NO one can deny that a world in which a regime like Iraq's no longer has "weapons of mass destruction" would be a safer place.

Yet ammunition containing depleted uranium was used right across the southern battlefields in Iraq by American and British forces in the first Gulf War in 1991.

Journalist John Pilger has described how children who were not even born in 1991 are dying from Hodgkin's disease, leukaemia and other cancers in Basra hospitals. Fruit growing in gardens and fish from the local rivers are mutated and inedible.

The West denies any link between depleted uranium weaponry and reports of the high levels of cancer mortality in the region. But, according to Pilger, "In 1991, a United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority document reported that if eight per cent of the depleted uranium fired in the Gulf War was inhaled, it could cause '500,000 potential deaths'."

Your feature entitled "Arms and the man" (March 20) showed these weapons are still part of our armoury but did little to inform us of their true nature. Instead, we were presented with bland technical data, neat, sanitised diagrams and understated text.

None of this comes near to describing the true effect of these weapons on impact, or the long-term effects of what is, according to one US army physicist in Pilger's book, "a form of nuclear warfare".

Mike Cooper,

Huntington Road,

York.

...AFTER visiting Iraq, Caroline Lucas MEP wrote of the consequences of using depleted uranium-tipped warheads during the last Gulf War. She was shown shocking photographs of babies born with terrible congenital malformations.

She quoted Dr Abdul Jasim, the Basra hospital's chief oncologist, who said: "Women are afraid of becoming pregnant in this city. Before 1991, we had no leukaemias at this hospital. Now we sometimes have four or five in one week."

British ministers and military have had 12 years to take in these after-effects of depleted uranium, which is held to violate international law precisely because its lethal radiation does discriminate between soldiers and civilians.

If Tony Blair's aim was to eliminate the Iraqi people, depleted uranium shells would be a useful tool. But when his aim is avowedly humanitarian, I wonder why he forces British troops to use weapons which will go on killing innocent people for years to come.

John Heawood,

Eastward Avenue,

Fulford,

York.

Updated: 11:00 Wednesday, April 02, 2003