[Ogre] Re: Ogre-list Digest, Vol 4, Issue 4

[White Rat]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 ogre-list-request at sjgames.com wrote:

> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:07:59 -0500 (CDT)
> From: "Henry J. Cobb" <hcobb at io.com>
> Subject: Re: [Ogre] Re: Depleted Uranium
> To: "OGRE Digest" <ogre-list at sjgames.com>
> Message-ID: <15828.68.126.82.218.1095365279.squirrel at webmail.io.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Since every vehicle carries a mix of DU and nuclear rounds I don't see it
> as that big of deal, but the "DU" rounds of the future might not have 
any
> uranium in them.
>
> http://www.defense-aerospace.com/produit/11171_us.html
>
> http://airbornecombatengineer.typepad.com/airborne_combat_engineer/2004/08/amorphous_tungs.html
>
> --
> Henry J. Cobb
> http://www.io.com/~hcobb/

The problem is that Tungsten, like DU, is still a toxic substance. DU's 
toxicity is not in any way, shape or form related to the radioactivity of 
uranium, it manifests simply as standard heavy metal poisoning. It 
receives a lot of press because it's URANIUM (ooh, evil atomic monsters 
and mutants!) but there are actually very few provable battlefield 
examples of DU-poisoning having taken place.

The majority of fetus and dead-baby pictures hoisted at DU protests are 
clipped from medical texts and have more to do with thalidomide and other 
such chemicals than DU. DU has a lot of interesting properties, putting 
out enough particles to cause radiation poisoning isn't one of them. 
Uranium oxide (the dust which settles in the near vicinity of a 
DU-penetrator hit) will cause heavy metals poisoning if a significant 
amount of it is ingested over time, but it sinks in water and doesn't 
impart its characteristics to the water. It isn't soluble so it doesn't 
get 'into the water table'. Beryllium is more toxic to the human body than 
UO.

The modern battlefield is a blend of many different noxious chemical 
exposure opportunities. The exhaust from solid-rocket motors and the 
effluent smoke left by explosives has lousy effects on the human body, as 
does breathing quantities of gunpowder smoke. Throw in the opportunity for 
soldiers to ingest airborne metal particles (largely brass molecules from 
the jackets of fired rifle rounds and the bore-rings of artillery shells, 
UO sinks to the ground too quickly, you'd have to be right next to a hit 
when the penetrator struck home for it to be an issue and then you'd have 
*other* problems) and you can easily end up with unhealthy soldiers. 
Civilians rarely are exposed to such quantities of propellants and 
airborne metal particles as the soldiers are, even in urban battlefields, 
since a great deal of the exposure goes to the firer of the weapon. In 
urban environments, collateral damage burns cause all manner of 
interesting molecules to linger in the atmosphere, many of them toxic. 
Take one whiff at a household burn site and you'll know just what I'm 
talking about.

The long and short of it is that the idea of DU rounds as a causal effect 
for mutations or stillborn children stands on very shakey ground. The 
people who are roused against the idea rely on the papers of a half-dozen 
doctors, all of whom have political backgrounds which render their 
testimony dubious, and most of whom have not performed sufficient quality 
testing to support their hypothesis. Nevertheless, their papers are 
distributed widely by these sites.

You get a lot more radiation taking a cross-country airplane ride in a 747 
than you would if you were locked into a closet built out of DU ten to 
twelve hours a day for several months. This isn't exaggeration. The 
'closet' equivalent is the latest generation of M1Abrams, which not only 
carries significant weight of DU penetrators in close proximity to the 
crew, it also is armored with DU to resist penetration. Most of our 
tankers spend half or more of every day of their service in close 
proximity to large quantities of DU. Some of our Abrams have been 
penetrated, and UO poisoning has not been an issue for the surviving crews 
(The Abrams is a marvelous machine. The fact that you can say 'penetrated' 
and 'surviving crews' in the same sentence alone speaks volumes.).

The fight against DU is tied to a rather particular type of protester. 
It's not hard to see why. There is only one nation which utilizes DU 
penetrators and DU armor, so attacking DU usage on the battlefield makes 
for a rather focussed target. It's also one of the few nations which 
bothers to give air time to hordes of barking moonbats waving dead baby 
signs around. These people choose their targets. There's a reason 
Greenpeace and AoE are more active in the US and Europe instead of 
focussing on the even higher levels of gross pollution produced by Eastern 
European countries. DU is a red flag for anti-American environmental 
concerns, but in truth it isn't a significant impactor on the environment 
even when compared to something as ubiquitous as the use of chemical smoke 
on battlefields.

After all the reading I've done on the topic, it boils down to this for 
me: If you're worried about the environment, you can pick plenty of fights 
which will affect an actual problem instead of a falsely perceived one. If 
you're interested in trying to embarrass the current US administration, 
you can find more embarrassing things to use.

People have been protesting about DU usage for almost three decades now. 
There's a reason it never becomes a major environmental cause...The 
environmentalists who look at the details of the supposed problem instead 
of the pictures of dead babies wander away shaking their heads. I can 
assure you that we're not studying amorphous tungsten to correct an 
environmental problem...I spent a decade in various elements of the 
American military-industrial complex, primarily aerospace, and after doing 
toxic cleanup work on USAF bases and at Oak Ridge I can tell you that the 
environment isn't a causal effect for new weapons-system development. 
We're studying it because someone thinks he can make a penetrator with 
better punch than the existing Sauvestre' APFSDSDU rounds...A way to make 
tungsten behave like DU, self-sharpening like a flint. That's why we use 
DU. Not because of its pyrophoric properties. Not because it's heavy. Not 
because it's associated with evil radiation. We use it because it 
penetrates more efficiently, chipping a new sharp penetrating tip rather 
than mushrooming out. Last I heard, DU penetrators had between 150 and 
180% the efficiency of the best tungsten penetrators, all geometries being 
equal.