Thoughts on the DU thread

["Fritz A. Seiler" <faseiler@nmia.com>]

Hi All,

    I have been reading with great interest the current DU thread.
For one thing because I was for many years an NBC officer in
the Swiss Army, and commanded its 37 radiation Laboratories
in addition to my civilian job on the faculty of the Physics
Department of the University of Basel in Switzerland.
    I must say that I am appalled at what I am reading with
regard to the case of  Major Rokke, and with regard to the
various risk assessment considerations on this thread!  As usual,
some people have tried to insert some common horse sense, but
many others made statements that really sent my dander up.
    Let us just look at one statement:
"When we climbed into vehicles after they'd been hit, no matter
what time of day or night it was, you couldn't see three feet in
front of you. You breathed in that dust."
    War or no war, if had he been under my command and had
climbed into that tank wreck on his own initiative, I would have
administered a dressing down that he would remember to his
dying day!  If he had been ordered to do so, I would have gone
full tilt after his CO for issuing such a totally irresponsible order!
    Why?  If you cannot see 3 feet, you have a particle density
of many tens of  mg/m**3, so you have a density which is way
above the nuisance level (and you don't really want to consider
what all is likely to be present in that atmosphere!). It also means
that you cannot see what you are going to step on in this wreck;
in fact, you do not even know whether this mixture is breathable
at all (does this concoction contain enough oxygen, not too much
CO2 or CO, or god only knows what else!?).   To blithely go
into such a situation, without even a gas mask and a safety rope,
with someone to yank you out if you should pass out, is really
incredibly stupid.  Orders or no orders!
    I will control my more military 'outrage' now, and will not
comment on other equally asinine aspects of that story which
does tend to tax one's credulity or one's common horse sense in
many ways.  Frankly, I think that parts of it are clearly
fabricated or then hugely exaggerated.
     The other part of the discussion which makes me wince, is
the clear-cut tendency to do  'tunnel vision' risk assessments, by
not considering the associated risks of the scenario. From a
holistic point of view, it is almost ridiculous to ignore the fact
that when you are inside a tank hit by a DU shell, you are far
more likely to be dead or so seriously wounded, that an increase
in your chances of dying from lung cancer a few years down the
road is the really the least of  your worries.  After this DU hit,
you are clearly living on borrowed time.
    If you are outside the tank, you are in essentially the same
unenviable situation.  Note how many tanks were shown after the
Gulf war which had suffered catastrophic hits with ammunition
and fuel explosions that blew the turrets right off, sending them
often ten or more feet up into the air.  When a tank brews up
like that, its surroundings are not exactly a risk free environment!
The key here is to do a comparative risk assessment which helps
to put these risks in perspective, and the concerns are likely to
be purely 'conventional', having little to do with DU.
    As for the decontamination of 'friendly fire' victims, I do seem
to remember reading some U.S. Army Decon manuals for nuclear
fallout that would have done the job quite nicely!  Why were they
ignored by a HP doing a decontamination specifically for
radioactive DU?
    Another one of my risk assessment questions in this respect
is whether the explosion of the tank and the following long
lasting fire has been taken properly into account when doing the
DU dispersion calculation.  The corresponding initial plume rise
will tend to entrain most of the aerosols present away from the
potential receptors, dilute them further and deposit them
elsewhere.
    I would not know what kind of a dispersion model to use
in this situation.  Let us remember that the air above a battlefield
is not exactly in a neutral state, considering all the explosions
and fires, and the turbulence induced by low flying jets and tank
hunting choppers.
    Like the deposition of nuclear weapons fallout in a turbulent
atmosphere, this can lead to drastic hot spots, surrounded by a
virtually uncontaminated landscape.  I do not know if this might
explain some exposures which could have been incurred far
downwind from the battle field.
    In this respect, we should not forget the death of more than a
thousand sheep which were killed by our own chemical warfare
agents in the vicinity but, it was thought, "safely" far enough away
from the Army's Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah!  This leads
us to the conclusion that we should not be guilty of putting too
much faith in our dispersion models, or any other models for
that matter!


*************************

Fritz A. Seiler, Ph.D.
Principal
Sigma Five Associates
P.O. Box 14006
Albuquerque, NM 87191-4006
Tel.    505-323-7848
Fax.    505-293-3911
e-mail: faseiler@nmia.com

**************************


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