Iraq Links U.S. Weapons To Cancer

United Nations' arms inspectors report today that Iraq has blocked at least three of their teams in the last week, denying access to evidence about chemical and biological weapons.

While pledging to co-operate with the U.N. inspectors, Iraq has launched a new campaign against the United States. CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports that Iraqi officials charge that American weapons used in the 1991 Gulf War are causing an epidemic of cancer.

Until recently, that claim has been angrily disputed, but increasingly vocal criticism of the DU shells is now coming from sources closer to home.

Even from the man the U.S. Army sent in to clean up the mess left behind in the desert.

"Contamination levels that we saw in equipment that was struck by depleted uranium was fairly substantial" says Doug Rokke, a former U.S. Army health-physicist.

Now a university professor, Rokke supervised the recovery of destroyed Iraqi armor and later ran the army's tests of DU shells in the Nevada desert.

Rokke found that when a DU shell impacts, much of it burns and turns into fine uranium oxide dust. The army may argue that radiation levels are not dangerously high, but Rokke insists the dust has unknown, even ominous health risks.

"If you breath it into the lungs, the depleted uranium is an alpha emitter and now you have the possibility, as the Surgeon General wrote in 1993, of cancer" he says.

Dr. Assaf Durakovic, a specialist in nuclear medicine, says he found that exact condition in some Gulf War veterans. Durakovic also says he was fired from his Veterans Administration job when he contested the Pentagon line.

"Out of 24 patients who were referred to my clinic, two of them, young people, died of cancer of the lungs and both of them were non-smokers and none of them had any symptoms of the lung tissue before the war" Durakovic says.

Yet the Pentagon points to the more than thirty American friendly- fire victims in the care of V.A. health specialist Dr. Melissa McDiarmid. They may have health problems from DU shell fragments, but they don't have cancer.

"I don't see anything that's a toxicological smoking gun for depleted uranium" she says. "In other words, we went to where we thought we should see a problem, the kidneys, there's not a problem tere."

While the Iraqis have been trying to make a case against depleted uranium, they suffer from a distinct credibility problem. Basically, given their track record, few in the outside world believe anything they say.

However, criticism from American scientists and doctors is raising the profile of the issue. These researchers say there simply has not been enough study done to truly gauge depleted uranium's effects.

That DU shells can kill so effectively was proven beyond doubt in the Gulf War. The unresolved issue is whether that killing power lasts a lot longer than the flash at impact.

Reported by Mark Phillips