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What is depleted uranium? It’s been used by America’s military in making projectiles for everything from rotary cannons for airplanes to tank guns. Alloys made with DU offer a number of attractive qualities for projectile makers: it’s denser than lead, shatters into armor-piercing flaming-hot shards on impact, and tends to explode and/or light things on fire. It makes for more effective weapons, which theoretically would save lives on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the low-level radioactivity of DU—it’s considered “depleted” because it has a lower percentage of the more radioactive uranium isotopes, the opposite of enriched uranium used in bomb-making—was a constant presence for troops handling ordinance deemed more or less safe. That radiation is an oft-cited cause of Gulf War Syndrome, a condition that affected (and in many cases, continues to affect) around 250,000 of the 697,000 vets who served in the first Gulf War. Symptoms include fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, cognitive problems, skin rashes and diarrhea. In a pamphlet for veterans afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome, the Support Network for an Armed Forces Union wrote that the Pentagon used at least 300 tons of DU during the first Gulf War, while estimates figure at least 1,700 tons in the the latest war in Iraq. According to Dr. Doug Rokke, former director of the Army’s DU project, “today’s troops have been fighting on land polluted with chemical, biological and radioactive weapon residue from the first Gulf War and its aftermath. In this setting, troops have been exposed not only to sandstorms, which degrade the lungs, but to oil fires and waste created by the use of uranium projectiles in tanks, aircraft, machine guns and missiles. Depleted uranium is extremely volatile. It is autopyrophoric, which means it can spontaneously combust at room temperature in the presence of water and oxygen. At higher temperatures, like that of an explosion or friction from piercing armor, it will explode, releasing radioactive aerosol particles. According to Dr. Rosalie Bertell, in a report for the Hauge Peace Conference of May 1999, “There is no dispute of the fact that at least 320 tons of depleted uranium (DU) was ‘lost’ in the Gulf war, and that much of that was converted at high temperature into an aerosol, that is, minute insoluble particles of uranium oxide, UO2 or UO3 , in a mist or fog.” Because the DU exploded into aerosol forms, it would have been impossible for troops to know if they’d been actually been exposed to DU particles or not. Even if they had a reasonable suspicion to know how or when they’d been exposed, it would have been even harder to quantify how severe the exposure was. Yet, despite DU’s widespread use in the first Gulf War, doctors and military health programs were underprepared for helping troops who’d been inhaling radioactive heavy metal during the course of war operations. An exhaustive report on environmental exposure to DU in the Gulf War, organized by Bernard Rostker, Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses at the Department of Defense, highlights this fact:…. In 2001, the Basra hospital in southern Iraq reported an increase in the incidence of child leukemia and genetic malformation among babies born in the decade following the Gulf War, mutations doctors there attributed to DU. In 2004, Iraq had the highest mortality rate due to leukemia of any country (pdf). But a 2009 report (pdf) prepared for the Department of Defense by the Rand Institute that looked at the research into the effects of depleted uranium found no conclusive health risk, but called for “further… long-term studies” as the use of DU munitions and armor is likely to expand greatly over the coming years, both in the U.S. military and in other countries.” http://motherboard.tv/2011/11/12/gulf-war-syndrome-and-the-army-s-depleted-uranium-training-videos