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Depleting Your Cranium While our nation awaits with bated breath the next episode of The Next Joe Millionaire, we have overlooked a program perhaps even more stupid and disturbing—the Pentagon’s program of deploying depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq. There is a nuclear war going on right now. If you want to find weapons of mass destruction, look in an American tank. It all started back in ‘Nam, when the army became frustrated at the inability of tungsten-tipped shells to penetrate enemy tanks consistently. By Grenada, we had figured out more than how to ensure the graduation of borderline medical students. We had also figured out that using leftover radioactive material as tips for the shells and more of it sealed inside a casing not only easily penetrated armor, but also incinerated its contents at temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Celsius. Think of each shell as a teeny weenie Hiroshima. An itsy bitsy Nagasaki follows a nanosecond later without all the debate. For those of you who just got through listening to the G. Gordon Liddy Show and say it’s only a bunch of Iraqis we’re baking, guess again. Friendly fire is getting unfriendlier. Every day, our troops handle amo hotter than a Pamela Anderson honeymoon flick. Meanwhile, Centcom, again proving the old George Carlin line about military intelligence being an oxymoron, has repeatedly sent our soldiers into incapacitated, irradiated enemy tanks to count the dead. They shouldn’t forget to count themselves. Throw in the low-level radiation clouds that drift for miles, and one thing is clear: GW’s version of dum-dum bullets represents the most impressive and thorough program of testing US troops under conditions of nuclear warfare since those neat blasts in the Nevada desert back in the 1950s. Since the Gulf War, American soldiers have returned home in record numbers with cases of hair loss, immune disorders, and leukemia. Unlike Joe Millionaire, GI Joe is living in a trailer park, suffering from lymphoma, and being denied disability benefits. There has been scarcely little fallout from this atrocity. Unlike Iraqi tanks, the Pentagon has successfully deflected all shots fired. As loyal Americans, we should at least try to see things their way. We’re not in violation of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, because this is no test. Furthermore, this is not a nuclear build-up. We are deploying these weapons as fast as we make them. So what if we have less respect for the Geneva Convention than Mike Tyson has for beauty pageant contestants? We’re ridding the continental United States of dangerous radioactive waste just like those tree-hugging freaks wanted, even if it means turning Mesopotamia into a Superfund site. And so what if, as has been reported by Iraqi doctors trained stateside at Sloan-Kettering, hundreds of Iraqi babies are being born without a brain? In America, that doesn’t stop you from becoming president. Welcome to mutually assured destruction without the mutuality. Unfortunately, some things can’t be recalled. Elements like plutonium and the aptly named americium typically have half-lives of over 400 years. By that time, J.Lo will be happily married. Those minefields in Bosnia are looking better every day. At least when you step on one of those, it’s over fast. If nothing else, you have to feel for cartographers. Vieques has been relocated to Basra, and the real Camp X-ray isn’t in Guantanamo Bay. The cradle of civilization is now the grave. It’s hard to win the battle of hearts and minds when they are metastasizing. True, Saddam gassed his own people. We’re microwaving his and ours. This sort of thing tends to make a Dixie Chick out of the most patriotic among us. Unfortunately, from now on, anything the US says will be taken with a grain of SALT. We now have less moral weight in the Middle East than Sammy Bull has in Sheepshead Bay. Meanwhile, those French ingrates refuse to endorse our program of bullet-by-bullet nuclear proliferation. No one likes to be thought of as a hypocrite, but if we had found just one DU shell casing with Arabic writing on it, Sean Hannity would have had an orgasm. If the army’s dalliance with LSD in the 50s is any indication, DU amo will be turning up in the streets of Compton any day now. Forget North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear capabilities. I’m worried about the Crips and Bloods. I give it till about Christmas before plutonium nuggets are being shoulder-launched at American passenger planes by Al Qaeda. A debt of gratitude is owed to Rolling Stone for its recent informative, in-depth feature on DU. In an irony that may have been lost on the pro-hemp Jan Wenner, Britney Spears appears half-naked on the cover of the same issue. You may remember her as the celebrity pundit who advised that we trust our president and not ask questions. If only the DU shell casings were as empty as Britney’s head. Click here to rant back. |