Has the nuclear catastrophe already arrived?

November 17, 1993
Issue 

Blowin' in the Wind
Directed by David Bradbury
Limited national season commencing in Sydney and Melbourne at Dendy cinemas on October 27, other cities to follow

REVIEW BY LACHLAN MALLOCH

David Bradbury needs almost no introduction to Green Left Weekly readers: his lifetime of progressive film-making speaks for itself. Bradbury's latest documentary — a film he says "you'll never see on 'your ABC'" — continues that tradition into perhaps his most dangerous subject yet, the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the era of the "war on terror".

In production terms it might seem modest — just under an hour long and made for the equivalent of chicken feed — but its content is breathtaking, sensational and urgent.

Blowin' in the Wind documents the increasing use of so-called "depleted uranium" (DU) in weapons around the world and forcefully reveals the devastating health and environmental effects of these "mini-nukes".

The world authority on the devastation wreaked by DU is former US Army physicist Dr Doug Rokke, who suffers from radiation sickness due to his work in Iraq after the first Gulf War. Dr Rokke is one of the heroes of this film, tirelessly campaigning around the world against the criminal use of nuclear weapons.

The other great heroes are the dying children in Iraq, whose bodies are riddled with the minuscule deadly radioactive particles unleashed by US bombing 15 years ago and carried for kilometres by Iraq's notorious, dusty winds.

The condemned children stare at us as if from the other side of a great abyss. It is impossible to look at them and not feel a burning guilt and shame at the nightmare visited upon them in our name.

The footage seen here, of dying children and grotesquely malformed foetuses, is not new. John Pilger's 2000 TV documentary Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq eloquently exposed the West's genocidal regime of economic sanctions and DU bombing in Iraq.

Before the Gulf War, few babies in Iraq were born with malformations. Now there are 7-10 per day, some of them so badly mutated that they are "just pieces of flesh".

This medical nightmare can only be expected to worsen, with the US's increasing use of DU on battlefields around the world. Yugoslavia was bombed with over 84 tonnes of DU, over 1000 tonnes were dropped on Afghanistan and Iraq was blasted with more than 2500 tonnes in the latest invasion.

Bradbury's new and sensational thesis is that these deadly nuclear winds have come to Australia and are set to blow even harder, in several ways.

First, Australian military veterans are suffering from the euphemistically titled "Gulf War Syndrome" — more likely, radiation sickness. We meet Gulf War veteran Ed Grant, suffering an unexplained disease and battling the Australian government to take his case seriously. Not surprisingly he's afraid of what poison he might have passed on to his children and eventual grandchildren.

Second, Bradbury outlines the Australian government's enthusiastic plans for dramatically expanding uranium mining here. This is a double-edged sword: we'll be faced with increased dangers of waste storage and accidents at mine sites, as well as increasing our complicity in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, by increasing the global supply of uranium.

But the centrepiece of Bradbury's thesis is his examination of the secret treaty, or "Memorandum of Understanding", that was signed by Australia and the US on July 7, 2004, setting the framework for intensified military cooperation between the two nations.

Bradbury argues that this agreement gives a 20-year-long, virtual blank cheque to the US to use all sorts of deadly weapons, including those with DU, in their testing and training exercises on Australian soil. It is likely that nukes were used in the June 2005 Talisman Sabre exercises at beautiful Shoalwater Bay on the Queensland coast, when 11,000 US troops joined the Australian military in live aerial bombardments, doing unknown levels of damage to such a precious environmental treasure.

Blowin' in the Wind shows us that we are entering a new period in Australia's long history of complicity with and support for imperial power, but it's mostly taking place behind the backs of the Australian people.

The extremely truncated cinematic exhibition of this film means that activists will need to work hard to make it anything more than a voice in the wilderness. It asks urgent questions that we ignore at our own peril.

[Visit the film's website at <http://www.bsharp.net.au>.]

From Green Left Weekly, November 2, 2005.
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