Depleted Uranium Statistics


DEPLETED URANIUM
Information and Statistics

“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

--Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State in the Nixon administration, in response to a question about the effects of Agent Orange on Viet Nam veterans.



  • Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of weapon of mass destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal Code (Title 50, Chapter 40 Section 2302.)

  • DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements, Hague and Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws and U.S. military law.


  • Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomic equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10 times the amount released during the period of atmospheric testing, which was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has permanently contaminated the global atmosphere with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 4.4 billion years.

  • The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since 1991, calling DU “conventional” weapons when in fact they are nuclear weapons.

  • DU on the battlefield has three effects on living systems: it is a toxic heavy metal “chemical” poison, a “radioactive” poison and has a “particulate” effect due to the very tiny size of the particles that are 0.1 microns and smaller.

  • The blueprint for DU weaponry as a poison gas weapon is: dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets.

  • DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators, but even more effective bioweapons since uranium has a strong chemical affinity for phosphate structures concentrated in DNA.
  • DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war – it keeps giving and keeps killing. There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn if off because it continues to decay into other radioactive isotopes in over 20 steps.

  • The Department of Veterans Affairs stated in August 2004 that over 209,000 Desert Storm veterans are now on medical disability, although only 7,039 of those veterans were wounded on the battlefield.

  • Over 130,000 veterans are suffering from Gulf war Syndrome.

  • Since 1991 an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 veterans have died from the effects of DU.

  • More than 500,000 veterans are homeless.

  • In some studies of 251 soldiers from Mississippi who had normal babies before the war, 67 percent of the post-war babies were born with severe birth defects – missing brains, eyes, organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.

  • In southern Iraq scientists are reporting that the levels of gamma radiation in the air are five times higher than normal. This increase in radioactivity on the inhabitants makes Iraq, as well as Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, essentially uninhabitable.

  • Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 alpha particles per second.

  • During the first Gulf War 375 tons of depleted uranium were used. In the current Gulf War 2200 tons have already been deployed.

  • The United States has sold DU weapons to 29 countries around the world.