Canada’s role in depleted uranium weapons worldwide
by Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, Med commonground.ca/iss/0707192/cg192_du.shtml
The Government of Canada is in non-compliance with the statutes and regulations of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), prohibiting the use of Canadian uranium in depleted uranium (DU) weapons. Moreover, Canada has a bilateral nuclear co-operation agreement with the US, under which uranium exports to the US may only be used for peaceful purposes, and not in weapons. This includes ‘control over the high enrichment of Canadian uranium and subsequent storage and use of the highly enriched uranium,’ a Foreign Affairs document states. The same rules that apply to uranium apply to depleted uranium, according to the CNSC.
DU weapons are considered weapons of mass destruction under international law. Thus Canada may be complicit in the US use of weapons of mass destruction in the 1991 Iraq war I, the 1998 Balkans war, the 2001 war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq war II, where the British medical journal Lancet estimates that one million civilians have died. In each of these wars, it is likely that depleted uranium in the DU weapons used by the U.S. and the UK comes from Canadian uranium exported to the US and processed in US enrichment plants into depleted uranium and subsequently manufactured into DU weapons. [more]