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Review of Blowin’ in the Wind - a Frontline Films production, produced by David Bradbury and Peter Scott, directed by David Bradbury, Australia, 2005.

I was lucky enough to see the première of David Bradbury’s latest film, Blowin’ in the Wind, at the Sydney Film Festival in June.

Bradbury is one of Australia’s foremost documentary film makers, a man who has won a raft of prizes at film festivals around the world and received several Academy Award nominations, including one for Frontline, his portrait of celebrated Australian cameraman Neil Davis on the job in Vietnam.

Blowin’ in the Wind was finished just in time to coincide with Operation Talisman Sabre 2005, the joint exercise of US and Australian troops conducted in June at Shoalwater Bay, Queensland – the first set of wargames conducted in Australia since a new defence agreement was quietly signed in Washington on July 7th last year.

Bradbury’s film is a searing exposé of the nature and effects of ‘depleted’ uranium (DU) munitions, set in the context of this little-publicised agreement which sets up the expansion of US weapons testing at numerous ‘facilities’ on Australian soil. In just an hour, Blowin’ in the Wind integrates innumerable strands of this complex story with seamless and terrible coherence.

The film is a wake-up call to Australians. As the US military presence is quietly extended across the country, we are not being told whether DU weapons have been or will be fired on our soil. Many locals living near bombing ranges are very worried – for their health, their fertility and their livelihoods. Bradbury interviews people from Lancelin, WA, where contamination could compromise the cray fishery and from the Shoalwater Bay area, which exports beef to Japan and pineapples to the rest of Australia.

Both areas also depend on the pristine environments which underpin their tourist industries, but two weeks after the agreement was signed, the government announced that an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) will no longer be required before or after military exercises. As the Queensland State Member for Keppel remarks in the film, promoting a place like Yeppoon could turn out to be like trying to maintain a “tourist industry at Chernobyl”.

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Blowin’ in the Wind gives us footage of the 2004 signing of the new defence agreement, where Robert Hill, Alexander Downer, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell literally fall about with unbridled hilarity as they seal the deal – whatever the deal really is.

The idea that we might co-operate with US efforts on missile defence (the ‘son-of-star-wars’ project which, at unbelievable expense, has yet to prove that it works was made public from early 2003, so our 25-year commitment on Star Wars was relatively unsurprising.

But Bradbury’s film focusses on a much less advertised part of the agreement – the expansion of the joint training ‘facilities’. Though the Prime Minister claimed that there was nothing secret about the new arrangements, few specific details about this expansion were forthcoming at the time and, apart from a Courier Mail story about plans to test “new generation weapons, including smart bombs”, there has been little press coverage since.

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Some readers will remember that the Philippines expelled the US from Subic Bay and Clark Air Base in the early 1990s not long after Mount Pinatubo erupted. This was a serious setback for the US, and Blowin’ in the Wind quotes Vice-Admiral Archie Clemens of the US Navy explaining just why the loss of these bases was so upsetting for the Navy. The worst thing the US lost in the Philippines, according to Clemens,

...was bombing ranges to train. Y’have to have places to drop bombs; y’have to have places to shoot live weapons; y’have to have places to fly planes over and make a noise; y’need places where you can actually test and exercise your capabilities… You [Australians] now have some of the finest ranges in the West Pacific which we cannot get anywhere else.

In 2003, the US Navy abandoned its bombing range on Vieques after decades of protest from the local people and their supporters in the US. About two thirds of that once paradisal Puerto Rican island had been used since World War II for aerial bombing, ship to shore bombardment and amphibian assault (precisely the activities planned for Shoalwater Bay).

Apart from the endless nerve-wracking boom and thud, child cancer rates on Vieques soared to 250% above the Puerto Rican average in the last thirty years. After denying that they had used DU on Vieques, the US military admitted in 2000 that it had fired just a few hundred DU shells ‘by accident’. Either that’s a grave understatement or, if one takes the military’s word that exposure to DU was ephemeral on Vieques, it is obvious that DU is not the only deadly toxin being generated at bombing ranges.

Bradbury also mentions the less well-known complaints of Japanese and mainland Americans against US bombing exercises conducted near their homes.

1500 rounds of ‘depleted’ uranium ammunition were test-fired on Okinawa in 1995, though it was not admitted publically until 1997. A few weeks ago, as US Marines began exercises in central Okinawa, I caught a fleeting mention on ABC radio of a demonstration of 10,000 people there, a story absent elsewhere in the Australian media as far as I could tell. Locals, including the governor of Okinawa, marched to the front gate of Camp Hansen to object to the firing of live ammunition within 300 metres of people’s homes.

Bradbury’s film does not cover the uproar in the Japanese Diet which forced the US to withdraw its DU weapons from Okinawa, nor the relocation of the weapons to South Korea. Farmers there are no more enthusiastic about military exercises carried out across their fields, which the South Korean government gave to the US. The land is now leased by Lockheed Martin under contract to the Defence Department. US officials finally confessed to having DU munitions in South Korea after a year of denying it.

The US military stored and used DU weapons in these places without forewarning the local people. Blowin’ in the Wind makes urgent these questions: Is DU being used at Shoalwater Bay? Will it be used at Lancelin? Or at other ‘facilities’? And how will we know if it is?

In the film, we see a crisp young naval officer, conducting what appears to be a public relations tour of his ship docked in Fremantle. He proudly points out 20mm weapons with the capacity to fire several thousand DU rounds in one go. “Any DU on board?” he is asked. “Yes,” he says.

Meanwhile, US Ambassador Schieffer tells an interviewer that the DU issue is “bogus” and the “navy is not engaged in that sort of thing”. As to whether US warships carry DU munitions: “I don’t believe they do,” says Shieffer.

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So-called ‘depeleted’ uranium (DU) is what’s left over when yellowcake (uranium ore) is enriched to produce nuclear fuel or weapons-grade uranium.  Though incapable of fission, DU is still uranium and remains radioactive (57% as radioactive as yellowcake), with a half life of 4.5 billion years. The alpha particles it releases are a spanner in the works for DNA if they get inside the body – invisible, but potentially catastrophic for any life form, including humans.

DU is the first layer of nuclear waste produced in the fuel cycle and there’s a massive volume of it lying around – over 700,000 metric tonnes in the US alone – stored in steel cylinders in the open. DU is a liability for the Department of Energy (DOE), which is responsible for the wastes of the nuclear fuel cycle, so it has a major advantage for the US military: Bradbury’s film reveals that DU is being supplied free of charge to munitions manufacturers.

The film also shows how, for a range of missiles, uranium has become the tip of choice. It was initially used in relatively small quantities on tank-busting munitions in the first Gulf War, but is now almost certainly powering the current generation of bunker busters deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq – with DU payloads of a tonne or more. See here. Over 3,500 tonnes of DU is estimated to have been exploded in Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan, more than half of it in Iraq.

Uranium is almost twice as dense as lead and has exquisite penetration properties; it allows the projectile to slice straight through inches of steel armour or metres of concrete. Not only this, it ignites on impact and burns at 5000˚C, ensuring everything inside the target is ‘carbonised’.

It is not a weapon the US military is willing to forgo, whatever the consequences for civilians and its own soldiers.

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Leuren Moret is one of Bradbury’s expert witnesses, an environmental geologist who had worked in US weapons laboratories. At Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, Moret realised that she and her team were being irradiated in the course of their work – and left. She has since dedicated her life to informing the public about nuclear weapons and radiation issues.

Moret’s account of the risks from DU is chilling. Whether or not it is fairly innocuous if left undisturbed (as the DOE asserts), most of it, maybe 70%, is vapourised when the warhead burns – sprayed into the air as submicroscopic particles of uranium oxide which gas masks can’t intercept. In this form, it’s easily breathed in and once inside the body it keeps emitting alpha particles for life, in direct contact with DNA.

According to Moret, this spray of radioactive particles is not only a danger to people close by (the Pentagon line) but remains in the dust around the target – and even ends up in the troposphere, ultimately landing back on earth all over the planet.

Bradbury interviews other scientists at the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg (Oct 2003) who have measured road dust in Kosovo and air quality over Basra, finding alpha particles far beyond background expectations for years after DU weapons were used.

Chris Busby of the University of Liverpool describes the “total catastrophe” of uranium dust dispersed across the entire planet. The proliferation of DU weapons may induce the same kind of global upsurge of cancer as atmospheric atom-bomb testing did in the 50s and 60s.

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Australians were irradiated without their knowledge by the Maralinga and Monte Bello tests of the 1950s and 1960s, tests which were decided on by just three men, Prime Minister Menzies and the two nuclear scientists Ernest Titterton and Mark Oliphant. Evidence that the cities of Adelaide and Brisbane – and tracts of Australian pasture – suffered fallout was suppressed. Blowin’ in the Wind revisits Maralinga briefly, focussing on Australian soldier Arthur Phillips, who witnessed several tests. Most of his 13,000 colleagues have died, over 80% from cancer. Back then, Government reassurances about civilian safety proved duplicitous.

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The Pentagon has always argued that “Gulf War syndrome”, which is blamed for the immense medical problems of Gulf War veterans, is of unknown origin. But Doug Rokke, perhaps the most compelling witness in Blowin’ in the Wind, thinks otherwise. A retired Major and physics PhD, he headed the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project and led the investigative team charged with observing DU weapons damage and recovering damaged tanks after the first Gulf War.

Rokke, who is now dying of cancer, concluded that it is impossible to clean up after DU weapons. The genie in the form of tonnes of mobile dust cannot be put back in the bottle. He also tells us how the Pentagon instructed him to downplay any problems in his report.

A Vietnam veteran from the patriotic corn belt south of Chicago, Rokke was reluctant to go public – but, as members of his team fell sick and died, the plight of his fellow veterans tipped the scales. About half of all the US soldiers who went to Iraq in 1991 are now on permanent medical disablity and 11,000 have died.

In the film, Major Rokke insists that the Pentagon has known all along that DU can cause cell damage, cancer and kidney damage. Despite this, many soldiers report that they had little warning to treat DU munitions or debris from destroyed tanks with caution.

Since being interviewed for Blowin’ in the Wind, Leuren Moret has released her findings that the key toxin leading to Gulf War syndrome is DU. One focus of Moret’s research was:

a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War; 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans’ families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.

Neither does the Pentagon offer post-war testing for uranium contamination, so there is no overall database for veterans reporting medical difficulties on returning from the current invasion and occupation of Iraq (1993-5). But the reports keep trickling in.

I was in New York in April 2004, when Juan Gonzales of the New York Daily News broke a story about New York National Guardsmen testing positive for DU exposure after the News put up the money for the tests. These soldiers, who had been working as police and prison guards, had not been exposed to the major combat of March-April 2003, but had been contaminated by indirect effects such as abandoned tanks and dust

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While US soldiers got little warning about DU, Iraqis got none at all. And, sad as it is if US soldiers are victims of their own command, the plight of the Iraqis is far starker. Bradbury’s film suggests that large areas of their country are irretrievably contaminated, including farmland, water sources and towns. Back in 1992, one year after the first Gulf War, one baby per week was born deformed in Basra in southern Iraq. Today, deformed babies are born at the rate of seven to ten per day. This is a tragedy that the Iraqis share with the US veterans – babies that are mere “pieces of flesh”, without heads or limbs.

Bradbury’s footage of Iraqi babies is graphic and devastating. He also focusses on one baby born to a family that moved near the Shoalwater Bay bombing range 12 years ago. They had had three healthy children before the move but the recent baby was born with severe deformities and died six days later.

Our own government seems to have settled for the Pentagon line. Blowin’ in the Wind shows Air Commodore Austin telling the Australian Senate that the Department of Veterans Affairs has “conducted a very comprehansive review of health effects” and found “no identifiable health threats of significance to military personnel associated with the use of ‘depleted’ uranium munitions”. Gonzales also reported that a Pentagon spokesman “said Army followup studies of 70 DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious health effects.” Official reports reiterate that DU is safe, while the evidence of hazard continues to grow.

It is of more than passing interest to Australians that the men tested by the New York Daily News had been working near Samawah, where both Dutch and Japanese troops with geiger counters have registered radioactivity that is hundreds of times background levels. The men recently dispatched to Iraq by the Howard government will be stationed near the Japanese contingent at Samawah.

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I’ve now seen Blowin’ in the Wind’s shocking and galvanising impact on two audiences – I saw the film again on Saturday night when it was screened here on the rural mid-north coast of NSW. The scramble afterwards for DVD orders was much the same as the scene in Sydney at the Film Festival – and here, most of the audience stayed on to plan a response.

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