Armor Piercing Without the Mushroom Cloud:

Depleted Uranium is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Stephen Buckley

84304-6228

Political Science 348

March 19, 2004

“The Iraqis tell us [the USA] terrible things happened to our [Iraqi] people because you [the USA] used it [depleted uranium] last time. Why do they want it to go away? They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them—okay?”[1]

- US Army Colonel James Naughton, US Army Materiel Command, responding to a question during a press briefing, March 14, 2003, one week before Shock and Awe began.

“DU is now part of America's arsenal and it's here to stay.”[2]

- Bernard Rostker, head of DoD’s office on Gulf War Illnesses, January 20, 2000.

People often talk about how land mines are weapons of mass destruction in slow motion. They do not kill extraordinarily large numbers of people in a short time. They kill a great deal of people over a great deal of time, long past the end of violent conflict. Land mines are weapons of mass destruction also in that they do not discriminate between combatant and civilian, thereby they violate international norms of the rules of war. But what of depleted uranium (DU)? DU is a waste product of the uranium enriching process. It also happens to be able to provide extra armored protection on tanks and, when coated on projectiles, can itself pierce armor. DU has immense strategic advantages. But being uranium, its presence introduces radiation into an environment, thereby resulting in the same kind of long term damage as a nuclear weapon, just without the initial blast destruction.

The Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies considers radiological weapons to be “devices that release radiation with the intent of inflicting severe injury or financial and psychological costs. The radiological isotopes used to produce radiological dispersal devices are found in waste from medical facilities, industrial plants, and nuclear power plants.”[3] In using DU, the United States and other nations are introducing a radiological weapon into an environment. Since the US uses DU for its technical, strategic benefits, perhaps they should be exempt from this definition of radiological weapons. They certainly have not stated that in using DU they also intend to irradiate enemies and their environment for billions of years. But does lack of stated intent allow the DU using states to arrive at the same result without culpability? No. Depleted uranium is a radiological weapon of mass destruction. While the United States has not done requisite research to acknowledge the effect of DU on environments and people’s health, maintaining plausible deniability is no excuse to avoid the indictment that states’ use of DU is actually the use of a weapon of mass destruction.

During the Gulf War, the United States became the first country to use depleted uranium on armor-piercing ordnance and in tank armor. Because of this material’s density and self-sharpening quality, it has great potential to pierce armor plating when used on rounds. Further, when US A-10 and Harrier aircraft’s DU-tipped rounds strike a target, DU particles separate and combust, contributing to consequent fire and explosions. When built into the armor of M1A1 Abrams tanks, for example, DU provides additional protection.[4] No Iraqi weapons ever penetrated a US DU-armored tank during that war.[5] Clearly, DU has tremendous strategic capacity and value to the point of US allies, and likely eventually, enemies, adopting the technology.[6] Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand and Turkey have or are developing DU weapons capacity.[7] In all, the US army fired roughly 50 tons of DU in the Gulf War. Because DU is so dense, 50 tons comprises merely a 4.5 foot cube. Additionally, the air force used 259 tons of DU and marine fliers used 11 tons. UK tanks used less than one ton of DU.[8]

Risks arise, however, both from DU’s chemical and radiological properties, prompting the US Department of Defense (DoD) to address the potential combat and non-combat effects of DU use. Specifically, they meant to examine these questions: “did DU pose an acceptable health risk to American troops; were personnel trained to recognize and communicate that risk; and were troops, once exposed to DU, adequately monitored and treated?”[9] In the DoD’s 1998 report, Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf, they argued that exposure to minute levels of DU is not harmful, but exposure beyond a certain threshold can damage people’s health. Still, the report concluded there was no medical or scientific proof that demonstrated a connection between DU exposure and “the undiagnosed illnesses presented by some Gulf War veterans.”[10] However, as long as many illnesses remain undiagnosed, it would be easy to conclude that whatever evidence exists of the harmful effects of DU would have no bearing on those conditions. So because of the narrow focus of this report, concentrating on undiagnosed conditions within the highly mysterious Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), the US government can use this report to plausibly disregard objective health risks of DU. Though trying to find ways to methodologically legitimize GWS, David Mahoney points out the likelihood of GWS forever remaining mysterious.

Veterans come to their physicians exhibiting vague symptoms whose etiology [factors that contribute to a disease] is as much a mystery as it was in 1991. And it is becoming more and more likely that the origin of GWS will never be clearly delineated. Indeed, far too much time has elapsed since the Gulf War, and far too little epidemiological data were collected during the war, to ensure that the cause of GWS would ever be identified. We have all but exhausted our etiological options.[11]

Thus, lack of careful documentation during and after the Gulf War may ensure that the US never conclusively connects DU effects with GWS. This lack of certainty has so far allowed them to swim in the murk of plausible deniability, permitting them to continue spewing DU about the globe. Similarly, Keith Goshorn describes the tenuous nature of a public’s faith in its leadership:

As charges of sinister conspiracy and high level government cover-up move in to displace and supplant the medical debate, Gulf War Syndrome becomes an epidemic of suspicion, a plague of paranoia that threatens a greater malaise than even Vietnam.[12]

And while that suspicion foments on a domestic level as people increasingly question their government’s authentic commitment to the soldiers it commands (in examining the effects of DU), the natural extension of this analysis leads to examining the methods the United States uses to engage other militaries in battle (in examining policy surrounding their use of DU).

Particular findings in the report demonstrate that Gulf War veterans who suffered from friendly fire DU ordnance and still have metal fragments in their bodies have higher than normal uranium levels in their urine. Veterans without fragments still in their bodies “generally speaking, have not shown higher than normal levels of uranium in their urine.” Apparently, also, the merely 33 veterans in this study have normal kidney functioning and have sired babies with no “observable birth defects.”[13]

The report recommends a list of changes to military procedure regarding DU. Military personnel should be educated about the risks associated with DU, particularly because enemies may use this technology on US soldiers. They also recommend upgrading guidelines for handling DU, particularly using better safety gear than what they currently use. Better tracking and communication of DU use is also critical to protect personnel from danger in contaminated areas. The report also recommended providing dedicated, more rapidly responding radiation control teams to commanders in the field.[14] The fact that the US military goes to such lengths to protect its personnel against the radiological properties of DU indicates their knowledge—at the very least—of the DU’s potential for danger. It is irresponsible for the DU using states to not extend this concern to enemies, victims, and bystanders. Further, the US military does not fire DU rounds during training.[15] Perhaps this is to save money. More likely, the greater reason could be to diminish needless radiological contamination, particularly of their training grounds, many of which are on their own soil.

While the US military studied their troops, examining the effects of DU remaining in Iraq is harder because of the breadth of DU dispersal during the Gulf War.[16] Generally, DU radiation risk comes from ingesting or inhaling radioactive material, particularly material that has contaminated the environment and food chain.[17] Cristina Giannardi and Daniele Dominici examined long-term effects of DU on an infected environment. They presented their findings in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity. They considered these means of DU affecting people: “external irradiation from soil, inhalation from resuspended dust, ingestion of contaminated soil and water, ingestion of plants and animal products grown on the site and ingestion of fish grown in a pond contaminated by groundwater.”[18] Resuspension of dust can occur when children play with soil.[19] They concluded that “inhalation of highly contaminated soil may result in exceeding the annual dose limit.”[20] Further, they found risk in “long term exposure due to ingestion of contaminated water and food.” The authors recommend that where military forces use DU shells, they should ensure people are not susceptible to accidental exposure (which would require mapping DU use areas and informing populations of the risks there) and they should plan to clean up the sites.[21] To proliferate DU without being responsible for cleanup is behaviour that arguably may have been valid in August 1945, but not in the 21^st century when so much legitimate concerns exists about WMDs, their proliferation and risks.

More concern about the health effects of DU comes, oddly, from the US Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Unit. They have found that “low-level radiation from depleted uranium…is capable of [possessing] carcinogenic properties.” Despite low doses of DU radiation not killing cells immediately, they still discovered evidence that there is cell damage. This discovery undermines US and UK arguments that DU radiation is of too low a dose to be responsible for increases in cancers and birth defects that have been reported in regions contaminated with DU.[22] So while the US may be intentionally not researching the right questions so they can avoid determining if DU has health risks, they may stumble out of their position of plausible deniability inadvertently, thereby jeopardizing their ability to commit to DU in a climate of uncertainty.

Shifting to NATO’s operations in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), Joan McQueeney Mitric argues that the late 1990s was a time when too many political distractions deflected attention from examining the human and environmental cost of NATO activity in the area.[23] First denying they were using DU shells in FRY, the United States eventually admitted they were, thereby annoying Gulf War veterans who were concerned that the United States was not warning military personnel or returning refugees of the DU risks and methods to minimize exposure, like not letting children play on tanks destroyed with DU rounds.[24] Despite the US military’s recommendations about DU-avoidance education in their Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf report, which was completed before their Kosovo involvement, the US assistant secretary of defense for medical affairs claimed that such education was not part of “civilian or military training” in FRY.[25] As long as the United States avoids finding conclusive proof that DU is dangerous, they can continue to recklessly deploy such radiological contamination.

When it comes to mapping locations of DU use, another report recommendation, the US military refused to release maps of DU use in FRY to environmental NGOs, journalists or even to the UN’s Balkan Task Force.[26] Another reality of geography is that:

The environmental and social consequences of war are not bounded by lines on a political map; they are not self-contained or static but tend to bleed outward and to exact a toll on public and workplace health, which in turn determines the economic viability of the entire region.[27]

Ultimately, is there merit in NATO liberating Kosovars from ethnic cleansing when in doing so they contaminate greater FRY with a legacy of irradiation that will undermine their functional self-determination for an indefinite future? The Federation of American Scientists notes that the half-life of DU is 4.5 billion years.[28] Is the strategic expediency of using DU in military campaigns worth the environmental, social, health and economic handicaps and the strain on a future where liberators ought to be able to live at peace with those they have liberated, who must live on the contaminated battlefield into the future? From a practical point of view, the answer to both questions may be no. From a moral point of view, there is similar doubt. From a sense of global justice, we can view deploying DU ordnance as engagement with a weapon of mass destruction, thereby making its use even more deplorable.

Partially because of laughably superior technical military capability as the United States engaged Iraq and Serbia, the US has the capacity to destroy social infrastructure to augment merely engaging enemy forces. Arguably, though, destroying social infrastructure, thereby undermining civilian populations’ means of survival, is a biological weapon of mass destruction capable of inflicting similar degrees of damage as releasing a toxic virus into a community. In destroying infrastructure, civilians can be kept from meeting their own survival needs, like transportation, potable water, and energy:

In Kosovo, the “degrading” of Serbian capabilities took the form of an infrastructural war that targeted and destroyed bridges, railroads, highways, communications networks, oil storage depots, heating plants, power stations, and water treatment facilities. As can be surmised, the execution of such a military strategy, especially when combined with the imposition of sanctions, results in shutting down the enemy’s life-support system.[29]

In similar fashion, by irradiating a land with munitions that just happen to be more effective because of being tipped with DU, the United States (and other nations that use such ordnance) hamper the capacity of all people to survive, let alone thrive, into the future. Like land mines, DU contamination is a weapon that keeps on destroying long after the conflict ceases, and it affects all people indiscriminately.

Since at the very least there is convincing evidence of the potential threat of DU to human health and the environment, we need to examine whether or not the nature of that threat establishes DU as a WMD. Certainly a nuclear weapon has the capacity to kill a great many people initially. Its military value, though, extends to contaminating enemies’ lands to continue killing long into the future. These days, almost sixty years after the US used two nuclear weapons on Japan, there is great moral imperative to not do so again, despite strategic deterrence realities. Simply, a great many people not affected by a nuclear weapon attack would condemn the state or non-state actor that uses such a weapon. The United States, however, is in the fortunate position of being able to use DU’s chemical properties for strategic value in armor-piercing shells and augmenting its defensive armor. If there were no long term health or environmental consequences of DU, as the US continues to maintain by not properly studying its effects, then DU would merely be a useful military technology innovation. Unfortunately, DU has the same kind of long-term, indiscriminate radiological contamination of tradition nuclear weapons. Does the absence of a mushroom cloud truly allow the world to address DU differently? Clearly, no.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative has some sound foundational information about various official and working definitions of WMDs.[30] Beyond traditional inclusion of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, US legislation and FBI definitions both include radiological weapons along with nuclear weapons.

The definition in the U.S. Code, Title 5, "War and National Defense," includes radiological weapons. It defines WMD as "any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of - (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors; (B) a disease organism; or (C) radiation or radioactivity."[31]

As evidence of DU radioactivity mounts, the absence of a mushroom cloud does not prevent the United States’ use of DU from violating their own statutory definition of WMD use. Further, the FBI “sometimes uses an even broader definition of WMD,” including “nuclear/radiological, chemical, or biological agents…. A weapon crosses the WMD threshold when the consequences of its release overwhelm local responders."[32] To make the United States’ use of DU even more suspect, yet another US statute defines a WMD as including a radiation attack:

TITLE 50, CHAPTER 40, Sec. 2302. – Definitions

In this chapter: (1) The term “weapon of mass destruction” means any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of - (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors; (B) a disease organism; or (C) radiation or radioactivity.[33]

So by their own statutory and security definitions, launching an attack on an enemy that involves radiation constitutes use of a weapon of mass destruction. This fact makes it even more compelling for the United States to maintain plausible deniability regarding the radiological collateral damage of using DU in theatres of war.

Turning to international law, in 1996, the UN Human Rights Commission “declared that DU was already banned because it is incompatible with existing humanitarian law and qualifies as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD). The UN body declared that DU weapons and ammunition were illegal, banned their use, and stated that use of DU weapons constitutes a crime against humanity.” [34] Further, in 2002, the same body reiterated its position, referring to other legal codes, stating

The use of DU shells and bombs by US-UK in four countries (Iraq, Bosnia, FRY, and Afghanistan) violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the Nuremberg principles of 1945, the Charter of the United Nations, the Anti-Genocide Convention of 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and its Additional Protocol I and II 1977, the Convention Against Torture, [and] the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980.[35]

Essentially, weapons ought to be banned if their use does not discriminate between combatants and civilians, is out of proportion to legitimate military objectives (granted, “legitimate” is far from objectively determinable), “adversely affects the environment in a widespread, long term and severe manner,” or causes unnecessary suffering.[36]

In a world where the threat of a WMD attack is all too conceivable, states must ensure they develop response plans that not only are effective, but also are informed by broad forethought regarding the possible forms such an attack might take. Indeed, there are tremendous factors that complicate states’ reactions: “eligibility for health care, the effects of low-level chemical and radiation exposure, stress-related illnesses, unlicensed therapeutics, financial compensation.”[37] But what becomes even more uncertain is how the financial compensation element may evolve if societies begin to draw connections between the civil effects of DU contamination and a state, like the United States, that has caused such dire conditions. While there are realistic uninsurable losses in times of war, should that extend to a state’s use of a radiological WMD? If a military power can win a war conventionally, but chooses to use DU to expedite the campaign to minimize its own risk, at the expense of civil life well into the future, should they be held liable? In the realm of public opinion, they may be. But what is to stop general opposition to DU usage from converting into a broad-based program of seeking redress against states that use radiological WMDs? While there seems to be little practical merit in applying our contemporary sensibilities regarding WMDs retroactively to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there may be value in applying such a perspective to the nations that have demonstrated their will to today use radiological WMDs in their military campaigns. Great power impunity is suspect in a world where great powers seeks to reign in others’ WMD capacity, while themselves using that capacity.

It would be cynical to argue that expending DU into enemies’ lands during warfare is a useful means of disposing of a waste product of enriching uranium. Even more cynically, we could merely call it recycling. But to process uranium for weapons systems, it is not surprising that the waste product is also a strategic weapons tool. Therefore, we should address DU as a radiological WMD in the same way as we would address a state or non-state actor that unleashes a nuclear weapon. Regarding Serbia, Vojin Joksimovich argues that NATO is morally responsible for an “environmental cleanup and reconstruction aid” and that “world public opinion must unite to identify ecocide as a crime against humanity on a level with genocide and other war crimes.”[38] Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan may have similar claims to make. Ultimately, the United States is deploying depleted uranium in military combat for its own strategic advantage. As evidence mounts implicating DU in providing a radiological threat to combatants and civilians, particularly long after conflicts cease, it will become more obvious that DU using states are engaging in WMD use. For the present at least, these states seem to be trying to use DU as much as they can before the rest of the world catches on that the absence of a mushroom cloud does not prevent us from holding these states accountable for such crimes against humanity. And in an era when the United States is struggling to retain strategic and popular credibility in its fight against WMD proliferation, their use of depleted uranium, with callous disregard for its radiological poisoning effects, is a handicap they do not need. It is time for the United States and other nations that have used depleted uranium in battle to take responsibility for their actions, begin reparations and be more consistent in promoting a global agenda that truly opposes the spread and use of weapons of mass destruction.

Endnotes

---

[1] Federal News Service, Inc., “DoD News: Briefing on Depleted Uranium,” March 14, 2003 [http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2003/t03142003_t314depu.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[2] Linda Kozaryn, “DefenseLINK News: Depleted Uranium: The Rest of the Story,” Armed Forces Press Service, January 20, 2000, [http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2000/n01202000_20001202.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[3] Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies, “WMD 411 Glossary,”

[http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/glossary.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[4] US Department of Defense, “Section 1 (Overview),” Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf, [http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du/du_sec01.htm], July 31, 1998. Accessed March 13, 2004. The index page of the report is at http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du .

[5] US Department of Defense, “Tab F (DU Use in the Gulf War),” Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf, [http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du/du_tabf.htm], July 31, 1998. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[6] US Department of Defense, “Section 1 (Overview).”

[7] Cristina Giannardi and Daniele Dominici, “Military use of depleted uranium: assessment of prolonged population exposure,” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 64 (2003): 229.

[8] US Department of Defense, “Tab F (DU Use in the Gulf War).”

[9] US Department of Defense, “Section 1 (Overview).”

[10] US Department of Defense, “Section 1 (Overview).”

[11] David Mahoney, “A Normative Construction of Gulf War Syndrome,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.4 (Autumn 2001): 577.

[12] Keith Goshorn, “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames Of Containment: On Critical Paranoia And Anti-Conspiracy Discourse,” Theory and Event 4.3 (2000) [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.3r_goshorn.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[13] US Department of Defense, “Section 1 (Overview).”

[14] US Department of Defense, “Section 5 (Recommendations),” Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf, [http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du/du_sec05.htm], July 31, 1998. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[15] US Department of Defense, “Tab F (DU Use in the Gulf War).”

[16] Giannardi and Dominici, 228.

[17] Giannardi and Dominici, 229.

[18] Giannardi and Dominici, 230.

[19] Giannardi and Dominici, 233.

[20] Giannardi and Dominici, 234.

[21] Giannardi and Dominici, 235.

[22] Al Rooney, “The legacy of depleted uranium,” The Lancet: Oncology v.4 (June 2003): 327.

[23] Joan Mitric, “Cascading Human Consequences of NATO's War in the Balkans,” Mediterranean Quarterly, 11.2 (Spring 2000): 59.

[24] Mitric, 74-5.

[25] Mitric, 75.

[26] Mitric, 75.

[27] Mitric, 76.

[28] Federation of American Scientists, “Depleted Uranium,” April 29, 1999, [http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/du.htm].Accessed March 13, 2004.

[29] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (Winter 2003): 30-1.

[30] Nuclear Threat Initiative, “"NTI: WMD 411",” [http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a1.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[31] Nuclear Threat Initiative.

[32] Nuclear Threat Initiative.

[33] Legal Information Institute, “TITLE 50, CHAPTER 40, Sec. 2302.” [http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/50/2302.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[34] Christian Sherrer, “DU and the Liberation of Iraq,” April 13, 2003, [http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=3453&sectionID=15]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

[35] Sherrer.

[36] Sherrer.

[37] Kenneth Hyams, Frances Murphy, and Simon Wessely, “Responding to Chemical, Biological, or Nuclear Terrorism: The Indirect and Long-Term Health Effects May Present the Greatest Challenge,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.2 (April 2002): 286.

[38] Vojin Joksimovich, “Militarism and Ecology: NATO Ecocide in Serbia,” Mediterranean Quarterly11.4 (Fall 2000): 160.

References:

Federal News Service, Inc. “DoD News: Briefing on Depleted Uranium.” March 14, 2003. [http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2003/t03142003_t314depu.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

Federation of American Scientists. “Depleted Uranium.” April 29, 1999. [http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/du.htm]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

Giannardi, Cristina and Daniele Dominici. “Military use of depleted uranium: assessment of prolonged population exposure,” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 64 (2003): 227-236.

Goshorn, Keith. “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames Of Containment: On Critical Paranoia And Anti-Conspiracy Discourse.” Theory and Event 4.3 (2000) [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.3r_goshorn.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

Hyams, Kenneth, Frances Murphy, and Simon Wessely. “Responding to Chemical, Biological, or Nuclear Terrorism: The Indirect and Long-Term Health Effects May Present the Greatest Challenge.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.2 (April 2002): 274-291.

Joksimovich, Vojin. “Militarism and Ecology: NATO Ecocide in Serbia.” Mediterranean Quarterly11.4 (Fall 2000): 140-160.

Kozaryn, Linda. “DefenseLINK News: Depleted Uranium: The Rest of the Story,” Armed Forces Press Service, January 20, 2000. [http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2000/n01202000_20001202.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

Legal Information Institute. “TITLE 50, CHAPTER 40, Sec. 2302.” [http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/50/2302.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

Mahoney, David. “A Normative Construction of Gulf War Syndrome.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.4 (Autumn 2001): 575-83.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (Winter 2003): 11-40.

Mitric, Joan. “Cascading Human Consequences of NATO's War in the Balkans.” Mediterranean Quarterly. 11.2 (Spring 2000): 59-77.

Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “WMD 411 Glossary.” [http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/glossary.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

Nuclear Threat Initiative. “NTI: WMD 411.” [http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a1.html]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

Rooney, Al. “The legacy of depleted uranium.” The Lancet: Oncology v.4 (June 2003): 327.

Sherrer, Christian. “DU and the Liberation of Iraq.” April 13, 2003, [http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=3453&sectionID=15]. Accessed March 13, 2004.

US Department of Defense. “Section 1 (Overview).” Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf. July 31, 1998. [http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du/du_sec01.htm]. Accessed March 13, 2004. The index page of the report is at http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du .

US Department of Defense. “Section 5 (Recommendations).” Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf. July 31, 1998. [http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du/du_sec05.htm]. Accessed March 13,

US Department of Defense. “Tab F (DU Use in the Gulf War).” Environmental Exposure Report: Depleted Uranium in the Gulf. July 31, 1998. [http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du/du_tabf.htm]. Accessed March 13, 2004.