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Retired document - 2003-2003
Depleted uranium page, naively underinformed -
an example of what you can and can't do with cut-and-paste

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2003 June 12 Thursday.
Today I began construction a new DU page, so I've decided to retire my old 2002-2003 DU page to this retired document file.

In retrospect, the page looks naively underinformed. It's a good example of what you can and can't do with cut and paste. You can, on the one hand, very quickly throw together a web page. But you can't really give your brain cells a workout.

Nothing really beats the old method of reading widely, thinking, drafting, revising ... and, where possible, seeking out an ur-document, the original source from which some idea came, not the nine hundredth iteration of it seen virally reproducing itself somewhere on the Internet.

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Introduction ends, old 2002-2003 page starts

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Depleted Uranium: Executive Summary

Depleted uranium is a radioactive metal used in modern ammunition. It is used, for example, by the British and American armed forces. During combat, the disintegrating ammunition forms an aerosol. It forms a dust which can be breathed in. A certain proportion of this dust tends to be in an insoluble form. Depleted uranium which is in an insoluble form gets incorporated into the body. Breathe it into your lungs and it will take close to twenty years to be completely purged from your system. During that time, it spews radioactivity into your body. Additionally, uranium acts as a good old fashioned chemical poison. It seems reasonable to believe that depleted uranium kills people.

Depleted Uranium: The One Vital Document

I found a link to a document by an epidemiologist by the name of Rosalie Bertell. It is authoritative, persuasive and very well organized. I describe this document and provide the link:-

below

I think this document lays out the technical side of the depleted uranium issue very clearly, and I think that it justifies the statements made in my "executive summary" (above).

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Depleted Uranium: Facts, Figures and Links

What is depleted uranium? It is the metal that a lot of modern ammunition is made out of. It was used in the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991) presided over by George Bush (that is, by George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st president of the United States) and is alleged to have caused both casualties to American troops who were involved in that war and, subsequently, to Iraqi civilians living in areas contaminated by radioactive waste.

Want a bit more in the way of a definition? If you're a facts and figures person, you could check out the World Health Organization fact sheet on depleted uranium, WHO - Fact Sheet No. 257 - Depleted uranium (15/01/2001). This says, in part:-

Depleted uranium (DU) is a by-product of the process of uranium enrichment (increasing U-235, the fissionable isotope concentration) in the nuclear power industry in which nearly all the radioactive isotope U-234 and about two thirds of the U-235 are removed. Thus, DU is almost entirely U-238 and is about 60% as radioactive as natural uranium. DU can also contain traces of other radioactive isotopes introduced during processing.

When we are talking about the aftermath of the battlefield use of depleted uranium, there seem to be two separate issues involved. One, as indicated above, is radioactivity. The other, as indicated below, is chemical poisoning. Is depleted uranium radioactive? Definitely. However, it also seems that uranium is also a poison. The WHO page says this:-

Chemical toxicity: Uranium causes kidney damage in experimental animals, and some studies indicate that long-term exposure may result in damage to kidney function in humans. The types of damage that have been observed are nodular changes to the surface of the kidney, lesions to the tubular epithelium and increased levels of glucose and protein in the urine.

An alternative introduction to the subject is on the website which seems to belong to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC page about depleted uranium (link active 2003 February 12) is here and gives a compact, coherent introduction to the subject. It says, in part:-

Depleted uranium is still uranium. There are three types of uranium, U238, U234 and U235. Uranium 234 and 235 are fissionable material, the kind used in bombs. Depleted uranium is what is left over when the U234 and U235 is removed. The remaining U238 is still highly radioactive.

The page introduces us to a soldier, Jerry Wheat, who went off to fight in the Persian Gulf War. His fighting vehicle got hit by rounds fired by his own side.

"What Wheat did not know was that the shells that hit him were made from depleted uranium, the pride of the American arsenal."

If you're familiar with the staggering statistics on the bad health of veterans who fought in the Persian Gulf War, you can probably guess the rest of this story. If not, you can get more on Jerry Wheat here.

In summary, depleted uranium is bad news, firstly because it is radioactive and secondly because it is a toxic chemical.

There is an Environmental Exposure Report produced by the American military on the subject of Depleted Uranium in the Gulf. The copy on the web at 2003 February 12 is tagged "Last Update: December 13, 2000".

This is very much on the reassuring side (this is the American military speaking, right?) but one little technical point really caught my eye:-

The body excretes DU through the kidneys in urine at a rate depending on the solubility of the DU material deposited in the body. The more soluble the material, the faster it enters the blood, is processed by the body, and excreted. Insoluble DU deposited in the lungs moves very slowly into the blood, taking about 7,000 days for 99.9 percent to transfer to the blood.

(The quote above is on this page and is tagged with footnote 81, which refers us to "USACHPPM, Health Risk Assessment Consultation No. 26-MF-7555-00D, "Depleted Uranium-Human Exposure Assessment and Health Risk Characterization in Support of the Environmental Exposure Report 'Depleted Uranium in the Gulf' of the Office of the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Gulf War Illnesses, Medical Readiness and Military Deployments (OSAGWI)," September 2000, p. J-18.")

Now, if you take a calculator (my math is lousy) and divide 7,000 by 365, then you get (unless I've made a bad mistake) a figure of just over 19 years. The Persian Gulf War was 1990-1991. If you add 19 years to 1991 then you reach 2010. If you were in the Persian Gulf area in 1991, and if you had the misfortune to get an insoluble form of depleted uranium deposited in your lungs, then a proportion of it is still there.

At this point I started searching the Internet for "depleted uranium urine", and things started to get very technical very fast. I decided that the smart thing to do was to try an advanced search with www.google.com and see what the latest is.

I tried "depleted uranium urine" in combination with "English" and "past 3 months" and turned up a page dated August 1999 ... according to my calendar, August 1999 is not in the "past 3 months" (I'm writing this in February of 2003). However, this looked like good stuff, so I went ahead and read it.

This, I think, is the key document to the depleted uranium puzzle. If you're seriously interested in the subject, and you have time to read just one document, this is it. The document is by Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., GNSH, who states that "I am an epidemiologist, with 30 years of experience in studying the health effect of exposure to ionizing radiation". She gives us her views on depleted uranium as a weapon of war, which includes this:-

DU is a very powerful alpha particle emitter, with each particle carrying a force of about 4.2 MeV (million electron volts). It requires only 6 to 10 eV (electron volts) to break the DNA or other large molecules in the body. This long stay of DU from weapons within the body can now be demonstrated through 24-hour urine analysis. The presence of DU eight years after the Gulf War exposure, means that the internal organs: lung, lymph glands, bone marrow, liver, kidney, and immune system have experienced significant localized radiation damage. Testing of urine for both veterans of the Gulf War and citizens of Iraq has confirmed this long-term exposure to DU.

I interpret the above as meaning the following:-

Damage requirement = 10 (maximum).
Alpha particle punch = 4,200,000.
Alpha particle punch = 420,000 x amount required to damage DNA.

I could be making a big mistake here, in which case my ego will probably be damaged so severely that I won't blog for a whole 72 hours, or maybe even longer. I have to admit that my math is lousy, and on top of that I only have ten fingers. However, what Bertell seems to be saying in the passage above (and I hope I'm not catastrophically misreading this) is that you need a force of ten electron volts (maximum) to damage DNA (or other organic molecules), and that one alpha particle generated by depleted uranium packs a punch of 4,200,000 electron volts. Unless I'm misreading this (and I'm most horribly anxious in case I am) the meaning of "4.2 MeV (million electron volts)" is "4,200,000 electron volts".

If a charge of ten electron volts (or less) is sufficient to damage DNA, and if a single alpha particle exerts a force of 4,200,000 electron volts, then a single alpha particle emitted by decaying depleted uranium has 420,000 times the force required to damage DNA.

At this point maybe you're asking "What's this guy's scientific background?" My "scientific background" is limited to high school physics, high school chemistry, high school mathematics, and, for what it's worth, high school advanced mathematics ... I think I've got enough scientific knowledge to read TIME magazine and understand it, and (maybe this is a bit hubristic) I think that's sufficient to get a handle on this depleted uranium business.

Above, in the "Executive Summary", I write that "During combat, the disintegrating ammunition forms an aerosol. It forms a dust which can be breathed in. A certain proportion of this dust tends to be in an insoluble form." If you want to know more about this point, then refer to Bertell's document (the one I've just been discussing and quoting from) for the technical details. As I've noted above (just below the "Executive Summary" up near the top of the page), I think that Bertell's document is the key document to the depleted uranium puzzle.

Speaking of "Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Yugoslavia", all places where depleted uranium has been used in war, Betell writes that:-

Two points need to be stressed: veterans and civilians in these wars WERE exposed to DU; and this inhaled DU represents a seriously enhanced risk of damaged immune systems and fatal cancers. This type of radiological and chemical warfare should be banned.

Note that that depleted uranium is both a radiation weapon and a chemical weapon.

That's really the end of my discussion of depleted uranium, but if anyone's really interested in digging into the matter in detail then some of the links below might perhaps form useful starting points.

Continuing my hunt with Google, I came upon a stash of links to documents on a site apparently run by NATO, a site which loaded REALLY SLOWLY ... most of this material seems to be extremely bland and reassuring handouts. There may be something more interesting, but I ran out of patience waiting for things to load.

Question: why does the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have one of the slowest sites on the Internet?

At this point I went to http://news.google.com and punched in "depleted uranium" ... do it yourself for the latest.

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More Depleted Uranium Links

On the Soldiers for the Truth site there is a page called poisonedbattlefield.html ... this has a bunch of links to various battlefield health topics, including depleted uranium.

One link (active 2003 February 12) is to an article on the www.worldnetdaily.com site headlined 2 of 5 Gulf War vets on disability. This says, in part:-

But the truth is nearly two of every five of the approximately 540,000 Gulf War vets are on disability as a result of illnesses they believe they sustained during that conflict.

About 161,000 Gulf War veterans are receiving disability payments from the U.S. government. About 209,000 have filed VA claims.

To wrap up:-

Depleted Uranium Education Project - there are links to a number of depleted uranium documents on this page.

This page is on the site of www.iacenter.org, the International Action Center founded by former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

When visited 2003 February 12 (Japan time) the site carried this note, which gives the flavor of what's there:-

The anti-war movement has now inaugurated a campaign to impeach George W. Bush and other senior U.S. government officials for their criminal conduct. The planned war against Iraq and the destruction of constitutionally protected rights at home are the grounds for impeachment.

Ramsey Clark has drafted an appeal to ban depleted uranium. This says, in part:-

During the Gulf War, munitions and armor made with depleted uranium were used for the first time in a military action. Iraq and northern Kuwait were a virtual testing range for depleted-uranium weapons. Over 940,000 30-millimeter uranium tipped bullets and "more than 14,000 large caliber DU rounds were consumed during Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield." (U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute)

These weapons were used throughout Iraq with no concern for the health and environmental consequences of their use. Between 300 and 800 tons of DU particles and dust have been scattered over the ground and the water in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people, both civilians and soldiers, have suffered the effects of exposure to these radioactive weapons.

Of the 697,000 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf, over 90,000 have reported medical problems. Symptoms include respiratory, liver and kidney dysfunction, memory loss, headaches, fever, low blood pressure. There are birth defects among their newborn children. DU is a leading suspect for a portion of these ailments. The effects on the population living in Iraq are far greater. Under pressure, the Pentagon has been forced to acknowledge Gulf War Syndrome, but they are still stonewalling any connection to DU.

The www.iacenter.org has a page which apparently gives one the opportunity to buy a book on depleted uranium called Metal of Dishonor. The material on this page says, in part:-

In May, 1997, the International Action Center published a book of essays and lectures on depleted uranium: the contamination of the planet by the United States military. In addition to exposing the deadly duplicity of the Department of Defense, the book documents the genocide of Native Americans and Iraqis by military radiation, the connection between depleted uranium and Gulf War Syndrome, the underestimated dangers from low-level radiation, the legal ramifications of DU Production and Use, and the growing movement against DU.

Another site which deals with the topic of depleted uranium is the Campaign Against Depleted Uranium which leads you into the subject with an introduction to depleted uranium.

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