7 ms·

New Study Documents Depleted Uranium Impacts on Children in Iraq

80 points by umadon 7y ago

dddeeerrr9999 7y ago
Looks like depleted uranium bullets probably have similar to effects to lead bullets. https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-toxicity-of-depleted-uranium-du/ https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-toxicit...
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  when you say "lead bullets" do you mean gun bullets, or armor piercing bullets / projectiles? a normal bullet does not vaporize and contaminate the whole area in the same way vaporizing projectiles do...
  - nine_k 7y ago
    I suppose whatever metal is used in a cumulative charge, a significant amount of it gets dispersed far and wide while a jet of the molten metal is piercing several inches of armor. Copper, lead, whatever else, should contaminate all around as fine dust.
  - birdyrooster 7y ago
    Depleted Uranium is not designed to vaporize. It has a boiling point (3818°C) more than twice that of lead (1740°C). It's atomic mass of 238 is considerably higher than Lead's 207.5. It packs quite the punch when put into a slug, but does not reach temperatures where it could vaporize. Certainly particulate matter would be ejected from the impact, though as with most slugs. That said, what was done here is despicable and it is clear evidence of a war crime.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > It's atomic mass of 238 is considerably higher than Lead's 207.5. Atomic mass has little to do with an element's boiling point.
      - birdyrooster 7y ago
        But it has to do why it packs quite a punch. I agree it's worded awkwardly.
    - astrodust 7y ago
      The DU projectiles are intended to fragment in ways that lead does not, as on impact parts of the projectile shear away and it "self-sharpens" when penetrating. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4004-safe-alternative-to-depleted-uranium-revealed/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4004-safe-alternative... The energy involved is also more than sufficient to hit that temperature. When a high-velocity shell impacts something it will deform and convert a lot of the kinetic energy to thermal. The whole thing doesn't melt, but parts of it do, and the vehicle it hits gets absolutely thrashed. These things cut through pretty much any armor like it's not even there. During the Iraq war they'd even hit tanks by firing through the tops of sand dunes, aiming using thermal imaging.
    - trhway 7y ago
      >Depleted Uranium is not designed to vaporize. when an uranium projectile hits the armor, some of the uranium burns into uranium oxide, a dust of which gets dispersed all around. Big problem in Serbia too - in 1999 NATO used 30K+ units of uranium ammunition there.
- hristov 7y ago
  Your link does not support what you are saying. The linked article says that: (i) there aren't enough studies for the toxicity of depleted uranium (ii) we know that uranium is chemically somewhat similar to lead (iii) there are a lot of studies about the toxicity of lead, so (iv) because of (i)-(iii) for the time being it and for modelling purposes it may be useful to assume that depleted uranium has similar toxic effects to lead. In other words, the article admits that the author does not really know about the toxicity effects of DE and uses lead only as a best guess. Furthermore, the article clearly distinguishes between the toxic effects and radioactive effects. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than the usual uranium, but it is still plenty radioactive. And the effects of radioactivity are pretty bad when you are breathing the stuff in.
josho 7y ago
With a “half-life of 4.5 billion years” does that mean these areas are going to be permanent toxic waste lands? Regardless why isn’t there a growing movement to call the perpetrators of this war criminals?
- infinitone 7y ago
  > Regardless why isn’t there a growing movement to call the perpetrators of this war criminals? You're kidding right? Before the US invasion, the largest protests in the world happened all over the world against it and it didn't do anything. > Social movement researchers have described the 15 February protest as "the largest protest event in human history" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
  - dev_dull 7y ago
    Thankfully the war in Iraq was the last time our intelligence agencies mislead the public.
    - dmix 7y ago
      It's fascinating to reread just how bad these stories were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries > In March 2003 [..] it reportedly took International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerien officials. The CIA and foreign intelligence services did do some good work to try to correct that particular false narrative - something originally spread from Iran's intel service no less (which sounds a lot like the discredited 2016 'dossier' which came from questionable Russian sources). But they clearly didn't do enough. Probably because they were on the brink of getting new massive sweeping powers. This one's my favourite CIA story from that era, just straight-up blatant disregard for the law with zero repercussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_videotapes_destruction?oldformat=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_videota...
destroyerShiva 7y ago
The underlying concept had never clicked in my mind before, but now, looking at the common themes among some of these deformities I'm starting to realize why depleted uranium produces such pronounced disfigurement. When you think about how a fertilized ovum subdivides from a singular entity, into a cohesive target comprised of trillions of entities, and that all features, structures and organs have only one chance to cascade the rapid coordinated proliferation as emergent functional shapes, with no undo stack, and no regenerative salamander retries or polyfills, penetrating, disruptive ionizing radiation seems to introduce the destruction of keystone stem cells that only appear once, with one chance to create the specialized arrangement of tissue architecture that creates our bodies in well known phases of development. The introduction of the ionizing alpha particles is like rolling a billiard ball across carefully prepared chain of dominos, such that later phases of the chain reaction are unreachable due to cell death at whichever stage of the development gets ruined. This is why some children seem to demonstrate malformation from the hips, shoulders and neck outward (completely unviable, profoundly distorted stillbirths), but others only show misshapen hands and feet (severe disability, with survivable deformities due to late-term exposure). Use of DU should be abolished as a war crime.
latchkey 7y ago
Living in Vietnam, I see kids on the street clearly suffering from the effects of agent orange, all the time.
roenxi 7y ago
I don't like articles this blatantly manipulative; it is an unfortunate character flaw if anyone thinks the most important part of a military invasion are photos of 10s of mutated children. This particular instance is horrible but also unimportant. The US killed literally thousands of civilians when they invaded in 2003. There is a long, long list of worse things that the US military has done; even ignoring anything prior to the Iraq invasion in 2003.
aaron695 7y ago
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2019.113070 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2019.113070 I sincerely doubt, if this study is an accurate indication of the harm from Depleted Uranium, it is even close to the defects caused by lack of medical care and supply line issues caused by war. Babies with mutations for any reason in any hospital look as horrific as those photos. And most are preventable today in many parts of the world for far more mundane problems, like not having access to a doctor or proper nutrition.
Santosh83 7y ago
And this is why China is hated passionately in the West. Because it is the only credible potential deterrence in the future against the West doing whatever they want on whomever the want (outside their territories that is). It is of course possible that China itself will turn into another hegemonic military power with scant regard for non-Chinese lives the way the US has been for decades, but nevertheless in a multi-polar world it will be more problematic to simply invade whichever country you wish, when other significant powers have economic/geopolitical interests in those countries.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  > And this is why China is hated passionately in the West No it isn't, it's the government that we find deeply grubby. And this subject is unrelated to china.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    I wonder where is a deep hate for other brutal dictatorships du jour like Saudi Arabia, a great friend of US no matter how many atrocities they do internally or externally. China deserves all the bashing it gets (and some more), but news of past weeks are very biased only and precisely against it. Like it would be, I dunno, orchestrated or something.
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      > like Saudi Arabia It gets some hate, whether it's proper measure thereof, I dunno. Good question. > China deserves all the bashing it gets For clarity it would be helpful not to conflate the entirety of china with the chinese govt. > are very biased only and precisely against it Probably talking about "crushed bodies and broken bones". Rather sets the tone, don't you think? OK, genuinely: give us some good news stories that are genuine (ie. not chinese government propaganda). It would be nice to hear another side.
      - tempguy9999 7y ago
reacweb 7y ago
All these images are terrible, but it doesn't match my understanding of radioactivity. I thought the lessons learned from Hiroshima and Nagazaki was that radioactivity was causing very few mutations (far less than expected), but instead was causing mainly sterilities. I am not an expert, but teratogene effects are generally caused by chemical products. If uranium is similar to lead, it should cause neurologic diseases, not this kind of pictures. I do not want to minimize the consequences of war, but this article has no plausibility.
- Recurecur 7y ago
  Agreed. It's much more likely the deformities are the result of chemical exposure or other factors. The scary sounding "4.5 billion year half life" of DU is synonymous with it not being very radioactive at all. DU is toxic, but the main hazard is inhaling the dust. That's likely not a big issue unless you're near impacting rounds...
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    What the heck? The article clearly says: Every round of DU ammunition leaves a residue of uranium dust on everything it hits. We talk about semi-desert environment where dust flies all around, and it doesn't become easily locked in soil like in more humid environment. If you live a kilometer downwind from place where an A-10 smashed some iraqi tanks with DU ammunition, you have clear source of exposure.
    - Recurecur 7y ago
      >If you live a kilometer downwind from place where an A-10 smashed some iraqi tanks with DU ammunition, you have clear source of exposure. Sure, depending on how well the extremely dense (1.7x the density of lead, remember?) dust remains airborne. Also, the dust concentration is likely to be so low that far away that it's extremely low exposure. Don't lose sight of the fact that the article provides zero factual evidence that DU caused those deformities. It's strictly guilt through association.

80 points by umadon 7y ago

Looks like depleted uranium bullets probably have similar to effects to lead bullets. https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-toxicity-of-depleted-uranium-du/ https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-toxicit...

DoctorOetker 7y ago
when you say "lead bullets" do you mean gun bullets, or armor piercing bullets / projectiles? a normal bullet does not vaporize and contaminate the whole area in the same way vaporizing projectiles do...
- nine_k 7y ago
  I suppose whatever metal is used in a cumulative charge, a significant amount of it gets dispersed far and wide while a jet of the molten metal is piercing several inches of armor. Copper, lead, whatever else, should contaminate all around as fine dust.
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  Depleted Uranium is not designed to vaporize. It has a boiling point (3818°C) more than twice that of lead (1740°C). It's atomic mass of 238 is considerably higher than Lead's 207.5. It packs quite the punch when put into a slug, but does not reach temperatures where it could vaporize. Certainly particulate matter would be ejected from the impact, though as with most slugs. That said, what was done here is despicable and it is clear evidence of a war crime.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > It's atomic mass of 238 is considerably higher than Lead's 207.5. Atomic mass has little to do with an element's boiling point.
    - birdyrooster 7y ago
      But it has to do why it packs quite a punch. I agree it's worded awkwardly.
  - astrodust 7y ago
    The DU projectiles are intended to fragment in ways that lead does not, as on impact parts of the projectile shear away and it "self-sharpens" when penetrating. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4004-safe-alternative-to-depleted-uranium-revealed/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4004-safe-alternative... The energy involved is also more than sufficient to hit that temperature. When a high-velocity shell impacts something it will deform and convert a lot of the kinetic energy to thermal. The whole thing doesn't melt, but parts of it do, and the vehicle it hits gets absolutely thrashed. These things cut through pretty much any armor like it's not even there. During the Iraq war they'd even hit tanks by firing through the tops of sand dunes, aiming using thermal imaging.
  - trhway 7y ago
    >Depleted Uranium is not designed to vaporize. when an uranium projectile hits the armor, some of the uranium burns into uranium oxide, a dust of which gets dispersed all around. Big problem in Serbia too - in 1999 NATO used 30K+ units of uranium ammunition there.
hristov 7y ago
Your link does not support what you are saying. The linked article says that: (i) there aren't enough studies for the toxicity of depleted uranium (ii) we know that uranium is chemically somewhat similar to lead (iii) there are a lot of studies about the toxicity of lead, so (iv) because of (i)-(iii) for the time being it and for modelling purposes it may be useful to assume that depleted uranium has similar toxic effects to lead. In other words, the article admits that the author does not really know about the toxicity effects of DE and uses lead only as a best guess. Furthermore, the article clearly distinguishes between the toxic effects and radioactive effects. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than the usual uranium, but it is still plenty radioactive. And the effects of radioactivity are pretty bad when you are breathing the stuff in.

josho 7y ago

With a “half-life of 4.5 billion years” does that mean these areas are going to be permanent toxic waste lands? Regardless why isn’t there a growing movement to call the perpetrators of this war criminals?

infinitone 7y ago
> Regardless why isn’t there a growing movement to call the perpetrators of this war criminals? You're kidding right? Before the US invasion, the largest protests in the world happened all over the world against it and it didn't do anything. > Social movement researchers have described the 15 February protest as "the largest protest event in human history" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
- dev_dull 7y ago
  Thankfully the war in Iraq was the last time our intelligence agencies mislead the public.
  - dmix 7y ago
    It's fascinating to reread just how bad these stories were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries > In March 2003 [..] it reportedly took International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerien officials. The CIA and foreign intelligence services did do some good work to try to correct that particular false narrative - something originally spread from Iran's intel service no less (which sounds a lot like the discredited 2016 'dossier' which came from questionable Russian sources). But they clearly didn't do enough. Probably because they were on the brink of getting new massive sweeping powers. This one's my favourite CIA story from that era, just straight-up blatant disregard for the law with zero repercussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_videotapes_destruction?oldformat=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_videota...

destroyerShiva 7y ago

The underlying concept had never clicked in my mind before, but now, looking at the common themes among some of these deformities I'm starting to realize why depleted uranium produces such pronounced disfigurement. When you think about how a fertilized ovum subdivides from a singular entity, into a cohesive target comprised of trillions of entities, and that all features, structures and organs have only one chance to cascade the rapid coordinated proliferation as emergent functional shapes, with no undo stack, and no regenerative salamander retries or polyfills, penetrating, disruptive ionizing radiation seems to introduce the destruction of keystone stem cells that only appear once, with one chance to create the specialized arrangement of tissue architecture that creates our bodies in well known phases of development. The introduction of the ionizing alpha particles is like rolling a billiard ball across carefully prepared chain of dominos, such that later phases of the chain reaction are unreachable due to cell death at whichever stage of the development gets ruined. This is why some children seem to demonstrate malformation from the hips, shoulders and neck outward (completely unviable, profoundly distorted stillbirths), but others only show misshapen hands and feet (severe disability, with survivable deformities due to late-term exposure). Use of DU should be abolished as a war crime.

latchkey 7y ago

Living in Vietnam, I see kids on the street clearly suffering from the effects of agent orange, all the time.

roenxi 7y ago

I don't like articles this blatantly manipulative; it is an unfortunate character flaw if anyone thinks the most important part of a military invasion are photos of 10s of mutated children. This particular instance is horrible but also unimportant. The US killed literally thousands of civilians when they invaded in 2003. There is a long, long list of worse things that the US military has done; even ignoring anything prior to the Iraq invasion in 2003.

aaron695 7y ago

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2019.113070 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2019.113070 I sincerely doubt, if this study is an accurate indication of the harm from Depleted Uranium, it is even close to the defects caused by lack of medical care and supply line issues caused by war. Babies with mutations for any reason in any hospital look as horrific as those photos. And most are preventable today in many parts of the world for far more mundane problems, like not having access to a doctor or proper nutrition.

Santosh83 7y ago

And this is why China is hated passionately in the West. Because it is the only credible potential deterrence in the future against the West doing whatever they want on whomever the want (outside their territories that is). It is of course possible that China itself will turn into another hegemonic military power with scant regard for non-Chinese lives the way the US has been for decades, but nevertheless in a multi-polar world it will be more problematic to simply invade whichever country you wish, when other significant powers have economic/geopolitical interests in those countries.

tempguy9999 7y ago
> And this is why China is hated passionately in the West No it isn't, it's the government that we find deeply grubby. And this subject is unrelated to china.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  I wonder where is a deep hate for other brutal dictatorships du jour like Saudi Arabia, a great friend of US no matter how many atrocities they do internally or externally. China deserves all the bashing it gets (and some more), but news of past weeks are very biased only and precisely against it. Like it would be, I dunno, orchestrated or something.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    > like Saudi Arabia It gets some hate, whether it's proper measure thereof, I dunno. Good question. > China deserves all the bashing it gets For clarity it would be helpful not to conflate the entirety of china with the chinese govt. > are very biased only and precisely against it Probably talking about "crushed bodies and broken bones". Rather sets the tone, don't you think? OK, genuinely: give us some good news stories that are genuine (ie. not chinese government propaganda). It would be nice to hear another side.
    - tempguy9999 7y ago

reacweb 7y ago

All these images are terrible, but it doesn't match my understanding of radioactivity. I thought the lessons learned from Hiroshima and Nagazaki was that radioactivity was causing very few mutations (far less than expected), but instead was causing mainly sterilities. I am not an expert, but teratogene effects are generally caused by chemical products. If uranium is similar to lead, it should cause neurologic diseases, not this kind of pictures. I do not want to minimize the consequences of war, but this article has no plausibility.

Recurecur 7y ago
Agreed. It's much more likely the deformities are the result of chemical exposure or other factors. The scary sounding "4.5 billion year half life" of DU is synonymous with it not being very radioactive at all. DU is toxic, but the main hazard is inhaling the dust. That's likely not a big issue unless you're near impacting rounds...
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  What the heck? The article clearly says: Every round of DU ammunition leaves a residue of uranium dust on everything it hits. We talk about semi-desert environment where dust flies all around, and it doesn't become easily locked in soil like in more humid environment. If you live a kilometer downwind from place where an A-10 smashed some iraqi tanks with DU ammunition, you have clear source of exposure.
  - Recurecur 7y ago
    >If you live a kilometer downwind from place where an A-10 smashed some iraqi tanks with DU ammunition, you have clear source of exposure. Sure, depending on how well the extremely dense (1.7x the density of lead, remember?) dust remains airborne. Also, the dust concentration is likely to be so low that far away that it's extremely low exposure. Don't lose sight of the fact that the article provides zero factual evidence that DU caused those deformities. It's strictly guilt through association.