How does depleted uranium ammo work

The other metal used for anti-tank rounds is tungsten, which is also very hard and dense. When a tungsten rod strikes armour, it deforms and mushrooms, making it progressively blunter.

Uranium is "pyrophoric": at the point of impact it burns away into vapour, so the projectile stays sharp. When it breaks through, the burning DU turns the inside of a vehicle into an inferno of white-hot gas and sparks. Normal uranium is not as hard as tungsten. But a classified technique allows it to be hardened. This is believed to involve alloying it with titanium and cooling it so that it forms a single large metallic crystal rather than a chaotic mass of tiny crystals.

This structure is very strong and produces an improvement similar to the difference between a brittle pencil lead and a carbon-fibre tennis racquet.

The final advantage of uranium is cost. Machined tungsten is expensive, but governments supply DU more or less free. As with most weapons, depleted uranium is not as deadly as its proponents - or its critics - claim. One tank was hit four times with no casualties. The long-term health effects are not known. It is likely that DU will be phased out eventually, not for health reasons but for military ones. It was introduced to solve the problem of breaking through heavy armour.

But tank armour is concentrated mainly at the front, facing the main threat; it is thinner on the sides, and thinner still on top. If the entire vehicle were clad in thick armour it would be too heavy to move.

The legality or illegality of DU weapons must therefore be tested by recourse to the general rules governing the use of weapons under humanitarian and human rights law which have already been analyzed in Part I of this paper, and more particularly at paragraph 35 which states that parties to Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of have an obligation to ascertain that new weapons do not violate the laws and customs of war or any other international law. This again was neglected and the use, transport and further development of DU continued.

Del Ponte concluded that:. There is a developing scientific debate and concern expressed regarding the impact of the use of such projectiles and it is possible that, in future, there will be consensus views in international legal circles that use of such projectiles violate general principles of the law applicable to use of weapons in armed conflict. In , some states and the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons, a coalition of more than nongovernmental organizations, asked for a ban on the production and military use of depleted uranium weapons.

Three years ago, in December, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for users of DU to hand over quantitative and geographical data on their use. The resolution passed by votes to four, with 30 abstentions. The countries which abstain or vote against any anti-DU regulation are also the countries with the largest and most developed militaries.

The value of DU usage in warfare was first seen and thoroughly analyzed during Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf in by the American and British militaries. Most of the main battle tanks fired rounds that contained DU rounds. The Pentagon later estimated that over 14, such rounds were fired 6. This amount of radioactive material had a tremendous impact on the population, and, in a sense, kept the country underdeveloped and in constant need of aid from outside actors.

Soon after the Gulf War ended, questions and concerns began to arise regarding DU. After the Gulf War, thousands of veterans began to voice their newly emerging chronic health problems. Approximately , of the , veterans who served in the Gulf War are afflicted with enduring chronic multi-symptom illness, a condition with serious consequences 1. Many veterans looked for answers and treatment at VA medical centers or military hospitals, but very few found answers.

They reported some or all of the following symptoms: neurological problems, chronic skin rashes, respiratory problems, chronic flu-like symptoms including severe body aches, immune system disorders, severe fatigue, joint pain, gynecological infection, bleeding gums and lesions, and unexplained rapid weight loss 7. Hundreds of thousands of veterans were examined and told that they suffered from an illness that was not yet able to be diagnosed.

Despite all this, the military has still not agreed to fund studies to finally prove that veterans who were exposed to DU have health related issues.

Peacekeeping troops, civilians and relief workers would have been very surprised to learn that the former battlefields they spent time around were contained with DU. The worst part is that children play on and around destroyed armored vehicles and adults are known to scavenge this equipment for usable parts and scrap metal.

Much research about DU can be attributed to the countries of former occupations after they began to study the effects of their wars.

Iraq reported a sharp increase in the incidence of child leukemia and genetic malformation among babies born, and Iraqi doctors attributed these malformations to the possible long-term effects of DU; this opinion is shared by several newspapers, including the St. Contamination results have also been growing in Afghanistan and Iraq. The debate on depleted uranium has been ongoing ever since the first Gulf War; however, the literature seems to have strong arguments to both sides.

In sufficient amounts, if DU is ingested or inhaled it can be harmful because of its chemical toxicity. The IAEA concluded that while depleted uranium is a potential carcinogen, there is no evidence that it has been carcinogenic in humans According to the official website for Military Health, every single study done on animals did not result in conclusive data, and further information needs to be conducted.

In one project, the military developed an animal model to examine the toxicological and behavioral effects of depleted uranium on female rats This study did show that the DU is potentially high enough to adversely affect the developing fetus, but no further conclusive studies were needed.

Current research is being conducted on the potential treatments for neurotoxicity caused by chronic exposure to depleted uranium The pointing of fingers, victimizing of self and blaming others is not always the most productive way of finding solutions to problems. The United States is developing drones and unmanned fighters. Artificial Intelligence is exponentially growing.

Future weapons will rely more on computer systems and robotic units than humans. It is very difficult to get a country, let alone a group of countries, to admit that they committed acts of treason.

It would seem much simpler for these countries to learn from past mistakes and develop new medicines or technologies to combat DU and its environmental and health effects.

Yet costs, evidence and time seem to be the biggest obstacles to overcome here. Nevertheless, there is always a bright side to any situation. Recently, Sciencenews. This drug is composed of an ordinary antibiotic combined with a microbe-fighting compound that, experiments with mice suggest, may protect thousands of people from the ravages of radiation sickness. Researchers exposed mice to a heavy dose of radiation and 24 hours later gave some of them injections of an antibiotic and a protein that is made naturally by the immune system.

Thirty days later, most mice that received no treatment were dead, whereas nearly 80 percent of mice that received the treatment still appeared healthy Current radiation sickness treatment is aimed more at preventing further radioactive contamination, managing organ damage, reducing symptoms and managing pain than actually curing the poisoning, but the future looks very promising in these fields of study.

Now this does not solve the current problem of using DU weapons or armor, but it can help future exposed individuals. When it comes to a solution for protective armor, the German military might be the right place to start. It currently arms its anti-armor shells with tungsten alloy.

Tungsten has the same density as DU but does not burn like DU when it strikes a target. This eliminates the microscopic dust that can be harmful if inhaled. However, DU can engage the enemy at greater distances than tungsten penetrator rounds can. Also, when the rounds strike a target, tungsten penetrators blunt while DU has a self-sharpening property.

DU ammunition routinely provides a 25 percent increase in effective range over traditional kinetic energy rounds Politicians and the media soon forged a link between the disease and depleted uranium use. Despite the recent attention, depleted uranium is not all that new. The military has experimented with it since the s.

Military interest in the heavy metal is twofold: For one thing, uranium is almost twice as dense as lead, and thus packs a lot of punch as ammunition. Like its slightly denser cousin, tungsten, uranium can penetrate most heavy armor. But whereas tungsten projectiles become rounded at the tip upon impact, uranium shells burn away at the edges. This "self-sharpening" helps them bore into armor. Also attractive to the military is depleted uranium's abundance.

In the U. Department of Energy had about , metric tons of depleted uranium in storage. Depleted uranium armor-piercing incendiary API munition comes in two main forms.

One is fired from the suitably nicknamed "Tank Buster" A Thunderbolt aircraft; the other shoots from M1 Abrams tanks, which are also enforced with DU armor. Each round of A DU ammunition contains a gram DU penetrator slug, which brings the total amount of depleted uranium dropped during the conflict to a little less than 10 metric tons. The question now is whether the metal that lies scattered over a wide area of the Balkans presents a health threat to soldiers and civilians.

In fact, compared to other materials, uranium and depleted uranium are not terribly radioactive see the side bar. The latter is used to actually shield radiation from fuel rods in nuclear power plants. But that's not to say that they couldn't have some deleterious health effects. Gamma-radiation can reach far into the body, but releases its energy gradually. As a result, it has little impact on any one part or organ. Alpha- and beta-radiation, on the other hand, are more hazardous because they have a short range and release all their energy within a small area.

Brenner agrees that alpha-radiation is the biggest concern, but adds that its short range also makes it less harmful in some ways: "The alpha particles have to reach sensitive cells to be of any relevance. The distance they can travel in tissue or water or something like that is in tens of microns. So what is important, then, is not so much the amount of radiation involved, but how much enters the body. The relevant unit for the impact of radiation on tissue is the Sievert Sv , defined as the amount of energy given off in one kilogram of tissue.

Another unit to describe the same thing is the Rem Rem is equivalent to 1 Sv. Indeed, to do real damage, the radiation would have to reach tissue such as bone marrow.