December 4, 2024: In 2023 Britain was criticized by Russia for sending depleted uranium tank gun shells along with the Challenger 2 tanks sent to Ukraine. Apparently, the people running Russian propaganda operations were not aware of what was going on with the ammunition used in Russian tanks. The Russians also supply depleted uranium shells for their tanks, as does Germany and the United States. So why is depleted uranium criticized? The reason is simple: anything associated with uranium, depleted or otherwise, will make for provocative headlines among the “eek-a-nuke!” crowd. Despite that many nations continue to use depleted uranium shells because this is the most effective ammunition for destroying enemy tanks. Despite all that, there is this persistent myth that depleted uranium is somehow toxic. This has become a myth too popular to stop using.

For example, some American soldiers returning from Iraq with undiagnosed health problems blamed it on depleted uranium metal, which is used in the 30mm cannon carried by the A-10 aircraft, 25mm shells used by the M-2 infantry fighting vehicle and 120mm shells used by the M-1 tank.

Depleted uranium is a very dense metal that has had the radioactive material removed in order to manufacture nuclear fuel or material for atomic bombs. This leaves the depleted uranium about as radioactive as some common building materials like granite. In other words, not very radioactive at all. Depleted Uranium is denser, and heavier than any other metal and penetrates thicker armor. It has proved to be a very effective anti-tank weapon. Not only does it go through armor, but it also burns when it hits armor at a mile a second or 1,600 meters a second. This increases the damage within the tank. But when the depleted uranium burns, it also creates many tiny fragments. At one point scientists believed that these fragments, emitting alpha rays, were causing otherwise unidentifiable diseases among troops who had operated in areas where depleted uranium ammunition was used. This proved to be false.

Another factor was that depleted uranium particles are still a heavy metal and are in the air only for a short time after the depleted uranium shell has hit something. After that, the particles fall to the ground and tend to stay there. Depleted uranium replaced tungsten, another (non-radioactive) heavy metal for armor piercing work. Tungsten can also cause health problems if it gets inside of you, as does another, more familiar heavy metal, lead.

Depleted uranium is what is left over when uranium has the highly radioactive U-235 removed for use as nuclear fuel or for atomic bombs. What is left is U-238, which, while still radioactive, emits much less dangerous alpha rays. U-235 emits the much more dangerous gamma radiation. Depleted uranium is thus less radioactive than the original uranium, and not much more radioactive than many other rocks. Thousands of American soldiers and civilians have handled depleted uranium in the last half century, with no noticeable increase in health problems. Moreover, there has been no increase in cancer cases among the civilian population of areas where depleted uranium shells have been used. Cancer specialists know that it takes five to ten years for leukemia to develop from a radiation exposure. Nuclear medicine specialists also point out that depleted uranium's alpha rays are stopped by just about anything, including skin.

There has, however, been an increase in cancers in Kuwait and southern Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War. But this region underwent far more than just the firing of many depleted uranium shells. The area was subjected to several weeks of burning oil fields. These fumes are also a known carcinogen and were far more abundant than the remains of depleted uranium shells. Moreover, the thousands of armored vehicles that tore up the pristine desert created an unprecedented, even for Arabia dust cloud containing a very fine, talc like, sand and a lot of other nasty stuff. Local doctors were not surprised at the increase in illness because they knew, from long experience, what oil fumes and the crud in the sand could do.

Accusations of depleted uranium causing health problems have been made before and have never withstood scientific scrutiny. But throw the words uranium and radioactive in front of the media and you send reporters and politicians into a frenzy. Meanwhile, this detracts from the very real health problems soldiers are encountered in places like Iraq and Ukraine. As far back as the 1970s, Department of Defense medical experts warned of the large number of diseases native to the Persian Gulf. Many of these exotic afflictions are tolerated by the locals, but can be debilitating, or fatal, to outsiders. There are also a number of medical conditions in the area which are either unidentified, or not well understood, even by the natives.

No one from the West took a close look at the diseases of the Persian Gulf area until large numbers of outsiders moved into the area during and after World War II. Currently, identifying and treating all the diseases of the region is still a work in process. There is a similar scare in Ukraine with the Russians insisting all manner of maladies were created by the depleted uranium munitions since by NATO countries. Grandstanding over non-existent depleted uranium illness detracts from work on the real diseases injuring Ukrainian soldiers. What made all of this a credible news story in so many places? Mostly it was the eagerness of the media to fall over a scary story.