warthog aircraft fired about 940,000 DU projectiles.
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When a depleted uranium projectile hits a target, about 70 percent of the round vaporizes into (hot) dust as fine as talcum powder, as does part of the target, which may also have been constructed of depleted uranium. Three hundred tons of DU are estimated to be blowing in the wind from this particular desert storm. An American soldier in charge of a crew assigned to clean up DU around tanks destroyed by these shells said, “When we climbed into vehicles after they’d been hit, no matter what time of day or night it was, you couldn’t see three feet in front of you. You breathed in that dust.”
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Once the dust has been respirated, it can lodge in the lungs or make its way to other organs, such as kidneys. In any case, you’re in trouble. Uranium 238 and the products from its decay—including other isotopes of uranium, thorium 234, and protactinium—release alpha and beta radiation that cause cancer and genetic mutations in exposed individuals and their descendants more or less into perpetuity. Two of that soldier’s fifteen crew members are now dead, and
even the Department of Energy admits that this soldier’s internal uranium contamination is five thousand times that permissible. Ninety to one hundred thousand American Gulf War veterans have reported medical problems associated with the “Gulf War Syndrome,” and rates for malformations in their children approach
67
percent in some communities.

As well as affecting U.S. soldiers, DU has probably already harmed 250,000 Iraqis. The same can be said for residents of Bosnia, and soon we’ll be saying the same for the people of Afghanistan. Leukemias and cancers have gone up by 66 percent in recent years in southern Iraq, with some locales experiencing a 700 percent increase.
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And there have been birth defects. Oh, how there have been birth defects. One doctor began her report, “In August we had three babies born with no heads. Four had abnormally large heads. In September we had six with no heads, none with large heads, and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four with big heads and four with deformed limbs or other types of deformities.”
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Which finally brings us to the pictures. There are two groups: pictures I have not seen, and pictures I have. Here is what one person wrote about those I have not (and of course I don’t expect to soon see similar text in America’s much-vaunted and certainly uncensored capitalist “free press”™): “I thought I had a strong stomach—toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children’s Hospital in southern Iraq. Dr. Amer, the hospital’s director, had invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, are called “congenital anomalies,” but what you and I would better understand as horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly grotesque—and thank God they didn’t bring out the real thing, pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to support my legs. I won’t spare you the details. You should know because—according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the World Health Organization, which is soon to publish its findings on the spiraling birth defects in southern Iraq—we are responsible for these obscenities. During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted-uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs—for they were scarcely human—are the result, Dr. Amer said. He guided me past pictures of children born without eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the world with only half a head, nothing above the eyes. Then there was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl born with her brain
outside her skull, and the whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose. Then the chair-grabbing moment—a photograph of what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks with a face and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these babies survived for long. Depleted uranium has an incubation period in humans of five years. In the four years from 1991 (the end of the Gulf War) until 1994, the Basrah Maternity Hospital saw 11 congenital anomalies. Last year there were 221.”
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There are photographs, too, that I have seen, some of the worst of my life. There are infants with one large eye in the middle of the face; infants—still alive, huge eyes staring—with the exploded heads of the hydrocephalic; infants with translucent skin or skin covered with some unknown white substance or covered with welts or deep split-open fissures or with charred-looking skin or skin like dark glazed pottery; infants with ambiguous genitals (these are called, for some reason, “non-viable children”); infants—unfortunately alive—with no eyes, their bones fused and stunted; an infant—also unfortunately alive—with no anus, and with her bowel and urinary tract on the outside of her body.
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These pictures all lead me to ask, not rhetorically, but with all expectation of answers: What, precisely, is this culture’s calculus of casualties? The lives of how many of these children are worth the life of one efficient executive, one prank-playing stockbroker? How many of these children’s lives are worth one Porsche, or the gasoline it burns to take off in the wind? The lives of how many children add up to the value, to take a unit of modern currency, of a barrel of oil?