Earlier this week the local hometown paper ran a nonsensical op-ed about depleted uranium. The person who wrote the op-ed didn’t even seem to have any idea why the military uses DU, which can be found with a single Google search or even in most of the anti-DU literature. Anyway, this is a response I wrote which the local paper promises they’ll run as an op-ed next week:
There were numerous errors and omissions in Mary Ann Schwenk’s June 9 op-ed, “Federal bill to ban depleted uranium weapons should be revived.”
Schenk claims that “our government has not informed us as to why they decided to use DU weapons,” but the reason why depleted uranium is used both in weapons and in armor plating is hardly any secret — it is about 70 percent denser than lead which gives it extra stopping power when used in armor and additional penetrating power when used in munitions.
During the first Persian Gulf War, for example, an American tank outfitted with DU armor was able to withstand direct hits from three Iraqi T-72 tanks and not only survive but also disable all three enemy tanks.
As a weapon, DU is primarily used to target tanks. Because shells made of DU are able to penetrate armor much easier than other materials, DU munitions allow American forces to engage the enemy at a range of up to 25 percent further than with weapons made of traditional metals.
But isn’t DU radioactive? Yes, in fact, it is about as radioactive as most dirt. Since DU is actually about 40 percent less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium found in almost all rock, soil and water, it poses the same radioactive risk that most dirt does.
When a United Nations Environmental Program team analyzed soil samples from holes where DU rounds had impacted in Kosovo, for example, they found that most samples had radiation levels within normal ranges and just a small number of samples had slightly higher levels of radiation. As UNEP put it in its report, “Surface contamination in the areas we visited is trivial and does not pose any threat to the environment.”
The major long-term danger from DU is the possibility that large amounts of it would enter the water supply. Since DU is a heavy metal, large-scale ingestion of it would pose potential health risks, and UNEP has recommended the monitoring of groundwater where large numbers of DU shells have been expended.
Depleted uranium is also used in a number of civilian applications including x-ray tubes and as a radiation shield (casks used to store spent nuclear wastes, for example, are typically made out of depleted uranium encased in stainless steel).
The claims that DU is some sinister highly radioactive weapon whose use may constitute genocide under international agreements would certainly have made a great X-Files episode, but the facts simply don’t support such flights of fancy.