Quietly, US BUYS $38 Million Of Depleted Uranium Tank Shells

[kpete]

U.S. signs $38 million deal for depleted uranium tank shells
John Byrne
Published: March 2, 2006


The U.S. Army quietly placed an order for $38 million in depleted uranium rounds last week, bringing the total order from a West-Virginia based company to $77 million for fiscal year 2006, RAW STORY has learned.

The munition is highly controversial. While the Pentagon has been ambiguous about its health toll, leftover rounds from the first Gulf War are believed to have caused a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in Iraq. According to a detailed article by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2002, "Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations, agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans."

The new $38 million order was placed with Alliant Techsystems for 120-mm ammunition. Once the new pact is completed the firm will have produced 35,000 rounds for the U.S. military

http://rawstory.com/news/2006/U.S._signs_38_million_deal_for_0302.html

[Earth_First]

1. More nuclear war

goody! :eyes:

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Wonderful

x(

[FloridaPat]

3. For our next invasions? Iran??

[TechBear_Seattle]

4. Or Syria. Or maybe Pakistan

It depends on who seems the most vulnerable target as we get closer to the elections.

[StClone]

5. That story is all wrong

Iran is about to use nukes not the U.S.! We never would drop nukes or use Depleted Uranium laden shells that containment the environment with radiation. :crazy:

[deminks]

6. Who is it in this administration that has the biggest jones

for death, torture, disease and destruction? My money is on Smirky. Didn't he hurt animals as a child? It might be Rummy, too. More than likely Condi as well. Probably Bolton as well. They are all sick, sick people.

[Nikki Stone 1]

7. kick and recommend

:kick:

[AwakeAtLast]

8. I gladly put this one over the top

They can deny all they want, but this is still going to be the "Agent Orange" of the
Iraq conflict.

Wonder what the UN has to say about this?

[OneBlueSky]

9. depleted uranium weapons are WMDs, and their use is . . .

both a war crime of the highest order AND a crime against humanity . . .

Depleted Uranium Is WMD
By Leuren Moret
Scoop Independent News
Tuesday August 9, 2005

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0510/S00138.htm

My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin Joseph McAllister, was born in Battle Creek in 1895. He does not know that his first grandchild is an international expert on depleted uranium. I have worked in two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, and in 1991 I became a whistleblower at the Livermore lab. Depleted uranium is very, very, very nasty stuff:

# Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of weapon of mass destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal Code Title 50 Chapter 40 Section 2302.

# DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements, Hague and Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws and U.S. military law.

# Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10 times the amount released during atmospheric testing which was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has permanently contaminated the global atmosphere with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

- much more . . .

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0510/S00138.htm

[megatherium]

10. The third point is amazingly misleading.

DU is radioactive but only very slightly so. The very fact that it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years tells you that it isn't very radioactive. (The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive an isotope is.) So they've put out 400,000 times as many U238 atoms as the U235 atoms used in the Nagasaki uranium bomb. This means nothing in terms of radioactivity -- the Nagasaki bomb was horrible because the act of detonation created a maelstrom of highly radioactive nuclear species. None of this exists in DU.

But this is not to diminish the danger of DU. Uranium happens to be a heavy, toxic metal. Using DU in battle aerosolizes it, it gets everywhere. I wouldn't be at all suprised if Gulf Syndrome or the cancers/birth defects in Iraqi children were related to DU. (However, DU isn't the only toxic thing in battle. There's an odd variety of parasites and diseases over there, as well.)