Scott Peterson

How dangerous is this unseen residue once the battle is over - whether in Iraq's southern desert or in a Kosovo to which hundreds of thousands of refugees are meant to return?
The US military has given mixed signals. A series of Pentagon reports and regulations cite serious health risks from depleted uranium, and still stipulate stringent, moon-suit type protective gear when approaching objects hit with DU bullets.

LOADED WITH CONTROVERSY: Airmen prepared 30-mm depleted-uranium rounds for an A-10 'Warthog' plane this month in Aviano, Italy, a base used for strikes on Yugoslavia. (US AIR FORCE /AP)  

And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires the military to have a license to make or test fire a single DU round. In part because of safety and environment concerns over DU, the US Navy opted to use tungsten for its armor-piercing bullets.
But Pentagon officials today downplay that risk and cite other Pentagon reports that back their view. They confirm that thousands of US soldiers were "unnecessarily exposed" to DU in the Gulf, adding their view that those exposures were "not medically significant."
In Iraq, however, physicians describe a sharp upward spike after the Gulf War in the kind of health diagnoses - such as cancer - associated with exposure to radiation. Iraqi veterans interviewed by the Monitor supported those claims, if only anecdotally.  

But any increase in Iraqi health problems may have another cause, or many causes. The Gulf War was the scene of a "toxic soup" of dangerous chemicals. The Iraqis, and some American physicians and scientists, argue that DU is one of the most dangerous.
Indeed, some Western scientists who have examined DU believe that it could be one of the factors behind Gulf War syndrome - the much-studied, little understood set of symptoms claimed by as many as 1 in 7 US Gulf War veterans.
The American military designed DU bullets in the 1970s, during the cold war, to counter Moscow's advanced T-72 tanks. Denser than lead, DU burns and self-sharpens when it hits a hard target and scorches its way through inch after inch of armor in, literally, a flash.
American forces - and, to a very small degree, their British allies - fired the 320 tons of DU that was shot across the deserts of Kuwait and southern Iraq, where most of it still lies.
But it does not lie quietly. A Monitor reporter who traveled throughout the region watched a radiation detector carried over parts of those battlefields register about 35 times normal background radiation. Portions of old tanks "killed" with DU bullets showed radiation levels 50 times above background - results similar to what US Army teams found during the war.  

When DU is protectively encased and carefully handled, its health risks are considered small. So if DU is outside the body, these are not especially dangerous levels of radiation.
But when it smashes at Mach II into metal, DU burns and pulverizes into dust that can soar in the heat column of a flaming tank and waft for miles on the desert wind.
It is when this dust is inhaled or ingested that it becomes most dangerous as a radioactive substance and a toxic heavy metal, some experts say.
So far, DU bullets have received only limited public attention, though the Pentagon predicts that every future battlefield is likely to be strewn with their residue.
Reporting from Iraq, Kuwait, and the US, this Monitor series examines the possible long-term effects of this powerful spinoff of the nuclear age.
If there is a connection between human suffering and DU, then its use in the future will mean that lands of conflict will remain contaminated for the 4.5 billion years - a figure comparable to the age of the solar system - that DU remains radioactive.

If depleted uranium (DU) has not already been fired in Yugoslavia, what are the prospects that it will be?
The US Army has no DU munitions "in theater" and no plans to send them, says Lt. Col. Bill Wheelehan, an Army weapons spokesman at the Pentagon. But the US Air Force does have DU capability in the conflict.
President Clinton announced April 13 that NATO forces were "taking our allied air campaign to the next level" against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic - and that "we are striking now at his tanks, and at his artillery."

America's best-suited plane for that task is the 1970s-designed A-10 "Warthog." It was "literally built around" a seven-barrel Gatling gun, a Pentagon report noted last year. "To further exploit the new cannon's tremendous striking power the Air Force opted to use the DU 30-mm round," the report said.
During the Gulf War, the 780,000 DU bullets shot from these planes accounted for 80 percent of all DU fired.
A-10s - which also carry an array of weapons other than DU - have been in action over Yugoslavia for weeks. The Air Force says it has the "capability" to use DU, but that it hasn't so far. "We still have not had any reports of any DU use in Kosovo," says Margaret Gidding, a US Air Force spokeswoman.
Chris Hellman, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information in Washington, finds that surprising: "If it is in fact true [that DU has not been used], it would require the Air Force to go significantly out of its way not to use DU," he says. DU rounds, he says, are the "standard load" for the A-10. NATO used DU rounds against Bosnian Serb targets in 1995. Fragments were tested in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, so Serbs are aware of the propaganda value of any allied use of the bullets. A subcommission of the UN Human Rights Commission resolved in 1996 that DU was a weapon of mass destruction that should be banned.
"If you go after tanks that are moving, and ground forces, that is typically when those 30-mm depleted-uranium rounds would be used," says the Air Force's Ms. Gidding. Now, she says, the A-10s are instead using missiles.
What about President Clinton's "next level" of tank-busting? "I heard his comments as well," says Gidding. "But we have no reports that DU has been used."

At least 17 countries already have in their arsenals bullets made from depleted uranium (DU). Many - such as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan - get them from the United States. England and France buy DU wholesale from the US. Russia now sells DU rounds on the open market.
Such proliferation has raised unanswered questions about the long-term health effects of the hard-hitting and controversial ordnance.
Is there a continuing health risk from DU fragments and particles for civilians in Iraq and Kuwait? And if the degree of danger to human health can't be nailed down, how should future use of DU be dealt with?
Several official bodies already take serious precautions. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), for example, requires a license to handle or test-fire DU munitions. The US Army has 14 separate NRC licenses related to the substance. The Navy and Air Force each have one NRC "master materials" license.
Workers handling DU in the US must treat it as low-level radioactive waste. Disposal typically means the substance is locked into a 30-gallon canister, sealed with plastic, then sealed again inside a 55-gallon drum and, by law, buried in licensed underground dumps. Fine particles are mixed into concrete and locked into drums.
Definitive statements about DU's health risks to humans are not easy to make, scientists say.
"We don't know everything we'd like to know," says Ron Kathren, a physics professor and director of the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries in Richland, Wash. Attached to Washington State University, the registry has studied uranium and its effect on industry workers for 30 years.
"The reason people get panicky is because DU is radioactive, but [the battlefield dose] is so small that it never approaches chemical hazard," says Mr. Kathren.
Part of the problem with DU is public misperception, says John Russell, the associate director of the registries: "You say 'uranium,' and people think of the bomb. That's not the case here."
At the heart of the health debate is this question: Do small DU particles trapped in the body emit enough radiation over time - in the form of alpha particles - to cause physical harm?
Most of the concern is focused on dust particles left after a bullet is incinerated upon impact.
Carried aloft by the wind, the small particles can work their way into the human body, where the emission of alpha particles can be extremely damaging to cells, says Douglas Collins, a health physicist for 20 years and an NRC division director of nuclear material safety in Atlanta.
A 1990 study commissioned by the Army links DU with cancer and states that "no dose is so low that the probability of effect is zero." Dr. Asaf Durakovic, who was chief of nuclear medicine at the US Department of Veterans Affairs' medical center in Wilmington, Del., from 1989 until 1997, takes that a step further. Even the smallest internal alpha dose, he says, "is a high radioactive risk."
One safety memo, written by the US Army in 1991, says a single charred DU bullet found by US forces was emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. (A rad is a measurement of ionizing radiation absorbed into material.)
"The current [NRC] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year," it noted. The limit for radiation workers would be some 30 times more. Du's critics cite incidents to bolster their case against its use.
In 1992, for instance, a German scientist found a spent DU bullet in the Iraqi desert and was later arrested and fined by a Berlin court for "releasing ionizing radiation upon the public" when he brought it home.
"You're not playing with anything innocuous," says Leonard Dietz, a nuclear scientist who worked for 28 years at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York.
In 1979, DU particles escaped from the National Lead Industries factory near Albany, N.Y., which manufactured DU penetrators. The particles traveled 26 miles and were noticed in a laboratory filter by Mr. Dietz. The factory was shut down in 1980 for releasing more than 0.85 pounds of DU dust into the atmosphere every month - a fraction of the 320 tons fired during the Gulf War.
"It's still hot forever," says Doug Rokke, a Pentagon DU expert until last year. "It doesn't go away, it only disperses and blows around in the wind."
The British Atomic Energy Agency, at the behest of the Ministry of Defense in 1991, tried to quantify the risk. Based on an early estimate of just 40 tons of DU used during the Gulf War, it said that that amount could cause "500,000 potential deaths." Recently declassified, its report says this purely theoretical calculation is "obviously not realistic" because it would require every single person to inhale similar quantities. But the sheer volume does "indicate a significant problem."
The Pentagon rejects that. "The problem is that all of that stuff has to be put into people. It physically can't happen," says Col. Eric Daxon, the radiological staff officer for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. The possibility of DU causing serious health problems in Iraq, he says, is "exceptionally small, to the point where it should be absolutely at the bottom of the list."
Bernard Rostker, the Pentagon's special assistant for Gulf War illness, also sounds an all-clear. The Gulf War "is not an extraordinary nuclear event," he said. "This area [where DU was used], we would say, is free for any agricultural, industrial use, any personal use."
But Dr. Durakovic says those areas are still dangerous. Widespread use of DU, he told Congress in 1997, means that "the battlefields of the future will be unlike any ... in history."
The result is that "injury and death will remain lingering threats to 'survivors' of the battle for years and decades into the future," he testified. "The battlefield will remain a killing zone long after the cessation of hostilities."

The men who guard the ruins of the remote Kharanj oil-pumping station near Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia don't wander around much.
Destroyed by US air raids during the 1991 Gulf War, parts of this facility remain "hot" - radioactive. So the guards confine themselves to one small building to avoid wreckage contaminated by US bullets made with depleted uranium (DU).

STILL 'HOT': Mahmoud Hossein, an official of Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission, checks an Iraqi tank hit by DU bullets near Basra, southern Iraq, and finds it to be radioactive. Some experts say the DU radiation is only mildly dangerous. Others counter that ingestion or inhalation of even a particle of DU carries high risks.  (SCOTT PETERSON)

Scott Peterson
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

A soldier's boots are often treated with sacred regard, once they carry a warrior safely through combat.
But for one US soldier, who volunteered for his Gulf War tour, Mark Panzera, his boots were the first sign that something was very wrong.
He was an Army mechanic in the 144th Service and Supply Company of New Jersey, which in 1991 prepared US tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles that had been hit by "friendly fire" for shipment home.
This front-line equipment had been inadvertently hit by American gunners shooting radioactive depleted-uranium (DU) bullets at what they thought were Iraqi tanks.
For weeks after the mistake, the 144th worked at a salvage site in Saudi Arabia, getting into every corner of every vehicle to recycle equipment, wearing T-shirts and shorts, eating on and sleeping beside the vehicles.
Suddenly one morning, Mr. Panzera recalls, before his team began work, two experts arrived looking like astronauts, wearing hooded masks and suits - and carrying radiation detectors.
Before the two unexpected visitors approached the vehicles, they first ran their instruments over the awestruck mechanics. Their clothes were contaminated, but Panzera's boots especially set the detectors crackling.

REFUSE OF WAR: Destroyed Iraqi tanks, artillery, and armored vehicles rust at a collection point known as the 'boneyard' in the Kuwaiti desert. Many were struck by DU rounds and later brought here by unprotected workers.  (SCOTT PETERSON /GAMMA-LIAISON)  

By the Pentagon's own admission, its policy toward use of DU weapons has been inconsistent. Several military and independent reports describe the potential danger of DU particles trapped inside the body, though most deem the overall risk to be "acceptable." Strict federal and military rules govern every aspect of DU use and decontamination.
But the Pentagon today calls its own regulations - based on US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) guidelines, which require masks and suits when dealing with DU contamination - "total overkill."
In 1993, a report from the US General Accounting Office, the government's investigative arm, found that Army officials "believe that DU protective means can be ignored during battle."
Then, in 1995, all four branches of the US military approved a multimedia DU training kit. In January 1998 it was endorsed as "impressive" by the deputy secretary of defense, John Hamre.
The kit, obtained by the Monitor through the Freedom of Information Act, said "the greatest threat is during open-air, live-fire testing. We can call combat a great big open-air, live-fire test." An area hit by DU "remains contaminated, and will not decontaminate itself."
The kit was never issued, and it is now under review.
"They [the NRC] have their own standards. The military's [standards] are under review," says Bernard Rostker, the Pentagon's special assistant for Gulf War illnesses. He first raised doubts publicly only last August. He said the "extremely restrictive" NRC rules are "poorly suited" to war, and "need to be rewritten."  

Critics say the Pentagon has reasons for its apparent downgrading of DU dangers: The bullet pierces enemy armor like no other, it's cheap, and any confirmed link with health problems could trigger a flood of compensation and reparations claims. And the cost of cleaning up DU residue in the Gulf would be prohibitive, as well. The price tag for removing 152,000 pounds of DU in the now-closed, 500-acre Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana has been estimated to be $4 billion to $5 billion. More than four times that amount of DU was spread during the Gulf War, over a significantly larger area.
"The government is institutionally incapable of telling the truth on this matter," says Bill Arkin, a former military intelligence analyst and columnist for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His analysis: DU is too troublesome for the Pentagon to keep in its arsenal.
In January 1998, Rostker reported that "failure" to alert troops to DU hazards "may have resulted in thousands of unnecessary exposures," but said those exposures "had not produced any medically detectable effects."

REFUSE OF WAR: Destroyed Iraqi tanks, artillery, and armored vehicles rust at a collection point known as the 'boneyard' in the Kuwaiti desert. Many were struck by DU rounds and later brought here by unprotected workers.

(SCOTT PETERSON /GAMMA-LIAISON)

 Angry veterans say that DU could be a reason that an estimated 1 in 7 of them report a set of symptoms known as Gulf War Syndrome, and have pushed their case on Capitol Hill. They estimate that hundreds of thousands of troops were exposed to DU during the fighting or on post-battle tours of the front line. Climbing on destroyed Iraqi tanks was a favorite activity, along with collecting war souvenirs. Among other sources, the veterans point to a 1990 report commissioned by the US Army that links DU to cancer and also makes clear that "there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero." They also remember Pentagon reluctance to divulge health hazards in the Vietnam War.
"This [DU] is the Agent Orange of the 1990s - absolutely," says Doug Rokke, a former Army health physicist who was part of the DU assessment team in the Gulf War, and DU project director for the training package.
Underscoring the official inconsistencies, Sen. Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin said in September that the Pentagon's "assertion that no Gulf War veterans could be ill from exposure to DU ... contradicts numerous pre- and postwar reports, some from the US Army itself."  

In a sign of the Pentagon's own confusion, Rostker told a White House oversight panel last November that he was "misguided" to issue so strong a statement - that ruled out DU as a cause of Gulf War Syndrome - in an August report. "I stand corrected," he stated.
The problem seems as political as it is scientific: "Misinformation disseminated by both the Iraqi government and the US Department of Defense has made analysis of DU impacts difficult," notes Dan Fahey, Gulf War veteran and author of an extensive DU report for veterans' groups published last year.

KICKING UP A STORM: An American M1A1 battle tank, on maneuvers in Kuwait last year, shows the ease with which dust and particles can be resuspended in the desert air.

(SCOTT PETERSON /GAMMA-LIAISON)

Protection guidelines for handling DU are as difficult to establish as a single speed limit for every American road, says Ron Kathren, director of the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries in Richland, Wash. But NRC guidelines "are in fact adequate" for DU, he says, and "if they are 'overkill,' that's OK, too. I'd rather err on the side of safety."
Col. Eric Daxon, a senior Pentagon radiation expert with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, said in an interview that the military needs to come up with its own "acceptable risks" of DU, compared to the other threats of combat. Protecting soldiers from DU can also put them at risk during battle, he said. Gas masks and suits can overheat a soldier and impair vision. The goal today is to keep exposures "as low as reasonably achievable," he adds.
"Reducing the total risk ... of getting shot, of getting wounded, of getting long-term cancers" is the new aim, he says. "We are really trying to balance all of those things."
As the Pentagon now weighs the use of DU munitions in NATO's war against Yugoslavia, the debate about the risks of DU is certain to escalate.
"I think we have been inconsistent," says the Pentagon's Rostker in the interview. "We published a standard ... that is inconsistent with the hazards of DU."  

As those arguments continue, Panzera has had several operations and health problems that he attributes to his DU exposure. Worried about taking contamination home before he left the Gulf, Panzera cut holes in his uniform and exchanged it for a new one. He left his soldier's boots "in the middle of the desert."
"I guess they are waiting until half of us are dead before they give in," he says, echoing the view of many US veterans whose patriotism has long since given way to cynicism. "My volunteering days are over."