http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/sit...irs.house.gov/files/2002%20Vol%20I-B.pdf page 891
"Bernard Rostker is a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, where he has served as associate director of the RAND Arroyo Center and director of the Defense Manpower Research Center in the RAND National Defense Research Institute. His recent RAND research has focused on managing the recruitment, retention, and performance of police officers in large city departments; managing the all-volunteer force; and reforming the military by lengthening military careers. He was formerly Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, the Secretary of Defense's senior policy advisor on recruitment, career development, pay, and benefits for 1.4 million active-duty military personnel, 1.3 million Guard and Reserve personnel, and 725,000 DoD civilians. He also had oversight responsibilities for the DoD health delivery system. Prior to that, he served as Under Secretary of the Army, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, and Director of Selective Service, where he formulated the Selective Service Revitalization Plan. Under his leadership, the first mass selective service registration since World War II was executed, and almost four million young men registered. Over his career, Rostker has been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate four times and received a number of awards, including the Distinguished Service Medal from the Selective Service, the Department of the Navy, the Department of the Army, and the Department of Defense. Rostker is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration."
http://www.rand.org/about/people/r/rostker_bernard_d.html" (...) Col. Daxon: My name is Col. Eric Daxon and I've been working with depleted uranium since about 1983. The first point that I would like to make is that all of us in here right now are breathing natural uranium. If you drank some water today you drank natural uranium. If you ate food, you ate natural uranium. If I were to take a urine sample or a sample of your lung from anybody in this room, I would find levels of natural uranium both in the lung tissue and in the urine sample. The average person has about 90 micrograms of natural uranium in his or her body just because of the natural uranium that's in the soil, so this is not a new substance.
We, and by 'we' I mean the United States and the rest of the world, have intensively studied the health effects of uranium since the early 1940s. In the US, DOD and non-DOD organisations have been studying the health and environmental impacts of depleted uranium since the 1970s - about the first time that we started considering using these weapons - and these studies are continuing, but the one point that I really want to make is all health effects are related to the amount of a substance that's internalised. I've already told you that all of us here have uranium in them so the amount is really the key. What I'm going to talk about now is what the US has done to actually determine the amount of depleted uranium that folks can internalise either by eating, breathing it or in wounds and shrapnel.
Right now we are using depleted uranium in our Abrams battle tanks, in our anti army munitions. The arrow that you see in the middle of that (slide) is solid depleted uranium, and that is what makes up the depleted uranium round. It is just a solid arrow - that is a 105 mm tank round and those depleted uranium penetrators are about that long, and those depleted uranium penetrators in the munitions that were fired in Kosovo are about that long and there about as thick as, I guess, a pencil.
Well, these depleted uranium munitions hit their target, pieces of it basically fragment off and depleted uranium ignites and it burns, and as it burns it creates a depleted uranium dust that is carried in the air, it's inside the crew compartment and it's on the vehicle and on the ground among the depleted uranium target area.
In order to characterize the amount of exposure, the amount of dose that can be internalised, the US has done over 35 studies that actually measure the amount of uranium in the air around the vehicle. There was actually one study that tried to measure the amount of uranium that's inside the vehicle that's actually penetrated and we've done a lot of environmental studies to try to measure the amount of depleted uranium that is released when these penetrators strike.
What we've found is that only personnel that are in on or near a vehicle at the time that vehicle was struck may internalise depleted uranium in excess of safety levels. That means crewmen inside a vehicle, somebody standing on top of a vehicle at the time it was struck.
The safety standards may also be approached by maintenance people. These are people that go inside the struck vehicle on a routine basis and do work inside that causes the depleted uranium to be re-suspended. We recommend routine precautions inside the vehicle not just because of depleted uranium but because of some of the other toxic substances inside the struck vehicle. It's just good hygiene and good practice to take the precautions that we are recommending.
This is just a listing of some of the key US consensus documents that talk about the health effects of depleted uranium. All these are readily available, either on the Web ,or probably in the library right outside I would assume.
Our decision to use depleted uranium has been reviewed several times, especially post Gulf War, first by the US National Institute of Health, Institute of Medecine, and all of these people have reviewed the health and environmental effects and impacts of our use of depleted uranium and have concurred with our basic conclusions on the use of these things, and there have been multiple US DOD panels, starting in the early seventies, that have been studying the health effects studying the exposure effects, for a very long time, and as we find a data gap we do work to fill that data gap. And I'll be talking about one of those data gaps in just a minute.
The UN Environmental Programme's 1999 report came up with conclusions that are very similar to ours. The top one I think is the main one this group (...inaudible...) and the same literature we're using came to the first conclusion - the presence of DU is not an obstacle to (…inaudible...). We also found significant risk limited to personnel immediately and around the target. That's basically what I said in the conclusions, and personnel in the immediate vicinity during and immediately after an attack are the people who could receive exposures that are in excess of our safety standards. And that's the UN Environmental Programme's report, and I know they are actually taking samples at the moment in Kosovo, and as soon as those samples are analysed, the report will be written, and we're anxiously awaiting the outcome of that report.
These are some of the ongoing US efforts - the data gap that I was talking about - as we have found out we don't know as much as we thought we did about depleted uranium fragments, so we've had ongoing research since between 1993 and 1994, and as Dr. Kilpatrick mentioned, we've been following the veterans that had embedded depleted uranium fragments in them since the 1993-1994 timeframe. We have a (...inaudible...) task that's going on as we speak, there's a shot going on today and this is designed to verify our earlier measurements of the amount of depleted uranium that's actually (…inaudible...) inside a vehicle, so they (...inaudible...) air samples in the middle of an explosion and around that vehicle.
We've done a lot of environmental monitoring at all of our active test ranges, we've been monitoring some of our ranges for the past fifteen years. The Department of (...inaudible...) Affairs, Medical Surveillance Programme, Dr. Kilpatrick, talked about that already and we're starting a programme to introduce inter-laboratory comparisons to make sure that everybody's techniques are basically given the same (...inaudible...) it's a standard inter-comparison order, the same sample is sent around to labs and we basically see if the results are the same.
First of all, I can't emphasise enough that uranium has been extensively studied from both a radiological and toxological point of view and the intensity really picked up in the 1940s because of the Manhattan project. It has been shown not to be linked with leukaemia in humans. The medical surveillance of our highest exposed people - and those are the folks that are actually inside a vehicle when that vehicle is struck, so they have inhaled it and some of them have it in their lungs and some of them have embedded fragments - have shown no adverse health effects related to DU. And, again, we've had reviews by multiple US and non-US scientific organisations that come up with consistent (...inaudible...) that DU radiation in chemical doses are below safety standards and again the DU (...inaudible...) are on the way and we're going to verify that one more time, and the research on embedded fragments is continual, so that's the one data gap that we have. All the results of the current things, capstone tests, the embedded DU fragments and the medical surveillance are being published in the (...inaudible...) literature. (...)"
http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2001/s010110b.htmCOL Eric Daxon, Radiation Protection 'Staff Officer
United States Army Medical Command (MEDCOM), Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas, USA
http://history.amedd.army.mil/memoirs/soldiers/documents/medcom.pdfhttps://www.linkedin.com/pub/eric-daxon/42/847/3b7
