Uranium content very controversial: British ammunition plans enrage Russia

Uranium content very controversial
British munitions plans enrage Russia

03/21/2023 at 9:31 p.m

Great Britain is one of Ukraine’s closest allies in the fight against the Russian invaders. The British government has now announced that it will also supply special depleted uranium ammunition for main battle tanks. This is extremely controversial. Russia is reacting quickly and at different levels.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has condemned a British plan to provide Ukraine with depleted uranium ammunition. A spokeswoman for the ministry says such ammunition is carcinogenic and pollutes the environment. When asked, Conservative British MP and Secretary of State for Defense Annabel Goldie said such munitions would be transferred to Ukraine along with Challenger 2 tanks. It is “very effective in combating modern tanks and armored vehicles”. Depleted uranium increases the penetrating power of armor-piercing weapons and was used in the Gulf Wars, for example. The exact consequences for humans and the environment are disputed.

The ammunition announcement caused irritation in Russia up to the highest level. During his statements on the occasion of the visit of Chinese head of state Xi Jinping to Moscow, Russian President Putin explicitly referred to the plans that had just been announced and threatened Great Britain if such munitions were delivered. In this case, Moscow would be “forced to react,” Putin said.

Shoigu speaks of “nuclear collision”

According to a media report, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu even sees a potential “nuclear collision” between the West and his country coming closer in view of the British plans. The Interfax Shoigu news agency quotes him as saying that there are fewer and fewer steps left until then.

It remains questionable to what extent Schoigu’s pure threatening gesture is. Almost at the same time, his boss Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi pledged in a joint statement that a nuclear war should “never be unleashed”. There can be “no winners” in a nuclear conflict, it said.

Nevertheless, as early as January Moscow had issued a sharp warning against the use of uranium ammunition with regard to other types of tanks. “We know that the Leopard-2 tanks and the Bradley and Marder armored infantry carriers are armed with armor-piercing projectiles with uranium warheads,” said the head of the Russian delegation at the Vienna talks on military security and arms control, Konstantin Gavrilov. according to the report of the Russian state agency TASS at that time. “Their use leads to the contamination of the area, as happened in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq. If such ammunition for NATO heavy weapons is delivered to Kiev, we will consider it the use of dirty nuclear bombs against Russia, with all the consequences that entails look at,” he said.

Harmful to the environment, soldiers and the population?

Depleted uranium is a waste product that results from the enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear power plants or in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. It is only about 60 percent as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium, but its properties make it suitable for use in armor-piercing ammunition.

In her research two years ago for the “Harvard International Review”, the journalist Sydney Young describes the ammunition as quite cheap and warns of the consequences for the environment and for the populations in war zones. “Depleted uranium may pose a risk to both soldiers and local civilians,” writes Young. “When depleted uranium ammunition hits a target, the uranium turns into dust, which is inhaled by soldiers near the blast site. The wind then carries dust into surrounding areas, polluting local water and agriculture.”

According to her, depleted uranium has been used in major conflicts over the past few decades, including in the Balkans and during the First and Second Gulf Wars. The United States and the United Kingdom both used depleted uranium during the First Gulf War, the United States even more so than Britain.

A study published in the journal BMJ Glob Health on the effects of uranium weapons in Iraq concluded that the available evidence indicated possible links between exposure to depleted uranium and adverse health effects in the Iraqi population. However, the authors referred to the difficult data situation and called for more research.

After the Russian reactions, the British government dismissed according to a BBC report backed Moscow’s perspective and described depleted uranium as a “standard component” that had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. The British Army has used depleted uranium in ammunition for decades. The BBC also quoted a former British tank commander as saying that the ammunition in question in Challenger 2 tanks contained only trace elements of depleted uranium. He described Putin’s reaction as “classic disinformation”.