About 40,000 canisters of depleted uranium, each weighing 14 tons, are spread out in rows at the Paducah, Kentucky Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Another 20,000 are kept at a facility in Piketon, Ohio.

Gunner’s mates inspect belts of 20mm depleted uranium ammunition before loading it into a magazine aboard the battleship USS Missouri

A far-reaching resolution critical of so-called “depleted” uranium munitions (DU) has won the support of 155 member states at the UN General Assembly. Twenty-eight abstained and only four countries voted against — the United States, Britain, France and Israel. The four all use DU weapons.
    The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons reports that the resolution — “Effects of Arms and Armaments Containing Depleted Uranium” — was supported by documentation from the UN Environment Program’s (UNEP’s) repeated calls for a “precautionary approach” to the wartime use and post-war management of the radioactive and chemically toxic shells. The Precautionary Principle holds that controversial practices or devices should be shunned until they can be shown to be safe for people and the environment.
    “That just four states actively opposed the resolution clearly shows that governments around the world deem the use of DU unacceptable,” said ICBUW’s international coordinator Doug Weir. ICBUW worked hard for the inclusion of “precaution” in the new text, a weaker version of which passed the UNGA in 2010. “We hope the new resolution triggers meaningful debate about the applicability of peacetime environmental and health precautionary norms for civilians facing the legacy of military toxics like DU,” Weir said.
    Depleted uranium weapons are made of solid uranium-238, a metallic radioactive waste left in huge quantities from the production of nuclear reactor fuel or hydrogen bombs. The U.S. government has a stockpile of 700,000 tons of this waste — which it currently keeps outdoors in 14-ton tanks — and the geniuses in our federal laboratories figured out how to turn the highly flammable (pyrophoric) metal into armor-piercing munitions, some of which are 120 millimeters in diameter. Sorry thing is, when the shells smash and burn through hard objects like tanks or armored cars, the resulting uranium dusts — or metallic fumes — poison large swaths of territory, can be inhaled, and contaminate the food chain.
    Places like Iraq and the Balkans, where the U.S. and the UK have fired tens or hundreds of tons of the shells, have seen long-term environmental contamination and its inevitable threat to human health documented by the UNEP.
    The latest UNGA resolution is backed by reports produced by the UNEP after its fieldwork in DU-targeted sites in the Balkans — where DU contamination was in turn proven to contain small amounts of plutonium. The UNEP called then, in 2000, for a precautionary approach to DU — backed by clean-up, decontamination, public education to reduce human exposures, and long-term monitoring of contaminated sites.
    Building on the UNGA’s 2010 text, the new resolution calls again for greater transparency from DU users like the United States. It calls upon shooter governments to provide detailed information about targeted areas and precise amounts to states hit with its waste uranium upon request. The United States has previously refused to share data on its use of DU in Iraq with the UNEP, leaving the agency unable to fully survey contamination in there.
    The United States and British militaries used over 360 tons of DU weapons in the 1991 bombardment of Iraq and Kuwait. Another five tons was fired into Bosnia in 1995 by U.S.-led NATO forces, and 10 tons were shot into Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia in 1999 during the 78-day NATO bombardment led by President Bill Clinton. As much as 200 tons have been used again in Iraq since the March 2003 bombardment and invasion.

    —  John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.