Depleted Uranium

Unsafe for Friend and Foe?

JOHN T. EBERTH / The Times Herald (Olean, NY) 31jan03

ST. BONAVENTURE - Maj. Douglas Rokke loves his country, but he hates its use of armor-piercing depleted-uranium ammunition.

The ammunition cuts through tank armor as easily as you can push a pencil through paper. Maj. Rokke said it does a great job killing the enemy.

"Depleted uranium is without a doubt an exceptional weapon," he said.

The problem is, it also kills U.S. troops who use it and civilians living near battlefields peppered with the rounds, he said.

Maj. Rokke spoke out against the use of depleted-uranium ammunition Thursday at St. Bonaventure University. A crowd of more than 130 people gathered for his lecture in the John J. Murphy Professional Building.

Depleted uranium is a dense, hard metal. It also catches fire and turns molten when it strikes other metals at high speed. Those qualities make it ideal for busting tanks and armored vehicles. According to the Pentagon, the ammunition is safe in its solid state.

Maj. Rokke said the Pentagon is ignoring and even covering up evidence of the danger to soldiers and civilians because the weapon has proven so effective.

A Vietnam veteran, he's been in and out of uniform since 1967 and now serves with the U.S. Army Reserves. Maj. Rokke is also a nuclear health physicist and the Army's expert on the health effects of depleted-uranium ammunition. He wrote the Army's field manual for responding to chemical and biological warfare and has trained U.S. soldiers in radiation safety techniques.

Maj. Rokke blames depleted-uranium ammunition with causing many of the 206,861 cases of Gulf War Syndrome reported by Persian Gulf War veterans. He said more than 8,000 veterans have died from causes related to the ammunition.

The Pentagon denies the ammunition is harmful to those who use it. Maj. Rokke said that denial has cost veterans medical care.

He charged the Pentagon of "willful neglect and dereliction of duty" toward U.S. troops, breaking a sacred covenant between soldiers and the country they volunteered to protect.

"It's a crime against God and humanity" to continue to use the ammunition and deny the danger it poses to troops, he said.

Maj. Rokke said since the Persian Gulf War, the military has developed new, lighter weapons to fire the ammunition, including machine guns used by ground forces. As a result, depleted-uranium ammunition will be everywhere on the battlefield.

The ammunition was first used in combat during the Gulf War. Maj. Rokke was theater senior health physicist with the 330th Army Medical Brigade during the war. He was part of a team directed to clean up U.S. tanks and armored personnel carriers struck by friendly fire with depleted-uranium ammunition during the war.

"I took us three months to clean up 24 vehicles for shipment back to the United States," he said. The team had to decontaminate the vehicles and recover the remains of U.S. soldiers inside them. "There was only one thing I could say when I saw the depleted uranium mess, 'Oh my God,'" Maj. Rooke said. "We started finding stuff and it scared us completely."

The team had to bury three Bradley Fighting Vehicles because they couldn't be decontaminated enough to be sent back to the United States, he said.

The ammunition is used in rapid-fire cannons mounted on jets, such as the A-10 Warthog, helicopters and armored vehicles. Maj. Rokke said when fired in gun barrels, the ammunition sheds radioactive dust, filling the air and infecting troops. The effect is worse when the ammunition strikes a metal target. The round melts, shooting geysers of radioactive flame and smoke into the air, saturating the battlefield.

Tests have found that one round of depleted uranium ammunition can spread radioactive material over a 437-yard radius. Maj. Rokke said most vehicles hit with the ammunition were struck three and four times.

He said Gulf War soldiers, including himself, weren't warned the ammunition posed a danger. "Nobody told them that when you blow up a tank with this stuff, you have a toxicological nightmare," he said.

Maj. Rokke said tests have proven that the radioactive particles emitted by the ammunition are so small, they pass through the gas mask filters issued to U.S. troops.

After the Gulf War, he conducted live-fire studies on the ammunition for the Army and the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm.

According to a 1993 report compiled by the General Accounting Office, "the Army was not adequately prepared to deal with depleted-uranium contamination" prior to using it during the Gulf War.

Maj. Rokke asked everyone in the audience to speak out against use of depleted-uranium ammunition by writing local newspapers and contacting their Congressional representatives.

"I must recommend that the world ban DU ammunition forever," he said.

Maj. Rokke's lecture was sponsored by the St. Bonaventure University Visiting Scholars Program, the department of political science, the Center for Nonviolence and the Olean Area Coalition for Peace and Justice.

His lecture will appear on BOCE's Cable Channel 6, at a time to be announced.