Exclusive: U.S. to send its first depleted uranium rounds to Ukraine -sources
www.reuters.com
The Biden administration will for the first time send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, according to a document seen by Reuters and separately confirmed by two U.S. officials.
  • BombOmOmEnglish
    27•1 year ago

    Good. These things have better penetration than the alternatives.

    The most dangerous thing for Ukrainians is invading Russians, and this is the best tool to remove that danger.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The rounds, which could help destroy Russian tanks, are part of a new military aid package for Ukraine set to be unveiled in the next week.

    The munitions can be fired from U.S. Abrams tanks that, according to a person familiar with the matter, are expected be delivered to Ukraine in the coming weeks.

    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.

    The United States used depleted uranium munitions in massive quantities in the 1990 and 2003 Gulf Wars and the NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia in 1999.

    The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says that studies in former Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Iraq and Lebanon “indicated that the existence of depleted uranium residues dispersed in the environment does not pose a radiological hazard to the population of the affected regions.”

    Parts of the country are already strewn with unexploded ordnance from cluster bombs and other munitions and hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel mines.

    The original article contains 499 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • daniel
    -12•1 year ago

    Yet it will poison the land like it has in Iraq.

    • Despair
      13•1 year ago

      Depleted Uranium has a half-life of ~4.5 billion years making it fairly safe to be around.

      The real issue is that Uranium is a heavy metal but that’s kind of a moot point since the alternatives are also heavy metals. The US isn’t the first to donate DU round’s either, The British Defense Ministry already confirmed that they would provide these rounds back in March, 2023.

      It’s also better to use fewer of the more effective rounds than needing to use more of the less effective alternatives in terms of spreading heavy metal around. They’re only controversial because “radiation scary”, and not because they’re a heavy metal.