I do not want to minimize the consequences of war, but this article has no plausibility.
DU is toxic, but the main hazard is inhaling the dust. That's likely not a big issue unless you're near impacting rounds...
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.
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_prot...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/2008/03/19/public-attitudes-towa...
Obama seemed to have the dream of stopping the partisan bickering and reuniting the country, prosecuting the former presidential administration would not have helped with that (not that this dream/mission got anywhere close to reality in his 8 years).
Another reason was prosecuting them would've meant subsequent administrations would look for any wrongdoing they could use against the previous admin. (Well, this is what the GOP did anyway, say with Benghazi).
This applies even when international courts have found the US guilty, since the US does not recognize the authority of international courts against them. See the case of the mining of Nicaragua's harbors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
As a point of comparison, regular U-238 is present at low levels all over the place in Colorado, it's naturally in the rock & soil. As long as the amounts are low, the radiation is low, and it mostly stays put, it's not a big problem.
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.
https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-toxicit...
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.
That said, what was done here is despicable and it is clear evidence of a war crime.
Copper, lead, whatever else, should contaminate all around as fine dust.
No it isn't, it's the government that we find deeply grubby. And this subject is unrelated to china.
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.
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.
Sample of 1, but it clearly showed me that with some people, you just can't get the message across. Doesn't matter how smart they are, what they experienced, it just doesn't work. I tried (not too hard though) and failed.
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.
Atomic mass has little to do with an element's boiling point.
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.
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.
Don't know about any Chinese external meddling like this, I guess we can call it a positive story considering these days.
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_videota...