Re: Depleted URanium Rounds

[Mike Broderick <Mike.Broderick@oklaosf.state.ok.us>]

There was a fuss about six months ago when a Marine jet fired depleted uranium
rounds during a training mission over a Pacific Island owned by Japan (I believe
it was Okinawa, but might be mistaken).  The Marines went in and cleaned up most
of the rounds, but a few could not be recovered. The jet was supposed to be
using non-DU rounds, but an error was made by the weapons loaders.

During the late 1970s, The Soviet Union tried to make propoganda hay in Europe
out of our use of the "nuclear" rounds in our tanks.  This was during the debate
over deploying neutron bombs.

These things never are going to be popular.  Nuclear-phobia has been discussed
here before.  But I suspect to the public, battlefield hazards are probably more
acceptable than the typical civilian nuclear application.

When I served as a nuclear and chemical defense officer in the Army during the
1980s, our chemical warning alarms had an Americium source in them ( a few
hundred microCuries, if memory serves), and these were routinely run over by
tanks or trucks during training exercises, necessitating a cleanup.  I wonder
how many of those alarms were run over during Desert Storm/Shield? Perhaps this
will be the next big "hazard" played up by the alarmists.

I was assigned to an armored unit with DU round capability, but we were not
allowed to fire them for training. My understanding was that this was at least
as much due to the safety hazard associated with the long range of the round as
to any radiation concerns.  For training, we used a special training round that
closely followed the ballistics of the DU round out to a certain range before it
lost velocity.

Mike Broderick
(MikeBinOK@aol.com)