US To Arm Ukraine With Toxic Depleted Uranium Munitions

In the latest manifestation of the War State’s depraved indifference to human suffering in Ukraine, the United States will soon pour depleted-uranium munitions into its proxy war against Russia, according to an exclusive report from Reuters. 

The shells, which are designed to penetrate enemy armored vehicles, will be used by US M-1 Abrams tanks that will begin arriving in Ukraine within the next several weeks. In March, the United Kingdom was first to announce it would give the controversial rounds to Ukraine, for use in British Challenger 2 tanks. 

The ammunition is made from the byproduct of uranium that’s been processed for nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. In anti-tank use, depleted uranium is valued for its density, which is 1.7 times the density of lead. It’s used to manufacture dart-like sabot rounds that penetrate armor and then ignite when they contact the oxygen inside the targeted vehicle. 

While the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) says the risk posed to civilians by the residue of depleted uranium (DU) rounds “was not significant,” a different study points to potential links between the ammunition and a variety of genuinely horrifying birth defects in Iraq. That study centered on the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, which was attacked by the US military in the early 90s and again in 2003. 

According to the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons: 

When DU bullets hit an armored surface, they are burned by the high temperatures generated by the impact. This creates a very fine dust that is radioactive and chemically toxic. Through food and respiration, this toxic dust is absorbed by the body. In the body, the radiation and the chemical poison cause serious damage.

Many diseases can be caused: alteration and damage to the genome, malformations of the human body in the womb, impaired fertility in men and women, cancer in almost all organs, kidney failure and behavioral problems.

It bears emphasis that these rounds will be used by the Ukrainian military on land it’s purportedly seeking to “liberate” for the benefit of the civilians who live there and will be exposed to this hazard for many years to come. 

The ammunition will be included in a new military aid package that will be revealed next week, Reuters reports. The new package will redistribute between $240 million and $375 million in American wealth to Ukraine, on top of the more than $135 billion poured into the proxy war so far.  

This isn’t the first form of highly controversial ammunition the US government has pushed into the war in recent months. This summer, the Biden administration sent cluster munitions that are fired by 155mm artillery pieces. More than 100 countries are party to a treaty that bans the ammunition. 

“Cluster bombs scatter small submunitions over large areas, making them especially hazardous for civilians,” wrote AntiWar.com’s Dave DeCamp in July. “Submunitions that don’t explode immediately on impact can kill or maim civilians for decades to come, as they have in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, where the US dropped hundreds of millions of bomblets during the Vietnam War.”

In an interview with CNN, Biden let slip that he’d approved the transfer of cluster munitions because Ukraine was running out of conventional rounds — and the US was too. 

Last seek, Republican Senator Mitt Romney demonstrated the casual ghoulishness of Washington’s warmongers. The billions being poured into Ukraine, he said, “is about the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done. We’re losing no lives in Ukraine!” 

The single most important thing we can do to strengthen America relative to China is to see Russia defeated in Ukraine. A weakened Russia deters the CCP’s territorial ambition, and halts Putin’s vision of reestablishing the old Soviet Union. Supporting Ukraine is in our interest. pic.twitter.com/X21GGs0lTW

— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) August 25, 2023

Romney’s rhetoric is clearly part of a coordinated, bipartisan PR campaign aimed at boosting sagging support for the war. After a trip to Kiev and a meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal published an op-ed in which he first gushed about Zelensky’s “magnetic energy,” then crowed that Americans are getting their “money’s worth” because “not a single American service woman or man [has been] injured or lost.” 

Given their disinterest in Ukrainian lives sacrificed for the neocon agenda, these warmongers surely don’t care if a generation of Ukrainian civilians is condemned to endure horrific birth defects and cancer from depleted uranium or losing limbs to cluster munitions. 

These people don’t care about Ukrainians. And they don’t care about you.