No Subject

[Don Kaag <dkaag@turbonet.com>]

"I remember reading in the New York Times that the U.S. used armor piercing shells containing depleted uranium when we bombed Kosovo (remember that?)  The area is seriously contaminated with radioactive material now. . ."

Melynda Huskey

Visionaries:

Sigh.  Now we get into my area of expertise.  

No, Melynda, the DU shells from the 20mm and 30mm auto cannon we fired in Kosovo did not "seriously contaminate with radioactive material".  

DEPLETED uranium!  It's about as radioactive as the hands on your watch.  The DU rounds are armor penetrators, and they use a depleted uranium alloy because it is the densest metal known to man.  So you have an itty-bitty, really fast, really dense, really hard, slug of depleted uranium which will penetrate tank armor.  The friction and resistance of the penetration causes it to "spall" (break up into little molten droplets) the inside of the tank armor, and then the droplets rattle around inside blowing stuff up and killing people.

The shells you refer to are on aircraft and used in the guns of armored fighting vehicles like the US's Bradley AFV.  We fired very few of them, because our aircraft were under orders to stay high to avoid getting shot down, and cannon like these are generally used for close ground support.  Since we didn't get into any significant firefights on the ground in Kosovo, the amount of DU ammo fired in-country was also at a minimum.

It is a different thing if you are harking back to the Persian Gulf War and the stories of battlefield contamination by DU rounds.  That was a tank war, and US tanks also fire DU rounds.  Since the tank gun on the Abrams M1A is 120mm, vice the 20 to 20 mm of the weapons used in Kosovo, and we fired thousands of them at the Iraqi Army, you are talking about a totally different level of contamination.  At that, the only people at risk were troops who crawled around in destroyed Iraqi tanks, and then only because they breathed in the residual DU dust present... and they would have sustained roughly the same symptoms if we had been firing asbestos rounds instead of DU!  

As far as I know, not a single US tank fired any rounds in Kosovo.

I rode around in Germany for three and a half years in the 1980's in a tank uploaded with 62 rounds of DU main gun ammunition, and its laminate armor sandwiched with rolled homogeneous steel, ceramic and depleted uranium, and I can assure you that I do not glow in the dark!

Regards,

Don Kaag