Collage of a bomb crater, an ambulance, and the symbol of radioactivity. Photo composition: Zeinab El-Hajj/Al Mayadeen.
By Robert Daly and Christopher Busby – Sep 6, 2024
Dr. Christopher Busby is part a mixed crew of investigative reporters and commentators from Lebanon and some film-makers investigating “Israel’s” use of enriched uranium in strikes on Gaza on Lebanon, and aim to follow up on the strange illnesses that are appearing on the battlefield.
The American Peace Information Council (APIC) and Green Audit (UK) are conducting an investigation of “Israel’s” possible use of small nuclear weapons in Gaza and South Lebanon. Dr. Christopher Busby—Scientific Secretary, European Committee on Radiation Risk; once Member, UK Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters; once Member, UK Ministry of Defence Depleted Uranium Oversight Board—presents the scientific and social background of the case below.
APIC and Green Audit ask people who drive ambulances down in the South, or live there, to come forward with engine air filters from ambulances driven in bombed areas, samples of long hair (at least 10 cm in length) if they live in bombed areas, and Geiger counter readings and soil samples from bomb craters. Please send these samples and evidence to Al Mayadeen who will forward them to us. One would think that the easiest way to obtain ambulance air filters would be from the Lebanese Red Cross, but its General Secretary, Mr. Georges Kitanneh, refuses to assist this investigation.
— Dr. Robert Daly
‘Israel’ in Gaza: Red Mercury (Report by Dr. Christopher Busby)
In 2021, a scientific report in the prestigious journal Nature confirmed what I had been saying since 2006. “Israel” has, since its attacks on Lebanon in 2006 and those on Gaza in 2008 and 2014, used a new nuclear weapon, one which kills with a high temperature radiation flash and with neutrons. This weapon, which leaves an identification footprint, but no fission products like Caesium-137, we now know was also employed by the USA in Fallujah, Iraq in 2003, and previously in Kosovo also.
The residues, inhalable Uranium aerosol dust, together with the neutron damage to tissues, cause a range of serious and often fatal health effects that puzzle doctors and defy treatment. Without knowing what caused such effects, which often mimic other illnesses or result in fungal infections that kill, doctors are powerless to help and just watch the exposed individuals die.
In the cases of direct exposures to the flash, parts of the body, arms, legs, places that were not behind significant shielding are burned to blackened sticks. The aerosol Uranium dust is inhaled, destroys the lungs through fibrosis, is translocated to the lymphatic system, and later causes cancers, not only lymphomas and leukemias, but pretty much any cancer as a result of localisation of the Uranium particle in the organ, for example the breast, which has extensive lymphatic vessels. If the particle is coughed up and swallowed, it can end up immobilised in the colon and cause cancer there.
Downstream results in exposed populations include genetic effects, unexplained infant mortality, congenital malformations, miscarriages, sex ratio perturbations at birth, and fertility loss, all of which were found in epidemiological studies I helped carry out in Fallujah from 2010-2011.
This is not science fiction or arm-waving. I have acted as an expert witness in two successful legal cases, one in England and one in Australia, where the judge and coroner court concluded that the particles caused colon cancer. I am helping a US DU veteran at the moment in his case against the military. He has a pituitary tumour (the small gland is located behind the nose where the particles lodge).
I began this investigation in 2006 when an article appeared in a Lebanese newspaper reporting that an Israeli bomb crater in Khiam was radioactive. A Dr. Ali Khobeisi had taken a Geiger counter to the crater and found a 20-times background radiation level in the crater relative to nearby. By 2006, I had become something of an alternative authority on Depleted Uranium weapons (DU). I had given evidence to the US Congressional Committee on Veterans Affairs on the effects of DU and Gulf War syndrome, I had visited Iraq and also Kosovo, and I was a member of the UK government Depleted Uranium Oversight Board (DUOB); I had written articles, including for the United Nations, I had given evidence to the Royal Society.
I asked a colleague to go to Lebanon and get samples from the crater, and also an ambulance air filter. When they were analysed, using two separate methods, they showed the presence not of Depleted Uranium, but of Enriched Uranium (EU). Now this is impossible, unless the weapon was made from EU or created EU from neutron irradiation of U-234 and U-238.
To follow the explanation of the problem, you need some science. Natural Uranium, as mined, has three isotopes, U-238 U-234 and U-235. Most of this Uranium by mass is U-238 (99.7%). The 0.3% of U-235 is important for nuclear bombs and nuclear energy and is extracted in various ways to make EU. What is left behind is less radioactive U-238, and this is what is termed Depleted Uranium (DU).
When U-238 decays, it changes into Thorium-234, which rapidly changes into Protoactinium-234 and this turns into Uranium-234. Then you get a long list of progeny, but these do not concern us. All this happens quite quickly, and the process releases some gamma rays which make DU a gamma radiation hazard, contrary to the statements of the military that DU is not a handling hazard. It is. But this is not important in this story.
The main issue here is this. Was the enriched Uranium in the Lebanon bomb a real finding? Could it have been a laboratory error? The answer is No. We used two different laboratories and two different Uranium analysis methods, ICPMS and alpha spectrometry.
What we found was picked up by the reporter Robert Fisk, who put the story into The Independent in October 2006: “The Mystery of “Israel’s” Secret Uranium Bomb.”
Until we found EU, I had focused on the health effects of DU. Everyone did. But in 2006 I was contacted by an eminent Italian nuclear physicist, Emilio Del Guidice. I met him in London, where he told me that the source of the EU was a new weapon which used Hydrogen or heavy hydrogen, Deuterium dissolved in Uranium and when this warhead, as small as a baseball, was fired at a solid object, the hydrogen suffered Cold Fusion to form Helium with the emission of a powerful gamma ray which cause the U238 to convert to an unstable U-239 which decayed to U-235 and a neutron.
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I am not a nuclear physicist, though I have my own ideas about this explanation but at that time I accepted that he knew what he was talking about. At least it explained the source of the enrichment.
In 2008 I was approached by some doctors in Egypt who wondered if the Israelis were bombing Gaza with DU. With some difficulty, I obtained samples from Gaza, again soil samples and an air filter, and analysis showed the presence of EU. In 2010, as part of our study of the congenital malformations in Fallujah, we analysed the hair of the mothers for 52 elements to try and identify the cause of the birth defects. We found EU in the mothers’ hair.
Further support for the existence of an EU-containing or EU-producing weapon came from a study of a Kosovo war Veteran whose mysterious illnesses were investigated thoroughly by some doctors in Liverpool and Manchester. The man’s kidneys contained Enriched Uranium.
Emilio del Guidice had not stood still in this Sherlock Holmes investigation. Together with reporters from Italian TV (Rai News) he had visited the father of Cold Fusion, Prof Martin Fleischmann, whom I had also previously worked with when I was at the University of Kent in 1980. Fleishmann added to the intriguing scientific puzzle, but was unwilling to get involved. It seemed that scientists looking at cold fusion were dying under suspicious circumstances. Fleischmann himself had seemingly been poisoned with something that caused multi-site cancer and passed away on August 3, 2012. A cold fusion colleague developed the same multi-site cancer and didn’t survive.
Del Guidice and the Rai News producer following up the story wrote a book: The Secret of the Three Bullets, published in 2014. It is still in print and contains their side of the story. I am in the book under various names. But a few months before its publication, del Guidice unexpectedly died when alone in his house. I am told that the Rai News co-author editor of the book, Maurizio Torrealta has gone into hiding after having been posted three real bullets in an envelope.
Fast forward to 2021. The Nature paper gave the results of analyses of 65 samples of soil, sand, cement, and building materials from Gaza. Using gamma spectrometry (where you use the whole sample and look at the identifiable peaks from U-235 and Th-234 = U238) the authors identified some significantly high levels of Enriched Uranium in all the samples, but mostly in the soil samples. The levels of enrichment had become greater than those that we found in our earlier studies. The natural isotope mass ratio in nature (U238/U235) is 138. In Lebanon we found 116. In Gaza 108. The 2021 paper found about 85. Since this was before the recent bombing, this contamination must date to the 2014 Israeli bombing. What should we expect to find now?
In March of this year, I wrote to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the official UN watchdogs for the use of nuclear weapons. My colleague from Fallujah, Dr. Mohamad Al-Darraji also sent my letter under his name. Nothing happened. No reply. He was to organise a Press Conference in Vienna to draw attention to the use of this weapon in Fallujah, and the cover up of the residual high levels of radiation by the Iraqi Ministry of Science. I made a video to be presented at this conference (it is online). But he couldn’t get a venue.
I followed the letter up with a second version in July, demanding that the IAEA respond. I wrote a paper about the issue and submitted it to two journals, putting the pre-print online. It was rejected on the basis that the reviewers didn’t believe the Nature analysis results. Eventually, Al-Darraji got a reply from the IAEA (naturally, I didn’t). The IAEA didn’t believe the Nature results. Nothing to investigate. No problem.
The UK Green Party House of Lords member, Baroness Jenny Jones (who I know) asked a question in UK Parliament. The government said they didn’t have anything to say about it. About the high level of Enriched Uranium in Gaza.
So that’s it. What can we do? “Israel” and the USA (at least) have developed what is almost certainly a mini-neutron bomb. “Israel” is using it in Gaza. And may be using it in Lebanon (again). In fact, there is evidence for the development of such a bomb having been tested as long ago as October 1962, in the final US atmospheric test in the Dominic series in the Pacific. This was the test named “Housatonic” which achieved 9.96Mt yield but reportedly had zero fallout. That means it had no fission primer in the first stage, a necessary requirement for all the hydrogen bombs before it.
The significance of this appears to have been overlooked, but, astonishingly, you can find details on Wikipedia. The UK government put all that stuff under the Official Secrets Act and when I was representing the Test Veterans in the Royal Courts of Justice from 2010 to 2016, I was refused access to these details. The new bomb was successfully detonated just before the Kennedy Kruschev test ban, and just before Kennedy was assassinated. Could there be a link?
I have joined a mixed crew of investigative reporters and commentators from Lebanon and some film-makers to seek out the solution to this conundrum. We aim to follow up on the strange illnesses that are appearing on the battlefield. We aim to look for Enriched Uranium and also neutron activation products like Cobalt-60, Tritium and Carbon-14. In a new development, the laboratories that I used to examine the earlier samples have all suddenly closed their doors. One of them was shut down altogether after the first Gaza analysis. One of them was threatened. But we can do a lot with what we have.
What we want is for people to obtain Geiger Counters to check out the impact sites soon after the explosion, and if it is radioactive to get us samples of dust and dirt. We want women’s hair samples, especially long hair, cut from the nape of the neck, from women who were near or lived in areas that were bombed. You can buy a simple Geiger Counter now for about 60 euros. You can even get a low-resolution portable gamma spectrometer for about 350 euros.
We would like anyone with comments or information to contact us. This is a big deal.
The weapon will certainly be used in future exchanges, and will make local nuclear war possible, since the scary scenarios involving fallout may not materialise. I have named the device Red Mercury because that is what it probably is (remember the red mercury story: written off officially by science (haha) as a fraud, as a phony). Red Mercury was Stalin’s code for Enriched Uranium. Clearly, from the Dominic Housatonic test, the USA also developed the weapon. Since it kills without leaving fission products, it is invisible to the global nuclear explosion detection systems and the IAEA watchdogs.
But there is no doubt the IAEA know about it. Their latest report on Uranium in the Environment completely ignores Enriched Uranium. When I asked one of the report authors why, I was told they were short of money. They only had enough to look at Depleted Uranium. Can you believe this stuff?
