Uranium Weapons Still Making Money, Wreaking Havoc
by alethoBy John LaForge | CounterPunch | May 15, 2014
The
US Army has awarded General Dynamics a $12 million contract to
deconstruct and dispose of 78,000 depleted uranium anti-tank shells. The
Pentagon’s May 6 announcement calls for “demilitarization” of the aging
shells, as newer depleted uranium rounds are added to the US arsenal.
In
the perpetually profitable business of war production, General Dynamics
originally produced and sold some of the 120-millimeter anti-tank
rounds to the Army. One of the richest weapons builders on earth,
General Dynamics has 95,000 employees and sells its wares in 40
countries on six continents.
The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons
in Manchester, England, reports the armor-piercing shells to be
disassembled are thought to be the large 105-millimeter and
120-millimeter anti-tank rounds.
Depleted
uranium, or DU, weapons are made of extremely dense uranium-238. More
than 700,000 tons of DU has been left as waste in the US alone from the
production of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor fuel rods. The
urankum-238 is left when fissionable uranium-235 is separated for
H-bombs and reactor fuel. DU is only ‘depleted’ of this U-235. It is
still a radioactive and toxic heavy metal. A tax and ecological
liability, DU is given away free to weapons builders.
The
Pentagon is replacing older DU shells in spite of international appeals
for a moratorium on their use. The military is set to buy 2,500 large
anti-tank rounds just this year at a cost of $30 million or over $10,000
each from Alliant Tech Systems, formerly of Minneapolis.
In
1991, during its 40-day, 1,000-sorties-per-day bombardment, between 300
and 800 tons of DU was blasted into Iraq by US forces. Another
estimated 170 tons were used in the 2003 bombing and annexation. Toxic,
radioactive contamination left from the use of these weapons (the DU
burns and turns to dusty aerosol on impact) has been linked to the
skyrocketing incidence of birth abnormalities in southern Iraq and to
the Gulf War Syndrome among tens of thousands of US combat veterans.
After
the US/NATO bombardment of Kosovo in 1999, our DU weapons were
discovered to be spiked with plutonium and other isotopes. This news
created a political uproar in Europe and led to the admission by the US
Energy Department that “the entire US stock of depleted uranium was
contaminated” with plutonium, americium, neptunium and technetium.
United Nations investigators in Kosovo found sites hit with DU to be
poisoned with all four isotopes. The Nation magazine reported
that about 150,000 tons uranium-238 was dirtied with plutonium-239 and
neptunium-237 and that “some apparently found its way to the Persian
Gulf and Balkans battlefields.” (Robert Alvarez, “DU at Home,” The Nation, April 9, 2001, p. 24)
European
papers shouting “Plutonium!” in headlines saw US and NATO officials
rushing to microphones to claim with straight faces that their shells
contained “mere traces of plutonium, not enough to cause harm,” and that
the highly radioactive materials “were not relevant to soldiers’ health
because of their minute quantities.” But plutonium is 200,000 times
more radioactive than U-238 and ingesting less than 27 micrograms of
plutonium-239 a millionth of an ounce — will cause lung cancer.
(One
indication of just how poisonous these weapons are is that in 30 years
of resisting nuclear weapons and the war system, the only ‘not guilty of
trespass’ verdict I ever won from a jury followed a protest at Alliant
Tech over its DU program. The jury agreed with four of us that since
poison weapons are banned by the Geneva and Hague Conventions our action
was an attempt at crime prevention.)
Long-term
disposal plans for the uranium from 78,000 shells were not outlined by
the Army. Uranium in the shells is often alloyed with titanium or
molybdenum, and if these metals are not recycled, they could become part
of our vast stockpile of DU, requiring indefinite storage as
intermediate-level radioactive waste. Other parts of the munitions are
currently disposed of as low-level rad’ waste in spite of the plutonium
content.
No comments:
Post a Comment