Depleted Uranium Tipped Weapons

[monsterbob]

@Lemur866

That bit about the half-life of U-238 shows that you have no understanding of radioactive materials. I don’t mean to be insulting, but you just don’t.

Half-life refers to the amount of time it would take for half the material to decay into some other element. So, for U-238 it would take 4.5 billion years for half of it to decay into Radon-222. Radionuclides only emit radiation when they decay, that’s the definition of radioactivity. A half-life of 4.5 billion years means that U-238 decays very very very very very very slowly. So slowly that U-238 isn’t very radioactive at all. Materials that have short half-lives (like U-235) are much more radioactive. They decay faster, and so they emit more radiation, and their decay products (whatever they are) are also produced more quickly. So yes, long half-life materials are dangerous for longer periods, but in an exact inverse of how dangerous they are.

The dirt around us has minute traces of radioactive materials. The concentrations vary from place to place, so people in (say) Colorado get more radiation from the soil than people in (say) Indiana. So contaminating the soil with U-238 is about as dangerous radiation-wise as trucking soil from Colorado and dumping it in Indiana.

That isn’t to say that U-238 can’t be dangerous in certain circumstances. It is a heavy metal, and almost all heavy metals are toxic (Gold being one of the exceptions). But casual exposure to U-238 isn’t a radiation danger BECAUSE its half-life is 4.5 billion years. Note that carrying around chunks of u-238 in your body isn’t exactly casual exposure. But carrying around chunks of lead or mercury or other metals around isn’t likely to be good for your health either.

It seems to me that it would be reasonable to compare the dangers of U-238 to the dangers of lead. Both are used in weapons designed to kill people. We can certainly agree that the primary danger of a lead weapon or a U-238 weapon is the kinetic energy it carries when it hits you. But we can also certainly agree that lead also poses other dangers. In many places lead shot is prohibited for duck hunting because of the toxicity of lead. So…how much more dangerous than lead is U-238? If the contamination dangers of U-238 are within an order of magnitude of the contamination dangers of lead, it seems unreasonable to be particularly upset about its use.

Now ARE the dangers of U-238 within that order of magnitude? I’m not sure. But the mere fact that U-238 can cause health problems in certain circumstances isn’t enough to call for the banning of U-238 weapons, any more than lead causing health problems isn’t enough to call for the banning of lead bullets.

Also, your contention that anyone who could make a radiologic bomb could probably also build a nuclear bomb is certainly not true. All you need to build a radiologic bomb is some radioactive material of some type (say, radiologic medical waste) and some conventional explosives. Wrap the radioactive material around the explosives, set off the explosives, and you contaminate an area with radioactive materials.

But really, this isn’t a very effective weapon. The real reason this weapon would be effective is that it would force the victim to spend a lot of time, money and effort to decontaminate the area. The real threat is that if we didn’t make a huge effort to decontaminate the area we’d face lawsuits every time anyone who had any tangential connection with the site developed cancer any time in the future, and of course even a thorough effort to decontaminate the area wouldn’t protect us against all lawsuits, just some of them.

A nuclear bomb is a whole different thing. You need refined U-235 (which is what you remove from metallic uranium to leave depleted uranium or U-238) or plutonium. Those aren’t easy to get, in fact this is probably the hardest step. You can’t build facilities for separating uranium in your backyard, you need an industrial infrastructure to do this. This is why most of our non-proliferation efforts focus on enriched uranium. Once the terrorists have the enriched uranium or plutonium building a bomb is pretty straightforward…not easy certainly, but doable. Probably any university engineering department could build one given the time and budget.

So, U-235 has a short half-life and I have no understanding of radioactive materials.
The following is a fact-you can check it wherever. If you have any understanding of radioactive materials, that would be a simple task.

There is only one, only one naturally occurring radioactive isotope that is more radioactive than U-238 and less radioactive than U-235.

The half-life of U-235 is 710 million years and you call it highly radioactive.

U-238 decays into several isotopes before it reaches Radon-222. Which is a gas that can enter buildings and become more concentrated than in outside air.
Radon-222 decay products are very short lived and emit alphas, which cause the lung cancer.

Yes U-238 and U-235 are present in minute quantities in the soil and exist everywhere, but that does not mean purifying and dumping almost pure U-238 is the same as trucking soil from Colorado to Indiana.

[foolsguinea]

Um, I’m not a heavy-metals expert, but it seems to me that this is pretty clear:

A) The US Army uses DU because it will ignite on impact & burn through a tank’s armor, effectively incinerating the entire vehicle.

B) This fire releases, for want of a better word, smoke. Airborne particles made up of what was the tank’s material, & a fair bit of uranium oxide.

C) Human beings on the scene can suffer from inhaling such burnt-metal smoke, even when it’s largely not from uranium. We’re not built to endure that, & find it toxic readily.

D) Uranium oxide is noticeably radioactive (even if “depleted uranium”). It also tends to travel in very fine particles, which are both penetrating & rather strongly toxic to organic life.

E) Thus, this release of particles is in effect comparable to that of a small-scale chemical-weapons attack, although DU is being used for its combustive properties, not its toxicity.

F) After Desert Storm, many soldiers suffered odd & debilitating ailments. The US Army refused to acknowledge that “Gulf War Syndrome” existed.

G) Inhalation of uranium oxide is a plausible if unproven cause of some Gulf War vets’ suffering.

H) The US Army wouldn’t want to be blamed for killing its own men, whereas if Gulf War syndrome was caused by Saddam, they would trumpet it as more proof of his evil.

I) DU is used because it’s hella cheap. Power plants just want rid of the stuff because it’s no use in reactors.

No, we don’t have proof. We have a hypothesis. You don’t throw out a case because the grand jury hasn’t convened yet.

Want cites?

http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm

http://www.ccnr.org/bertell_book.html

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7570

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/270800.stm

http://911review.org/Wiki/DepletedUranium.shtml

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@monsterbob

So, U-235 has a short half-life and I have no understanding of radioactive materials.
The following is a fact-you can check it wherever. If you have any understanding of radioactive materials, that would be a simple task.

There is only one, only one naturally occurring radioactive isotope that is more radioactive than U-238 and less radioactive than U-235.

The half-life of U-235 is 710 million years and you call it highly radioactive.

Lemur was incorrect to list U-235 as having a short half-life, but that does not change the fact that Uranium atoms are at most slightly radioactive. If they were short lived we’d never be able to mine the stuff for our nuclear power plants. It would decay before use. U-235 is often equated with radiation since it is used in Nuclear bombs and power plants, but that is due to a fission reaction, an entirely different animal.

However, to complain about the use of DU shells resulting in increased radioactivity is follishness. It isn’t like some magician in a lab is creating U-238 out of thin air, the stuff is already around and would decay naturally, resulting in your Radon. Due to the long half-life of U-238 you need quite a bit of the stuff laying around for quite some time before it becomes a safety hazard that can begin match natural radioactivity. A few thousand shells would need to be fired before you can consider a Radon hazard to be a potential occourance, and even then you’re going to need quite a bit of time, as well as ideal circumstances for the gas to get ‘trapped’, such as heavy urban tank-on-tank combat, which has so far not happened in this or the previous war.

[CurtC]

@foolsguinea

A) The US Army uses DU because it will ignite on impact & burn through a tank’s armor, effectively incinerating the entire vehicle.

No, they use it because it’s dense and hard enough to penetrate the armor.

F) After Desert Storm, many soldiers suffered odd & debilitating ailments. The US Army refused to acknowledge that “Gulf War Syndrome” existed.

People everywhere suffer odd & debilitating ailments all the time. Gulf War vets didn’t suffer anything at a higher rate than the general population; in fact, vets in general are healthier than the general population, and Gulf War vets are as healthy as non-deployed vets. You can speculate on causes of “GWS” till the cows come home, but you still have to face this well-documented fact.

G) Inhalation of uranium oxide is a plausible if unproven cause of some Gulf War vets’ suffering.

So it’s the cause that vets are healthier?

I) DU is used because it’s hella cheap. Power plants just want rid of the stuff because it’s no use in reactors.

You have no idea what you’re talking about. DU is not as expensive as having to go out and mine fresh uranium, because we have it lying around. But it’s more expensive than lead to make ammunition from, which is the alternative.

[CurtC]

@foolsguinea

Want cites?

http://911review.org/Wiki/DepletedUranium.shtml

That’s quite a cite you got there. It says:

Of course, the fact that depleted uranium tends to burn on contact with its target may explain why no debris was found in the Pentagon (and the ability of DU to provide punching power through even the toughest materials may explain how the missile penetrated into the Pentagon as far as it did).

[foolsguinea]

You think lead can punch through a tank? Lead is heavy, but so soft they used to make pencils from it. The tank team would laugh at you as your shell smeared on the outside. Try tungsten, my friend. If they drop DU, they’ll go back to tungsten.

This is what happens when people with no specific expertise try to bullshit their way out of their own ignorance.

[monsterbob]

We have nothing to worry about, just buy this book and learn how to cure all the ills of DU exposure!

http://www.radiationdetox.com/

You will need it because along with DU you get all these for no extra charge

Thoruim-234 beta 24.1 days
Protactinium-234 beta 7.75 hours
Uranium-234 alpha 247000 years
Thorium-230 alpha 84000 years
Radium-226 alpha 1600 years
Radon-222 alpha 3.823 days
Polonium-218 alpha or beta 3.05 minutes
Lead-214 beta 26.8 minutes
Bismuth-214 alpha or beta 19.7 minuts
Polonium-214 alpha 1.64 E -4 seconds
Thallium 210 beta 1.3 minutes
Astatine-218 alpha or beta 2 seconds
Radon-218 alpha 35 seconds
Lead-210 alpha or beta 21 years
Mercury-206 beta 7.5 minutes
Thallium-206 beta 4.19 minutes
Bismuth-210 alpha or beta 2.15 minutes
Polonium-210 alpha 138 days

and finally stable lead-206

Source- my trusty handbook of chemistry and physics 1976 edition- its old but I’m too cheap to buy and too honest to steal another

[GomiBoy]

There seems to be a lot of confusion about depleted uranium (DU, or ‘Penetrator’) rounds, what they are, what they do, and why they are dangerous.

First - DU rounds (ie from tank shells or rockets) work because the DU is incredibly hard. It is encased in a less hard substance (such as lead). When the round hits the outer armor of a tank, the less-hard substance is melted away by the kinetic energy of the impact, which does two things - passes a huge amount of kinetic energy to the DU core and also superheats the DU core from friction. This causes the DU core to cut through the armor of the tank like a hot knife through butter.

Once inside the tank, the DU core does not have sufficient kinetic energy to burn through the other side, which causes the DU round to bounce around like a BB in a tin can, this nice little superheated ball of metal. This then not only kills the crew, but also causes anything explosive inside the tank (fuel, other tank shells, etc…) to explode. This is what causes the ‘catastrophic kill’ (tank turrent flying into the air) that Hollywood so loves to show. Externally, DU rounds cause very small holes (like 1 inch across) but do big big damage to armored vehicles (which is what they are designed to kill).

DU shells are generally 105mm smooth bore shells (like on the M1 Abrams main battle tank) but do come as small as .50 caliber as well and do nasty things to any hardened target. They are also available in some rockets (like the Hellfire Anti-tank missle fired from Apache attack helicopters and A-10 tankbusters) and in some guided bombs such as laser-guided anti-tank cluster munitions (CBU-87 had a variant that had these laser-guided bomblets, but that was after my time).

So DU is not really an explosive, but does cause lots of problems for bad guys who get shot with them. If a DU round was to hit an soft target (body, etc…) none of the above would happen and instead you would just get a really big hole. It is definitely a metal before it is used, and if it gets turned into a ‘ceramic’ lafter, then I don’t know the hows or whys.

One of the side effects of DU cores in shells is that the superheating can actually cause the metal to burn, which can cause secondary injuries due to the slightly radioactive nature of DU, and the secondary explosions could throw this dust far and wide. Not as bad as say, getting 50 chest x-rays, but I certainly wouldn’t want to breathe it if I could help myself. This dust could easily get into food sources and groundwater, and in vulnerable people (especially children in the womb) this could cause birth defects and all sorts of other nasties.

Those of us who have worked with DU shells before, in their unfired condition, have nothing to fear as the DU core is encased in another totally non-radioactive shell, and therefore couldn’t have been exposed to the low-level radiation in the DU core.

As for the Gulf War Syndrome, there are tons of possibilities, and DU is one of them. But troops who were never exposed to post-combat (ie burned) DU also have some or all of the symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome. Some researchers (according to the Veteran’s Affairs web site) believe that this is actually due to the pyridostignine (SP?) tablets we all took in the Desert. These tablets were part of a three-course protective regime against nerve agents. P-tabs (as we called them) were taken daily, supposedly to up our resistance to the nerve agents we may have been exposed to if Iraqi forces had actually fired them at us. The other two protective agents were in autoinjectors to be used if we were actually exposed to the agents.

BTW - I was there (in the Air Force, so except for the occasional SCUD tossed at us, pretty safe) and I know a lot more guys and gals who were there as well for the first Gulf War. Some of us Air Force weenies still got Gulf War Syndrome, and we were no where near the places where DU was being used. I didn’t get it, and am still fine, but at least two of the lads I was stationed with have it and are sick as hell and nobody knows why. And this was months if not years after the fact. I chalk it up, personally, to either the drugs we were given or the conditions we had to live in, meaning something environmental in the desert. But as ‘rough’ as we had it, I know anecdotally of a lot more guys in the Army and Marines who got it, and they were a lot closer to the action than I was.

My 2p…

[GomiBoy]

Oh, and almost forgot - DU rounds are not used to kill people, but tanks. That they kill people is a nice little side effect, and they don’t kill people outside of the tank they are shot at. Sometimes the secondary explosions caused by DU kill others outside the vehicle or bunker targeted, but that is not what thye are designed to do.

DU is considered a penetration weapon only; it is designed for killing ‘hard’ targets such as tanks, armored vehicles, and whatnot.

If you want to kill people, you would use standard HE shells (from the main gun) or else use machine guns. You wouldn’t waste your time loading and using DU shells as they don’t have what is called ‘area effect’ of a standard exploding munition. And from the air, using DU munitions would be a waste of time for the same reasons.

If you want to kill 400x400x400 people, use a really big bomb or an exploding shell. If you want to deny the battlefield to others, use landmines. But if you want to kill a tank, use a DU munition.

[Latro]

@GomiBoy

As for the Gulf War Syndrome, there are tons of possibilities, and DU is one of them. But troops who were never exposed to post-combat (ie burned) DU also have some or all of the symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome. Some researchers (according to the Veteran’s Affairs web site) believe that this is actually due to the pyridostignine (SP?) tablets we all took in the Desert. These tablets were part of a three-course protective regime against nerve agents. P-tabs (as we called them) were taken daily, supposedly to up our resistance to the nerve agents we may have been exposed to if Iraqi forces had actually fired them at us. The other two protective agents were in autoinjectors to be used if we were actually exposed to the agents.
.

I remember a BBC docu that told that a very possible cause for the Gulf War Syndrome was a bombardment of an Iraqi chemical plant, on a day the wind was actually blowing in the direction of the allied ground forces.

If I remember correctly, that strike coincided with what was, at the time, another ‘strange instance’ where a number of sniffers suddenly sounded their gas alarms, without there being an actual iraqi attack.

[user_hostile]

Ahem,

foolsguinea

Lead is heavy, but so soft they used to make pencils from it.

and

This is what happens when people with no specific expertise try to bullshit their way out of their own ignorance.

My five year granddaughter knows that pencil leads are made of graphite (one of the three, perhaps four forms of carbon)…but she would be appalled at using the latter quote’s language to make a rhetorical point…

I also know that Pb is nasty, nasty stuff when ingested and I wouldn’t let any of my five grandchildren handle it on a daily basis.

May I offer a piece of humble pie for foolsguinea?

[Alessan]

@GomiBoy

DU shells are generally 105mm smooth bore shells (like on the M1 Abrams main battle tank)

120mm, these days (but nice post!).

[GomiBoy]

@Alessan

120mm, these days (but nice post!).

You are so right; the original M1 (and the M60, still used by some Marine Corps units and 3rd world dictators the world over) used the 105mm smooth bore; the M1A1 and M1A2 used a 120MM…

Not my area, just my hobby. Ask me about f-16s sometime!

[Hoopy_Frood]

@user_hostile

My five year granddaughter knows that pencil leads are made of graphite (one of the three, perhaps four forms of carbon)…but she would be appalled at using the latter quote’s language to make a rhetorical point…

I also know that Pb is nasty, nasty stuff when ingested and I wouldn’t let any of my five grandchildren handle it on a daily basis.

May I offer a piece of humble pie for foolsguinea?

You might want to save yourself a slice.

Well it is true that lead is no longer used, what foolsguinea said was not false.

They used to make pencils out of lead (well, I don’t know if they ever truly made “pencils” from lead, but many early writing implements were).

[foolsguinea]

Thanks to GomiBoy for his information. I’m relieved to find out I was wrong.

[user_hostile]

@Hoopy Frood

You might want to save yourself a slice.

Well it is true that lead is no longer used, what foolsguinea said was not false.

They used to make pencils out of lead (well, I don’t know if they ever truly made “pencils” from lead, but many early writing implements were).

www.officemuseum.com/pencil_history.htm

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/page/p/pencil.shtml

:o

[Alessan]

@GomiBoy

You are so right; the original M1 (and the M60, still used by some Marine Corps units and 3rd world dictators the world over) used the 105mm smooth bore; the M1A1 and M1A2 used a 120MM…

Hey, don’t diss the M-60 - it’s still a good tank, especially after it’s had some work done.

[GomiBoy]

@Alessan

Hey, don’t diss the M-60 - it’s still a good tank, especially after it’s had some work done.

Dis it? Not so long as it’s pointed at me. But it is a bit outdated compared to what we’ve got in the field now.

But if I had a couple million or so to spend, I would much rather get an M1A2; the only thing that can kill one of those is a nuke!

Of course, you can always count on the Israelis to take cast-off US technology, give it a once-over, and come out with something that truly kicks ass. Look at the Kafir (sp?) - used to be an F-16, and they’ve recreated it as something that gives an F-15 a run for it’s money as air superiority and carries more payload that our own hugely improved F-16s

Thanks for the pics, though - I love stuff like this, even if I my girlfriend doesn’t approve!