NOT-SO-SECRET-WEAPON: A U.S. Air Force A/OA-10 Thunderbolt II from the 355th Fighter Squadron is surrounded by a cloud of gun smoke as it fires a 30-millimeter GAU-8 Avenger Gatling gun over the Pacific Alaska Range Complex in Alaska on May 29, 2007. The A-10's standard 30-millimeter rounds contain depleted uranium, although CENTCOM says DU rounds have not been used in Afghanistan.
Image: DOD PHOTO BY AIRMAN 1ST CLASS JONATHAN SNYDER, U.S. AIR FORCE
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President Obama has called for the withdrawal of 33,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next year and the remaining 68,000 by the end of 2014, but questions linger regarding what the troops are leaving behind after more than nine years of combat. In particular, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has accused U.S. and NATO-led coalition troops of littering his country with weapons that use "nuclear components."
Karzai made this comment last week during an address to the Afghanistan Youth International Conference, throughout which he broadly criticized coalition forces and pointed out that the U.S. has been in negotiations with the Taliban in an attempt to end the fighting set off by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, during an appearance June 19 on CNN's State of the Union news program, confirmed such negotiations had taken place. Less clear, however, are exactly which weapons Karzai was referencing and their long-term impact on the Afghani people and their country.
Karzai's comments likely refer to ammunition that uses depleted uranium (DU) to pierce armor or, conversely, to strengthen armored vehicles, according to scientists as well as intelligence and policy analysts. They also note that DU is not "nuclear" in the sense that brief exposure to it would not cause radiation sickness or cancer in the way that fallout from a nuclear warhead or meltdown would. DU, the main by-product of uranium enrichment, is a chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal that is "mildly radioactive," with about 60 percent of the activity of natural uranium, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
"In short, DU munitions are not even remotely on the same scale of danger as having a war in the first place," says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and publisher of the ArmsControlWonk blog, which addresses disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), a Unified Combatant Command unit of the U.S. armed forces whose territory includes the Middle East, claims that no DU weapons are currently being used in Afghanistan, although a spokesman acknowledges that "DU-type munitions were used in Iraq in anti-tank and anti-armor weapons." The U.S. military itself has reported on its use of Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II jet fighter aircraft in Afghanistan. Whereas the A-10's standard 30-millimeter rounds normally contain DU, CENTCOM says that the A-10s in use in Afghanistan are not using DU munitions.
Why use DU?
"Wherever we send our A-10s, soon enough we hear reports of uranium contamination thanks to depleted uranium," says Chris Bronk, an information technology policy research fellow at Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and a former U.S. State Department diplomat. Still, it is unclear how much DU ammunition has actually been used in Karzai's country (either by the U.S. or its NATO allies) and the long-term impact of DU on the environment, he adds.
DU kinetic-energy rounds are an effective way of penetrating armored vehicles. "You want something dense, and DU is denser than lead, something on the order of 1.6 times the density of lead," says Kristian Gustafson, deputy director of the Brunel Center for Intelligence and Security Studies (BCISS) at West London's Brunel University. "You've now upped your energy transfer by significant quantity." Still, U.S. and NATO air-strike targets in Afghanistan are more likely to be mud–brick buildings than armored vehicles, and DU rounds "are useless for anything other than smashing armor," he adds.
DU is used in anti-tank shells because it is a heavy metal that can slam through shielding plates on armored vehicles, agrees Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project.
How dangerous is DU?
The DU used in munitions is neither the same as natural uranium ore nor the radioactive uranium used in a nuclear reactor. DU is mostly composed of the isotope uranium 238 (U238); its more radioactive content, U235, is at least three times less than that of natural uranium, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). "Natural uranium ore contains almost entirely U238 but also a small amount of U235," Kristensen adds.
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15 Comments
Add CommentSimple solution - as "leader" of the country, he needs to tell us to get out now! I have no problem with that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConfusingly written article. You state the U238 is not radioactive, yet in the next paragraph mention gamma radiation. There are several other areas that are less than clear as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGiven such a sensitive topic that is prone to misinformation and spin, it seems that special care in clear, crisp writing is warranted.
Very deceptive article, creating and destroying a false argument to make its point. The issue with DU has never been the immediate health threat from a false radiation scare. The issue is the generation of large quantities of DU dust particles that is inherent in the intended uses of DU to burn through armor etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article itself admits the toxic nature of inhaled/ingested DU particles. Once again, as in the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam we leave a country (countries - if you include two wars in Iraq where DU was used) with a long term toxic residue - or a long term health experiment on its population. We will worry about the long term health impacts on our soldiers (tank crews, etc exposed to DU dust in the operation of DU artillery etc.), its potential role in the long term health issues seen in so many Iraq war veterans, and deride as "political" any expression of concern from the nations exposed to this toxic residue
Maybe in twenty years we can come back to Iraq or Afghanistan to clean up our mess, as we are finally starting to do in Vietnam with toxic sites where Agent Orange was loaded and shipped.
Uhh, right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSJM has identified the issues -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. This article is disingenous in parroting the duplicitious statements of government spokesmen: "DU is not "nuclear" in the sense that brief exposure to it would not cause radiation sickness or cancer in the way that fallout from a nuclear warhead or meltdown would". 2. In fact depleted uranium penetration charges become incendiary and upon impact 99% of their mass is pulverized into particles approximately 0.1 microns in size, which become airborne until preceiptated by rain (rain?Afghanistan!?). Now, instead of a "brief exposure" to a du metal warhead, the environment and lungs of any exposed personnel will be continuously exposed to a radioactive micropollutant, which is additionally implicated in heavy metal poisoning and subsequent epigenetic damage.
Last I heard Lead is a toxic heavy metal (a main ingredient of most bullets). . . Also any partial that can't be cleaned from the lungs (using the lungs normal cleaning methods) is by definition a health risk - this includes allot of materials allot are not even normally toxic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat needs to be done is not going around yelling about that is CAN harm a person (it is a given it can – like most all things on the planet in some amount). . But how the amounts found in these war environments are scaled to "normal" local health threats.
Only then can some perspective can be had.
What an ungrateful piece of crap. I predict that when the taliban retakes the country after the U.S. leaves, Karzai will be one of the first to get beheaded.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKarzai's Accusation is a separate issue from the environmental and health effects of depleted uranium weapons. I don't know if these weapons are being used in Afghanistan, but it is not just tank shells and other heavy weapons that use depleted uranium. Heavy machine guns and other similar weapons have depleted uranium ammo versions. Are they being used? There is lots of information on the effects of DU weapons. Wikipedia has a extensive if disputed article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother article that discuses the issues involved and has a large number of references is http://cseserv.engr.scu.edu/StudentWebPages/IPesic/ResearchPaper.htm
If DU ammo is so safe, why isn't it generally available? Might want to shoot that deer from farther away and the police are always looking for more stopping power.
U is truly the boogeyman of the periodic table.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would posit that the long term effect would be a negligible increase in the background radiation in very small areas. I would imagine that people would come into contact with more Rn in their basements than they would as a result of DU weapons/armor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do believe they call it "depleted" uranium for a reason.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Still, it is unclear how much DU ammunition has actually been used in Karzai's country (either by the U.S. or its NATO allies) and the long-term impact of DU on the environment, he adds."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"At the same time, however, the studies identified a number of remaining scientific uncertainties that should be further explored. These include the extent to which DU on the ground can filter through the soil and eventually contaminate groundwater, and the possibility that DU dust could later be resuspended in the air by wind or human activity, with the risk that it could be inhaled."
Well they have no idea how much DU is being used nor what happens except there's not a big radiation risk. They'll see what the heavy metal risk is in a few decades after some studies or maybe not.
When one hears the word "Uranium", our mind stablishes automatically a bond with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. It's just the way our unconscious acts, words, images or concepts close one to other appear as identical, and if this mechanism is not acting, the mechanism of displacement passes the image of danger and destruction from a harmful thing to a probably innocent one. There is no way to scape such kind of propaganda, most of the way marxists countries indoctrinate its fellows is identical to this, and its force is overwhelming, you need to be some kind of an expert in the involved science field just to begin disengaging from the "evidence" this kind of images produce.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe funny thing with this article is that instead of focusing in the essence of the matter, i.e in the use of materials like depleted uranium against whole nations, it rather opts to underline the “politics” of the issue, insulting thus clearly the readers’ intelligence. This does not seem very weird though, as many facts have shown, especially recently, what some people think of the importance of human life. On the other hand, what is the probability of Euripides being right when noting that “he who harms others should also expect to be harmed” (Hercules Furens, 727)? I will close this comment by citing an excerpt from a recent article by the writer and gnoseologist Ioannis Tsatsaris, that is, to my view, the most illuminating work on how such kind of situations and behaviors emerge:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“The irrefutable clash of Man with his present natural form increases his subjective position, leading him to be in constant conflict with his self and, by extrapolation, with others. And his self, subjected as it is here in the intermediate universe, follows the unconscious expression and is subordinated to the greedy licence of the messages of his unconscious. The intermediate universe is answerable to the rules of natural conflict. This is why man, when he clashes, follows his natural flow here, element as he is of this intermediate universe. This is how he was classified, on the basis of his component course.”
(Ioannis G. Tsatsaris – “Μan's Ignorance about Nature” Scientific American, November 2010
Zoe Pittaki, Economist / Athens
A lot of DU ammunition was used against Hussein's tanks in the first Gulf War.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI remember that afterwards there were anecdotal reports of a certain type of widespread sickness among those who later went into the destroyed tanks, for whatever reason. Perhaps a subset of allied soldiers could be found and studied, to research long term effects of exposure to DU residues.
If it turns out that there is a significant danger from the residue of depleted uranium bullets, then this is a problem that should be addressed, not covered up.