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depleted uranium
Ukraine Needs Diplomacy, Not Depleted Uranium
The horror of DU is what happens after the battles are over.
Sep 07, 2023
Freedom’s just another word for... blowing up your children? Giving them cancer?
Militarism is obsolete, for God’s sake. Its technology is out of control. The latest shred of news that has left me stunned and terror-stricken is this, as reported by Reuters: “The Biden administration will for the first time send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine... It follows an earlier decision by the Biden administration to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, despite concerns over the dangers such weapons pose to civilians.”
Russia’s war on Ukraine is a disaster at every level. Some 70,000 Ukrainians have died, according to The New York Times, and possibly another 120,000 have been wounded, with Russia’s casualty level actually far higher. The war (like all wars) has to stop, but NATO and the U.S., just like Russia itself, are looking not for peace and conflict resolution but victory. Killing the enemy is what matters, the more the better. War is humanity’s most horrific addiction. When it takes hold of a people’s soul, all environmental and human concerns vanish. And today—indeed, throughout the course of my lifetime—with the development of nuclear weapons, we’ve been at the brink of self-generated extinction. And we’re still playing with it, rather than trying to move beyond it.
DU stays in the environment, and has been linked to huge rises in cancer and birth defects in the conflict zones.
Depleted uranium—DU—is one of the playthings of war: At 1.6 times the density of lead, DU shells are the last word in penetration power: locomotives compressed to the size of bullets. The shells ignite the instant they’re fired and explode on impact.
I first started writing about depleted uranium in 2003, when I heard Doug Rokke (who died two and a half years ago) speak in Chicago. Doug, a career soldier, was involved in the first Gulf War, leading a team of soldiers whose job was to clean up the war zones in the aftermath of our bombing raids.
As I wrote then: Depleted uranium
Isn’t really depleted of anything. It’s dirty: U-238, the low-level radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process. And when the ammo explodes, poof, it vaporizes into particles so fine—a single micron in diameter, small enough to fit inside red blood cells—that, well, ‘conventional gas mask filters are like a barn door...’
What’s not to love, if you’re the Pentagon? We pounded Saddam’s army with DU ammo in Gulf War 1 and destroyed it on the ground. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of what we did to it; GIs cleaning up afterward coined the term ‘crispy critters’ to describe the fried corpses they found inside Iraqi tanks and trucks.
But the horror of DU is what happens after the battles are over. DU stays in the environment, and has been linked to huge rises in cancer and birth defects in the conflict zones. As Doug Rokke said: “You can’t clean it up.”
But so what? According to Sydney Young, writing for the Harvard International Review:
In the past, leaders did not pay the necessary amount of attention to the risks of depleted uranium. Documents suggest that the United States may have known about the potential consequences of depleted uranium during conflicts in which it was used. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published a 1991 report indicating that deploying depleted uranium in the Gulf War could have caused 500,000 cancer deaths.
However, the United States still used depleted uranium in the Middle East despite the risks, deeming that its military benefits outweighed the potential civilian impact. This calculus reflects a common trend in which Western countries justify human rights abuses under the guise of ‘national interest’ or military necessity.
Another tactic of the political militarists is to deny there’s any negative consequences to their actions. Young also notes:
Research also faces political barriers. Governments that use depleted uranium have a vested interest in preventing research that suggests it has negative effects on human health. For instance, the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, and France all opposed a 2001 United Nations resolution to document depleted uranium in war.
There’s a collective human addiction not simply to militarism and war, but to winning: to domination. A focus on winning in the moment obliterates any sense of the larger future. The creation of peace is not a simplistic game. It has no weapons to parade before the public, whose use will obliterate the enemy of the moment and make the world a better place once and for all.
Noting the horrific extent to which the Ukraine war has stalemated, Jeet Heer writes at The Nation: “The time is surely ripe for a diplomatic push. Unfortunately, the passions ignited by war always make negotiations difficult...” and, alas “a strong ‘taboo’ against public discussion of diplomacy pervades the NATO countries.”
This is understandable, he notes, considering the criminality of the Russian invasion and the horror it has inflicted on Ukraine: “But an interminable bloodbath on Ukrainian soil is also horrific.”
Humanity has to figure out how to talk to itself, not kill itself.
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US to Begin Sending Controversial Depleted Uranium Shells to Ukraine
Peace groups have long campaigned for a ban on DU munitions
Sep 02, 2023
The Biden administration will, for the first time, send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, according to Reuters.
The munition can be fired from US Abrams tanks, which are expected to arrive in Ukraine in the coming weeks.
The shells, which will come from US excess inventory, would be funded by the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which lets the president make transfers from US stocks without Congress' approval in the case of an emergency.
This follows an earlier decision by the Biden administration to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine despite concerns over the dangers such weapons pose to civilians.
If the US deploys depleted uranium shells to Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to retaliate with DU rounds—which are linked to birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer.
Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the production of fuel used in nuclear power stations. Its extreme density gives rounds the ability to penetrate armor-plating easily.
The use of depleted uranium munitions has been fiercely debated, with opponents like the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons saying there are dangerous health risks from ingesting or inhaling depleted uranium dust, including cancers and birth defects.
Common Dreams has reported:
The U.S.-led NATO coalition that waged the 1999 air war against Yugoslavia also used DU munitions, which experts believe are responsible for a surge in leukemia in the region, both among the local population and foreign troops deployed in the war zone.
Peace groups have long campaigned for a ban on DU munitions. Last September, the United Nations General Assembly approved an Indonesian draft resolution urging further research of the "health risks and environmental impact" of DU weapons and calling for a "cautionary approach" to their use.
The resolution was approved by 147 nations. The U.S., U.K., France, and Israel voted against the proposal.
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Don’t Let Ukraine Become Another Forever War
The Biden administration has no diplomatic strategies, no demand for an immediate unconditional ceasefire followed by top-level peace negotiations.
Aug 15, 2023
Russia’s criminal war in Ukraine intensifies as it grinds on, World War I style with heavy casualties on both sides. While President Joe Biden keeps repeating that NATO, mostly meaning the U.S., will expand military support for Ukraine “as long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes,” is not a policy, it is deadly procrastination without any exit strategy.
Of course, Biden, who voted for former President George W. Bush’s criminal war in Iraq as a Senator in 2003, along with funding it with hundreds of billions of dollars over the years, is experienced in “as long as it takes.” That invasion and occupation took over 1 million Iraqi lives, caused even more injuries and sicknesses, and plunged Iraq into destructive chaos that persists to this day.
Our country should lead in peacemaking, in engaging the United Nations when its charter against offensive war is violated by any member country, and in observing our own constitutional mandates which reserve for Congress, not the presidency, the power to declare war.
“As long as it takes” for a million Ukrainian lives lost and the comparable destruction of their country? For the war to escalate beyond Ukraine, into Russia and bordering countries?
Biden spends more time thinking about when he will say, “Yes,” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demand for more powerful weapons—Advanced Armored Vehicles, longer-reaching artillery, Abrams Tanks with depleted-uranium rounds. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warns such ammunition is “chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal.” The Harvard International Review reports, “Depleted uranium may pose a risk to both soldiers and local civilian populations. When ammunition made from depleted uranium strikes a target, the uranium turns into dust that is inhaled by soldiers near the explosion site. The wind then carries dust to surrounding areas, polluting local water and agriculture.”
Biden also supports providing Ukraine with F-16s, which take many months to learn to fly, and he has already sent Ukraine cluster bombs to match Russia’s cluster bombs so as to further endanger Ukrainians, including children, for years to come. The New York Times reports, “One-hundred and twenty-three nations—including many of America’s allies—have agreed never to use, transfer, produce, or stockpile cluster munitions.”
The Biden administration has no diplomatic strategies, no demand for an immediate unconditional ceasefire followed by top-level peace negotiations. This war is expanding and becoming more lethal each day. Provocations are also escalating as armed Ukrainian drones appear over Moscow and more Russian missiles target Ukrainian civilians.
Congress, ignorant of history’s lessons from wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other military boomerangs of the U.S. Empire, rubber-stamp Biden’s demands without any thorough Congressional hearings to examine where this war is heading. Congressional Democrats did, however, make sure to block a proposed Inspector General’s Office to oversee the spending of tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars in U.S. military aid, watchdog corruption, and investigate diversions of military supplies.
A culpable Congress is also going along with the Biden and NATO decision to put 300,000 soldiers “at high readiness” stationed in the countries on Russia’s borders and in Europe. Already, thousands of U.S. soldiers, modern artillery, and warships are in that region.
Dictator Vladimir Putin doesn’t have to stretch the truth far in his propaganda to alarm the Russian people. They remember the invasions by Germany in World War I and World War II that took more than 50 million Russian lives and that caused massive devastation in Russia, their country. They see a military alliance of Western countries, (NATO) including Germany, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Estonia, Romania, and Bulgaria. They also see moves to include Ukraine.
In 1990 several Western leaders assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand. In 1991, when the Soviet Union started to formally dissolve and Soviet concerns about NATO increased. U.S. experts, including long-time expert George Kennan, warned of a redline disaster. The Guardian notes that “Putin claims that [James] Baker, [former Secretary of State] in a discussion on 9 February 1990 with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, made the promise that NATO would not expand to the east if Russia accepted Germany’s unification.”
President Bill Clinton infuriated Russian President Boris Yeltsin by breaking with past U.S. assurances on NATO expansion.
As pointed out in a long Harper’s June 2023 article on Ukraine, “…at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, the U.S. delegation, led by President Bush, urged the alliance to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership. German Chancellor Angela Merkel understood the implications of Washington’s proposal: ‘I was very sure... that Putin was not going to just let that happen,’ she recalled in 2022. ‘From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.’
“America’s ambassador to Moscow, William J. Burns, shared Merkel’s assessment. Burns had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice... ‘Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),’” concluding that “‘Russia will respond.’”
Imagine the shoe being on the other foot, with Russia doing all this on our borders. Look how the U.S. reacted to 3,000 lives lost on 9/11.
The media also hasn’t learned its history lessons. Coverage of the Ukraine War towers over its coverage of our illegal military invasions in the Middle East. Except they avoid reporting about peace advocacy by domestic and international groups.
While The New York Times’ readers are told about how domestic pets and athletes are faring in the Ukraine conflict, this newspaper of record ignores the voyage of the Golden Rule Boat, sponsored by Veterans for Peace, docking this year at ports on the west Gulf and eastern coast. The mainstream media ignored the rally by many peace groups on July 22, 2023, at Biden’s hometown (Scranton, PA) in front of the Army Ammunition Plant run by General Dynamics.
Nor does the mass media probe the U.S. policy driving Germany into larger military budgets and weapons shipments to Ukraine, and ending the Nordic countries’ traditions of neutrality by bringing them into NATO. All these expansions provide huge business for the U.S. military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned us about.
The expansions also scare the Russian public and increase popular support for the aggressor Putin and Russian troops. Roger Cohen’s long report in The New York Times on his trip through Russia shed some light on these feelings.
Our country should lead in peacemaking, in engaging the United Nations when its charter against offensive war is violated by any member country, and in observing our own constitutional mandates which reserve for Congress, not the presidency, the power to declare war.
Instead, we expand a vast military budget (greater than the next 10 countries combined, including China and Russia), operate military bases in over 100 countries, bristle with military threats or incursions in the backyards of many of these nations—in violation of international law, the U.N. charter (which we most prominently drafted in 1946), and federal statutes. All done in a bipartisan fashion, with astounding hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Whether or not you are a veteran, I urge you to virtually attend the annual Veterans for Peace Convention on August 25 through August 27, 2023, to hear the views of people who abhor all wars in favor of stopping the slaughter and deliberately waging peace.
Otherwise, prepare for a war of attrition on both sides, which could last for years. Unless, that is, it flares into a nuclear war.
That should sober all hawks, including the consistent one in the White House.
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