Concord, Ma : "The DU shot heard round the world”

by Steve Gillis
for the IAC-Boston

Jan. 15, 2001

Concord: An outpouring of residents in this small colonial era town outside Boston- home of the 1776 American revolution, Minuteman National Park, and depleted uranium profiteer Starmet -today denounced what they call Pentagon contractor Starmet's "Toxic Shots Heard Round the World"! For these 150 residents and their allies, who braved a snowstorm at 8:00 am to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday, "Ban DU weapons world wide immediately" is a unanimous demand. To Concordians, DU is as close as the abnormally high cancer rates in their wooded neighborhoods, whose secluded riverbanks Starmet (known pre-Gulf War by the less euphemistic Nuclear Metals, Inc.) has used since 1958 as an unlined dumping pit for over 400,000 pounds of its radioactive refuse of war production.

The protest's local sponsors, Grassroots Actions for Peace and Citizens Research and Environmental Watch (CREW), were joined by Latinas and Latinos for Social Change, DU researcher and Gulf War veteran Dan Fahey, Ed Bryan, commander of the Massachusetts Gulf War Veterans, and other local politicians, churches, and anti-war groups. Their efforts were part of an international day of actions called by the Military Toxics Project to petition the world's governments to immediately ban depleted uranium weaponry.

Judy Scotnicki, of Grassroots Action, informed the Pentagon that although it "has said it will never give up depleted uranium penetrators, the Pentagon is not the people." She pointed to the growing world wide movement to outlaw and criminalize the manufacture and use of these weapons of everlasting mass destruction, and called for solidarity with the peoples of Iraq, Puerto Rico, and Europe, who are suffering and combating the direct consequences of US nuclear bombardment.

Steve Fernandez, of Boston based Latinas & Latinos for Social Change, spoke of the many ironies in fighting massive, war industry, nuclear contamination in the woods of Walden Pond, where Thoreau penned "Civil Disobedience" more than a century ago. Speaking at a post-protest press conference in Concord's Colonial Inn, Fernandez blasted the continued US colonization of Puerto Rico, particularly the US navy's genocidal bombings of the inhabited island of Vieques with DU, chemical and conventional bombs, and napalm. LFSC demands that the US military immediately retreat from Vieques, clean up the island, restore its natural environment, compensate Vieques's citizens, and end its many operations in Puerto Rico.

These demands were applauded by the demonstrators from Concord, and brought home to target the Pentagon and Starmet's local operations. Begun as a corporate spin off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 50 years ago, Starmet is one of only two DU weapons manufacturers in the US, the other being Aerojet Ordnance in Jonesboro, Tennessee. Dozens of other bombing ranges, test sites, and dumping grounds in the US are contaminated with DU, which has a life of 4.5 billion years.

Starmet was delisted from the stock exchange and reportedly on the verge of a bankruptcy filing last week. Its wealthy stockholders, the Pentagon, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund department are aiming legal bullets at each other in their internecine struggle over who is to pay for the estimated $50 million clean up, which now languishes as DU seeps further into the local water table. Activists today vowed further struggle, in the legal arena and in the streets, to make all partners in this military industrial complex cease and desist from their criminal activity, and take responsibility for their toxic destruction of environments worldwide.

Readers online can print a copy of the Military Toxics Project's petition to ban DU at

Military Toxics Project DU Petition

For more info about Starmet and DU contamination in Concord, check out a 1997 presentation by Judy Scotnicki of Concord's Grassroots Actions for Peace