He often develops his attacks on the basis of rejection-by-resume, pointing out supposedly false or overstated qualifications that Rokke or others have suggested that they have. 'If Rokke wasn't really the project leader,' or 'if his Ph.d. is actually in another field,' he asks observers to believe, then all the rest is bunk.
And Colonel Roger Helbig, a third denier of DU's decriers, resides in a class of his own as a pit-bull police canine that snarls at anyone who disparages the DOD's DU SOP (click here). To obtain a sense of the inimitable earnestness, abusiveness, and slickness that Helbig combines in his pugilistic schtick, one might examine a Canadian blogger who effectively dispatched the good Colonel after a period of hounding.
Helbig attacks by a combination of grabbing small errors by the throat and advancing huge assertions that are difficult to challenge without significant research, sometimes providing Army-vetted or similar 'health-physics' citations to buttress his position. David Rothscum, in "Conversations with a Denialist," demonstrates excellent good humor and potent intellectual legerdemain in repeatedly deconstructing and refuting (click here) the former Colonel with a pro-DU bent.
Debunking the Debunkers
Technically, these guardians of Depleted Uranium demonstrate two inarguable ideas about their opponents' utilization of the Conant/Groves texts. First, as noted above, none of the 1940's documents make mention of 'Depleted Uranium,' itself allegedly a Public-Relations term meant to pacify in advance possible critics of DULLRAM(Depleted Uranium Low Level Radioactive Material) firepower.
Second, most opponents of DU-weapons who have utilized the (memos) have suggested more than they could clearly prove about the purposes of Urey's and Compton's and Conants work (click here). This assertion of matters not in evidence, as it were, does not invalidate their reasoning; it does not dismantle their arguments; it does not diminish their overall rectitude. But like second-rate sophomore debaters who believe harping on non-sequiturs might deflect attention from substance and thereby rescue a losing cause, Holloway and company are relentless in hammering home that the memos don't prove that the S-1 subcommittee had DU munitions in mind.
However, looked at in the very best light possible for Messieurs Holloway, Cherry, and Helbig, this all basically adds up to a situation like the following criminal law hypothetical. A defense lawyer in a murder trial says that, 'first, my client didn't think about committing this crime five years ago; in fact, he didn't think about killing anybody until five months ago. Second, the prosecution made a mistake; my client used the substance in question not because it was poisonous, but because it was extremely useful. He could care less that it was poisonous. So therefore he's innocent of all the deaths of which he's accused.'
Quite likely, both of these contentions are distortions, or even outright lies, anyway. But even were they completely accurate, the fact of conscious carnage, with malice aforethought or reckless disregard for others, remains almost inevitably probable.
Uranium Toxicity--An Initial Substantive Defense of DU-Critiques
At least a dozen substantive rebuttals, all probative of this notion, are possible to the likes of Holloway and his companions. A couple should suffice at this juncture.
First, one confronts the overwhelming general evidence of Uranium toxicity, in terms of both radiation and chemistry, the denial of which is a reflection on the scientific fraudulence of the one who refuses to acknowledge the danger. Holloway's "vast majority" is at best tenuous, in this context: perhaps the field of health physics has a predilection toward accepting the Nuclear Fool Cycle that other 'experts'--in public health, medicine, epidemiology, history, and citizenship, to name a few--have not followed with the same slavish sense of self-serving self-interest.
Massive, and both long-accessible and recently developed, evidence demonstrates the noxiousness of Uranium. The National Library of Medicine, noting an anomalous lack of clinical surety, estimates the inhaled LD/50 intake as a gram or so and the ingested deadly dose as a few grams or so (click here). The toxicology textbook, Clinical Environmental Health and Toxic Exposures also agrees that, despite the demonstrable need, little is certain about the damage of different doses. It provides multiple historical vantage points for considering the issue and leaves no doubt about the general potential lethality of Uranium.
The deleterious impacts of Uranium on miners (click here) were common knowledge from the inception of the Atomic age; U.S. scientists and administrators adopted an 'experimental' attitude toward confirming what Central European laborers had long proven. Just as DU is the tail-end of the Nuclear Fool Cycle, with a litany of lethal effects, so too the first step along the Uranium avenue is beset with mortality and morbidity.
The Google search, <"Uranium mining" OR "Uranium mines" + health> garners 279,000 hits--on the first two pages, 15 of 23 items unequivocally warn of Uranium's poisonous legacy. A couple of the remainder were neutral, like the Wikipedia entry. The balance consisted of nuclear industry groups or Health Physics departments or representatives.
This predominance of caution in regard to the first step along Uranium's hellish highway ought to make anyone stop to think before reflexively extolling DU as innocuous. Rationale aplenty, of course, as readers shall soon see, might direct those with a stake in Uranium to overlook evidence of its risk. Such cavalier disregard could consider the input of a pair of Canadian physicians who have produced a brief monograph, "Human Health Implications of Uranium Mining and Nuclear Power Generation." Every step toward a radioactive 'renaissance' is replete with filth and death, including DU's martial uses.
And Colonel Roger Helbig, a third denier of DU's decriers, resides in a class of his own as a pit-bull police canine that snarls at anyone who disparages the DOD's DU SOP (click here). To obtain a sense of the inimitable earnestness, abusiveness, and slickness that Helbig combines in his pugilistic schtick, one might examine a Canadian blogger who effectively dispatched the good Colonel after a period of hounding.
Helbig attacks by a combination of grabbing small errors by the throat and advancing huge assertions that are difficult to challenge without significant research, sometimes providing Army-vetted or similar 'health-physics' citations to buttress his position. David Rothscum, in "Conversations with a Denialist," demonstrates excellent good humor and potent intellectual legerdemain in repeatedly deconstructing and refuting (click here) the former Colonel with a pro-DU bent.
Debunking the Debunkers
Second, most opponents of DU-weapons who have utilized the (memos) have suggested more than they could clearly prove about the purposes of Urey's and Compton's and Conants work (click here). This assertion of matters not in evidence, as it were, does not invalidate their reasoning; it does not dismantle their arguments; it does not diminish their overall rectitude. But like second-rate sophomore debaters who believe harping on non-sequiturs might deflect attention from substance and thereby rescue a losing cause, Holloway and company are relentless in hammering home that the memos don't prove that the S-1 subcommittee had DU munitions in mind.
However, looked at in the very best light possible for Messieurs Holloway, Cherry, and Helbig, this all basically adds up to a situation like the following criminal law hypothetical. A defense lawyer in a murder trial says that, 'first, my client didn't think about committing this crime five years ago; in fact, he didn't think about killing anybody until five months ago. Second, the prosecution made a mistake; my client used the substance in question not because it was poisonous, but because it was extremely useful. He could care less that it was poisonous. So therefore he's innocent of all the deaths of which he's accused.'
Quite likely, both of these contentions are distortions, or even outright lies, anyway. But even were they completely accurate, the fact of conscious carnage, with malice aforethought or reckless disregard for others, remains almost inevitably probable.
Uranium Toxicity--An Initial Substantive Defense of DU-Critiques
At least a dozen substantive rebuttals, all probative of this notion, are possible to the likes of Holloway and his companions. A couple should suffice at this juncture.
First, one confronts the overwhelming general evidence of Uranium toxicity, in terms of both radiation and chemistry, the denial of which is a reflection on the scientific fraudulence of the one who refuses to acknowledge the danger. Holloway's "vast majority" is at best tenuous, in this context: perhaps the field of health physics has a predilection toward accepting the Nuclear Fool Cycle that other 'experts'--in public health, medicine, epidemiology, history, and citizenship, to name a few--have not followed with the same slavish sense of self-serving self-interest.
Massive, and both long-accessible and recently developed, evidence demonstrates the noxiousness of Uranium. The National Library of Medicine, noting an anomalous lack of clinical surety, estimates the inhaled LD/50 intake as a gram or so and the ingested deadly dose as a few grams or so (click here). The toxicology textbook, Clinical Environmental Health and Toxic Exposures also agrees that, despite the demonstrable need, little is certain about the damage of different doses. It provides multiple historical vantage points for considering the issue and leaves no doubt about the general potential lethality of Uranium.
The deleterious impacts of Uranium on miners (click here) were common knowledge from the inception of the Atomic age; U.S. scientists and administrators adopted an 'experimental' attitude toward confirming what Central European laborers had long proven. Just as DU is the tail-end of the Nuclear Fool Cycle, with a litany of lethal effects, so too the first step along the Uranium avenue is beset with mortality and morbidity.
The Google search, <"Uranium mining" OR "Uranium mines" + health> garners 279,000 hits--on the first two pages, 15 of 23 items unequivocally warn of Uranium's poisonous legacy. A couple of the remainder were neutral, like the Wikipedia entry. The balance consisted of nuclear industry groups or Health Physics departments or representatives.
This predominance of caution in regard to the first step along Uranium's hellish highway ought to make anyone stop to think before reflexively extolling DU as innocuous. Rationale aplenty, of course, as readers shall soon see, might direct those with a stake in Uranium to overlook evidence of its risk. Such cavalier disregard could consider the input of a pair of Canadian physicians who have produced a brief monograph, "Human Health Implications of Uranium Mining and Nuclear Power Generation." Every step toward a radioactive 'renaissance' is replete with filth and death, including DU's martial uses.
"Canada does not reclaim the leftover depleted uranium after the enrichment process. The American military now uses some of it in the production of armour for tanks and for armour-piercing bullets. Bullets made from this material combust on impact, producing a fine radioactive smoke which, when inhaled, damages lung tissue. This aerosolized uranium, and the contaminated spent shells remaining on the ground, expose the local population, as well as soldiers, to this radioactive waste for many years (the half life of U 238 is 4.46 billion years). These weapons have been used in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other theatres of war. This material, and its radioactive daughter products, will remain mobile in the environment for a very long time. Canada is implicated indirectly in this situation, as it supplies the U.S. with uranium. "A 1981 DOD compilation reveals the clarity with which Army health physicists saw DU dangers then (click here). It makes the point that fully combusted DU munitions are inherently likely to cause excessive inhalation, for example. "The Uranium concentration in the area surrounding the fire will exceed the concentration limit calculated for an acute exposure."
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