Abstract

Pentagon poison: The great radioactive ammo cover-up

Jerry Wheat suffered pellets and shrapnel wounds in the Gulf War in 1991. Not until his father, an industrial hygienist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, took them to work, measured them with a Geiger counter and discovered they were pieces of uranium-238, a radioactive and toxic byproduct of the process used to make fuel for nuclear weapons and reactors. For the first time in battle, the U.S. had used radioactive ammunition poisoning an unknown number of the U.S. soldiers in addition to the Kuwaiti and Iraqi environment, a story the Pentagon is doing its best to keep quiet. The results of emerging medical research show that the Pentagon knew as early as 1990 of the dangers of its new antitank ammunition made of uranium-238, but was mainly worried about bad public relations, that soldiers in the Gulf War were not warned of its toxicity.