panic attack
So, I've been doing some research for an upcoming episode of Sourcecode, one that will tentatively cover how war and militarism affect the environment, and there's been a low-intensity tussle between me and other staff on how to approach, if at all, the one enviro-war issue that even the most casual lefty knows about - depleted uranium.
DU is a bit of a bogeyman for the anti-war movement, kind of a converse two-birds thing: the resulting ordinance (or armor plating) is developed by recycling the waste from the enrichment of material used by the commercial nuclear industry (and not just ours - around fifteen or sixteen other nuclear nations use it as well); two big anti-war issues - nukes and guns - that make a big big noise.
But here's the thing - there seems to be agreement that, right now - and I stress, right now - the science does not support the oft-repeated claim that DU is dangerous because it's radioactive. From a 1999 article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
We have surveyed publicly available studies and employed our own calculations in an attempt to put the controversy into perspective. Our conclusions: The health risks associated with radiation from exposures to depleted uranium are relatively low--so low as to be statistically undetectable, with one exception: Radiation doses for soldiers with embedded fragments of depleted uranium may be troublesome.
Apart from radiation, however, the risks related to the heavy-metal toxicity of uranium inhaled and ingested by soldiers in direct and unprotected contact with vehicles struck with DU munitions could be significant. Primarily at risk are those who were in vehicles when they were struck, or their rescuers, as well as those who worked for extended periods in cleanup efforts inside the vehicles without adequate respiratory protection.
From the International Atomic Energy Agency FAQ on DU:
Based on credible scientific evidence, there is no proven link between DU exposure and increases in human cancers or other significant health or environmental impacts.
The most definitive study of DU exposure is of Gulf War veterans who have embedded DU shrapnel in their bodies that cannot be removed. To date none has developed any health abnormalities due to uranium chemical toxicity or radio toxicity.
It is a common misconception that radioactivity is the main health hazard of DU rather than chemical toxicity. Like other heavy metals, DU is potentially poisonous.
In sufficient amounts, if DU is ingested or inhaled it can be harmful because of its chemical toxicity. High concentration could cause kidney damage.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), very large amounts of DU dust would have to be inhaled to cause lung cancer from radio toxicity. Risks of other radiation-induced cancers, including leukemia, are considered to be very much lower still.
Based on what I've looked at, much of the threat of DU is in fact a domestic one - that the manufacture of the ordinance (or armor plating) is probably poorly managed and regulated.
But other staff's willing to bite on the what-if quality to the story, cherry-picking on the "uranium" bit instead of concentrating on what it is that we can actually show is harmful. This isn't to say that we shouldn't push on the U part, but why tilt after Gulf War Syndrome when the issue you need's right there? And really, who's going to go out of their way to make a healthy bullet?
Anywho, I had the good fortune to run across Saul Bloom on the Environmentalists Against War website (well, actually, Saul was the only guy to return my calls. But it was really fortunate for everybody he did). Saul's an activst and researcher around militarism and the environment, and while he acknowledged that DU's problematic, he said that as far as the U.S. military goes, there are much bigger threats than DU bullets. Here's a quick run-down of what we talked about:
** Every military base in the country - regardless of the branch - is a major polluter. Superfund-type-major.
** The Pentagon has nearly 30,000 square miles of U.S. territory that it uses for bombing runs, gun ranges, that sort of thing. Unexploded ordinance, says Bloom, lies on almost every square mile, and additionally, much of that land has been poisoned from decades of bombing. Rather than take responsibility for this massive ecological damage and the potential harm it could cause to, you know, people and animals, the military declares swathes of it "wilderness area," or just hands it over to agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, which doesn't know what to do with it.
Bloom says this doesn't even touch on other pressing international problems, like deforestation in African countries which are warring against each other, or the legacy of Agent Orange in Southeast Asia.
DU is without a doubt dangerous. And the Pentagon's shown time and again that the soldier comes last. But the DU issue's also sexy, in that doomscreamy way some of us latch onto sometimes. As a rule, however, assessing and combating eco-troubles is more about the wonk then the sexy.
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