Preparing for a Vietnam

[dorbie 0]

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No that would be conscription as in, during Vietnam we had a conscripted army and morale was much lower then.

I know that even in peace time soldiers look forward to their ETS (end time in service) date like six year old anticipates Christmas morning during December. Soldiers are suing over stop loss. That is not a sign of high morale.

Nor is it a good sign when units refuse support missions because they are not adequately supplied.

That is to say nothing of the high rates of malignant growth for some returning units due to the depleted uranium ammunition that has (still?) been used in Iraq.

Cancer is not the best incentive to motivate troops, or local populations.

I wouldn't diminish some of those issues, and I think stop loss can be tragic for the individuals involved.

I don't buy the DU scaremongering. There's a lot of nasty crap you can encounter besides DU. It's a heavy metal, so's arsenic but you don't hear people going crazy over that even though it's a poison like most heavy metals, probably because it doesn't have a fissionable isotope useable in A-bombs. Come up with an alternative self sharpening penetrator and and I'm sure the Pentagon would consider it.

However I was searching for a single word resonse to your two words, this is about more than just conscription. Looking at Vietnam, many soldiers were convinced their country was not fighting to win. That does lots do damage morale so does spitting on them on leave and calling them baby killers when they're home. The morale in Iraq is not IMHO anywhere near as bad as Vietnam. I even know a guy out there who couldn't wait to "get some", but he's a young Marine. There are all sorts in the forces and you're always going to have morale issues, it's not a binary thing its a continuum with variations between individuals and units. Anecdotes don't make a morale problem.

If the left cared about morale they'd show a bit more of the +ve side of the Iraq equation, but in fact they're hoping morale gets lower not just reporting it as low. It's another political lever for them, this isn't about concern for morale it's about feeding your political agenda again.

[jcd11235 0]

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I don't buy the DU scaremongering. There's a lot of nasty crap you can encounter besides DU. It's a heavy metal, so's arsenic but you don't hear people going crazy over that even though it's a poison like most heavy metals, probably because it doesn't have a fissionable isotope useable in A-bombs. Come up with an alternative self sharpening penetrator and and I'm sure the Pentagon would consider it.

First, Arsenic is not radioactive, nor is it a metal. Uranium 238 is. It has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Maybe that is why you hear more about depleted Uranium than you do about arsenic.

Seventy percent of the US soldiers who fought in Desert Storm have permanent medical disabilities, and the number is increasing. Thanks to depleted uranium, the Gulf Wars have contributed to more dead and permanently disabled US soldiers than did WWII.

Depleted uranium poisoning can be passed on to sexual partner, via contaminated semen, and contributes to a significant increase in birth defects for the children conceived after a parent was contaminated.

The residual uranium 238 left from US military use has given off 400,000 times the radiation given off from the atomic bomb the US dropped on Nagasaki.

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[DrunkMonkey 0]

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..Uranium 238 is. It has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Maybe that is why you hear more about depleted Uranium than you do about arsenic.

Depleted uranium poisoning can be passed on to sexual partner, via contaminated semen, and contributes to a significant increase in birth defects for the children conceived after a parent was contaminated.

Dunno about that particular stat, but I do know that Nuclear Munitions handlers and AWACS aircrew do have a irregularly high number of female babies than male babies... Odd...

[dorbie 0]

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I don't buy the DU scaremongering. There's a lot of nasty crap you can encounter besides DU. It's a heavy metal, so's arsenic but you don't hear people going crazy over that even though it's a poison like most heavy metals, probably because it doesn't have a fissionable isotope useable in A-bombs. Come up with an alternative self sharpening penetrator and and I'm sure the Pentagon would consider it.

First, Arsenic is not radioactive, nor is it a metal. Uranium 238 is. It has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Maybe that is why you hear more about depleted Uranium than you do about arsenic.

Seventy percent of the US soldiers who fought in Desert Storm have permanent medical disabilities, and the number is increasing. Thanks to depleted uranium, the Gulf Wars have contributed to more dead and permanently disabled US soldiers than did WWII.

Depleted uranium poisoning can be passed on to sexual partner, via contaminated semen, and contributes to a significant increase in birth defects for the children conceived after a parent was contaminated.

The residual uranium 238 left from US military use has given off 400,000 times the radiation given off from the atomic bomb the US dropped on Nagasaki.

There's an interesting corollary, about half life, the longer the half life the less radioactive a material is. Half life is not just a measure of the decay of an isotope, it is the act of decay that makes an isotope actually emit radiation.

Something with a short half life is generally much more radioactive and dangerous so it's pretty amusing when someone starts citing half lives in the billions of years as a risk factor.

As for desert storm veterans issues there are lots of theories, including burning weapons dumps and the oil fired in Kuwait, DU is an implausible one.

DU is produced in vast quantities, that it produces more radiation than teh Nagasaki a bomb is not shocking, your average beach has given off more radiation in the intervening time. Doesn't mean I'm going to get sick walking on it.

Don't confuse the chemical effects of Uranium with the radioactive effects.

P.S. never said Arsenic was radioactive (and it is a semimetal), but I don't consider DU to be dangerously radioactive. Ever heard of carbon dating? Carbon-14 has a half life of 5,730 years (remember the corollary) and it's inside you, everywhere.

[dorbie 0]

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..Uranium 238 is. It has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Maybe that is why you hear more about depleted Uranium than you do about arsenic.

Depleted uranium poisoning can be passed on to sexual partner, via contaminated semen, and contributes to a significant increase in birth defects for the children conceived after a parent was contaminated.

Dunno about that particular stat, but I do know that Nuclear Munitions handlers and AWACS aircrew do have a irregularly high number of female babies than male babies... Odd...

Nuclear munitions have all sorts of weird shit in them, including fast decaying isotopes like Tritium but even weirder secret sauce isotopes we're not supposed to know about. AWACS well you know what they do. None of that has real bearing on DU.

It should be noted that the decay products of isotopes are important too or would be it the half life wasn't multiple billions of years.

We should allso reflect that US weapons use of Uranium doesn't make DU, it separates uranium isotopes. The DU was always there just not depleted, it was always decaying emitting radiation and would still have been even it it was left alone.

[jcd11235 0]

One one millionth of a gram of Uranium 238, if injested in aerosol form, which the DU takes as it burns in the air, is fatal. I magine a single dose of LSD, without carrier paper, being enough to kill 250 people. It can be filtered out of the air with only the very best filters. Once it comes in contact with water, it is soluble, so the water is contaminated, and un filterable.

My roommate is writing a research paper on DU right now; its due tomorrow, so I'll snag the bibliography if anyone wants to check the facts for themselves. I just read some of the above from a declassified document from the Manhatten Project. I consider that a credible source.

And, for the record, Clinton condoned its use as well, not just Bush and Shrub.

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[jcd11235 0]

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t should be noted that the decay products of isotopes are important too or would be it the half life wasn't multiple billions of years.

We should allso reflect that US weapons use of Uranium doesn't make DU, it separates uranium isotopes. The DU was always there just not depleted, it was always decaying emitting radiation and would still have been even it it was left alone.

The reason I mentioned the long half life is because once its in the water, that water is contaminated, forever. One millionth of a gram is not very damn much, and that is all it takes to be fatal, if inhaled or swallowed, or otherwise enters the body.

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[dorbie 0]

Well I haven't seen that paper but it sure ain't the radiation that kills you, but the radiation boogeyman is used to scare people.

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One one millionth of a gram of Uranium 238, if injested in aerosol form, which the DU takes as it burns in the air, is fatal. I magine a single dose of LSD, without carrier paper, being enough to kill 250 people. It can be filtered out of the air with only the very best filters. Once it comes in contact with water, it is soluble, so the water is contaminated, and un filterable.

My roommate is writing a research paper on DU right now; its due tomorrow, so I'll snag the bibliography if anyone wants to check the facts for themselves. I just read some of the above from a declassified document from the Manhatten Project. I consider that a credible source.

And, for the record, Clinton condoned its use as well, not just Bush and Shrub.

[dorbie 0]

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t should be noted that the decay products of isotopes are important too or would be it the half life wasn't multiple billions of years.

We should allso reflect that US weapons use of Uranium doesn't make DU, it separates uranium isotopes. The DU was always there just not depleted, it was always decaying emitting radiation and would still have been even it it was left alone.

The reason I mentioned the long half life is because once its in the water, that water is contaminated, forever. One millionth of a gram is not very damn much, and that is all it takes to be fatal, if inhaled or swallowed, or otherwise enters the body.

So when you said "Arsenic isn't radioactive" you actually meant to imply that Arsenic stays around longer and is more dangerous?

Trace amounts of a lot of stuff can kill you, but it does depend on the details. I'd need to see the toxicology info before I believed it. There's a lot of junk science on the anti-DU side of things, IMHO.

[jcd11235 0]

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So when you said "Arsenic isn't radioactive" you actually meant to imply that Arsenic stays around longer and is more dangerous? Crazy

Trace amounts of a lot of stuff can kill you, but it does depend on the details. I'd need to see the toxicology info before I believed it. There's a lot of junk science on the anti-DU side of things, IMHO.

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Arsenic (As) is a metalloid element in the Nitrogen family (5A). According to the sources listed below, Arsenic is both toxic and carcinogenic. This means that exposure below the lethal dosage is considered a cancer hazard if it is above a specified exposure limit. There are two numbers that can be used to define the lethal dose of a substance: the LD50 defines the oral lethal dose that will kill 50% of the tested animals that eat the substance; and the LC50 defines the inhaled lethal concentration that will kill 50% of the tested animals breathing the substance. For arsenic, the LD50 is between 15 and 30 mg/kg (milligrams of arsenic per kilogram of body weight), and the LC 50 is around 400 mg/m3/2H (milligrams of arsenic per cubic meter of air after two hours of exposure). The exposure limit for avoiding cancer risks associated with arsenic is 2 ppm ("parts per million", which is equivalent to mg/m3) - exposure to arsenic levels between 2 ppm and 400 ppm can be carcinogenic and possibly lethal depending on how long the person, or animal, is exposed. (,http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/apr2001/987176844.Me.r.html.

You are comparing apples to oranges. You have to injest over 2 million times as much arsenic as aerosoled Uranium 238 in order for the dose to be lethal.


DU rounds are not "self-sharpening." Uranium 238 is pyrophoric, that is it burns in contact with air. This process begins in flight. As the DU burns, it produces an aerosol of Uranium 238 particles. These particles can be carried by air currents for miles.

There are WMD in Iraq after all. We brought them with us.

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[kelpdiver 2]

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One one millionth of a gram of Uranium 238, if injested in aerosol form, which the DU takes as it burns in the air, is fatal

Are you sure you're not confusing U-238 with plutonium, the most toxic element out there? Many of your stated claims are pegging my BS detector: 70% of servicemen disabled, and sexually transmitted radiation poisoning in particular.

[billvon 2,426]

>Uranium 238 is pyrophoric, that is it burns in contact with air.
>This process begins in flight.

U238 is an inert metal that does not burn when exposed to air. It's used as ballast on some commercial aircraft since it's cheap and dense; there are no special protections needed when working on it. It _does_ burn like magnesium when subjected to very high temps, as when it impacts something at very high velocity.

[dorbie 0]

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One one millionth of a gram of Uranium 238, if injested in aerosol form, which the DU takes as it burns in the air, is fatal

Are you sure you're not confusing U-238 with plutonium, the most toxic element out there? Many of your stated claims are pegging my BS detector: 70% of servicemen disabled, and sexually transmitted radiation poisoning in particular.

Of course U-238 decays into Plutonium so you get there in the end but it takes a few billion years unless you have a fast breeder reactor in your belly.

Edit: oops my bad, looks like it doesn't, there's a long decay chain that looks like a shopping list of the strange and exotic from 238 but no Pu. Dunno where I saw that (ah I was confusing fission products, bad memory, fast breeder ref was right though). Interesting reading about unenriched Uranium and it's decay.

Interesting stuff, heres the DU decay isotope ratios(can't be ratios actually, it must be normalized somehow), note the horizontal scale:


http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/img/actdu.gif

[jcd11235 0]

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Are you sure you're not confusing U-238 with plutonium, the most toxic element out there? Many of your stated claims are pegging my BS detector: 70% of servicemen disabled, and sexually transmitted radiation poisoning in particular.

The seventy percent figure comes from VA.

As far as the sexually transmitted aspect of your question, Uranium in the body tends to concentrate in semen, it moves from one body to another through ejaculation during intercourse.

You are right about Plutonium being dangerous. One pound of Plutonium, spread across the globe equally, would be enough to give every man woman and child, on the planet, lung cancer. Its lethal dose is less than one tenth that of Uranium. That does not however, mitigate the dangers associated with Uranium.

BTW, there are more toxic elements than Plutonium as well.

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[jcd11235 0]

Once inside your body, one microscopic particle of U 238 can produce 800 times the amount of acceptable annual radiation exposure.

Math tutoring available. Only $6! per hour! First lesson: Factorials!

[dorbie 0]

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Once inside your body, one microscopic particle of U 238 can produce 800 times the amount of acceptable annual radiation exposure.

Define microscopic, and it just doesn't make sense when you look at the half life. Combine the half life with the absolutely massive atomic weight of this atom and you don't have a recipe for a lot of particle emissions per milligram for U-238. The known facts indicate your claim is incorrect.

There are many isotopes of uranium and some are worse than U-238, all are going to be present in DU, which is never going to be pure U-238, however you could claim a lot by varying the assumed isotope ratios in DU. DU can be only marginally depleted or almost pure U-238, there's no definition mentioned here.

I'd be more worried about the guys mining this stuff day in day out, since natural Uranium seems potentially worse than DU and their level of exposure could be significant.

[jcd11235 0]

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Define microscopic,

An accumulation of a single microgram is potentially lethal.

Check out the attachment

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[PhillyKev 0]

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Define microscopic,

An accumulation of a single microgram is potentially lethal.

Check out the attachment

The attachment must be microscopic....I can't see it

[dorbie 0]

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Define microscopic,

An accumulation of a single microgram is potentially lethal.

Check out the attachment

There's no attachment. You keep saying that without specificity and you're slippery than a zero-p when it comes to radiation vs toxicology. You quote numbers for radiation that make no sense. Have you actually thought about the decay rate as influenced by the half life and atomic weight?

Your arguments are self defeating. If the toxins accumulated in the semen in quantities sufficient to poison a female (who as an aside doesn't actually consume semen, ahem in most cases) the man would quickly excrete the toxins from his body. You can't have toxins present for years yet leeching from his system in poisonous quantities. Then consider that any toxins in semen would more than likely get douched away.

THINK about the claims.

Europe and the nations there have had many studies of suspected DU poisining, most recently Germany over Kosovo sicknesses, they've found no link.

One study does not make the case either, I'm aware of several published government studies that find no link, but try proving a negative. I'm pretty skeptical at this point about any of your claims.

I also have no idea what the likelyhood of ingesting or inhaling a microgram of DU is when appropriate precautions are taken. That matters a lot. Your claims about what happens to fired DU rounds have already been refuted.

[jcd11235 0]

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The attachment must be microscopic....I can't see it Laugh

oops. sorry. Try it now.

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[jcd11235 0]

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Your claims about what happens to fired DU rounds have already been refuted.

Have they? I haven't seen that. The only person I know who is well studied and current on the topic wrote the paper. Granted he only checked 20 - 30 sources, so he might not know what he's talking about.

While individual countries deny the danger, neither NATO, nor the UN support that determination; they claim the danger is real.

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[dorbie 0]

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Your claims about what happens to fired DU rounds have already been refuted.

Have they? I haven't seen that. The only person I know who is well studied and current on the topic wrote the paper. Granted he only checked 20 - 30 sources, so he might not know what he's talking about.

While individual countries deny the danger, neither NATO, nor the UN support that determination; they claim the danger is real.

Well come to think of it I've seen real DU rounds in air, yes they have been.

I now see that your paper is a single page (in a big font) of biased bilge littered with inaccuracies and with no correctly cited references. Most of the text is ad hominem references to DU as a WMD mixed with high school physics and hysterical inaccurate & unfounded claims like DU rounds being like mini dirty bombs. The evidence of citations such as they are tell the whole story here, "Metal of Dishonor", "Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets" and "Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War".

I've seen this unscientific rubbish on the web before, self supporting hysterical rhetoric does not make any kind of a case.

"Inform the people" indeed.

[kallend 1,646]

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>Uranium 238 is pyrophoric, that is it burns in contact with air.
>This process begins in flight.

U238 is an inert metal that does not burn when exposed to air. It's used as ballast on some commercial aircraft since it's cheap and dense; there are no special protections needed when working on it. It _does_ burn like magnesium when subjected to very high temps, as when it impacts something at very high velocity.

Almost every metal is pyrophoric if in finely (enough) divided form without a protective oxide layer. One of my colleagues does research on powder metallurgy, and his group had some nasty fires with metal powders that you wouldn't ever think of as being flammable. They do all the mixing under an inert atmosphere.

The enthalpy of formation of U3O8 is -3575kJ/mole, which is HUGE.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[jcd11235 0]

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I now see that your paper is a single page (in a big font) of biased bilge littered with inaccuracies and with no correctly cited references. Most of the text is ad hominem references to DU as a WMD mixed with high school physics and hysterical inaccurate & unfounded claims like DU rounds being like mini dirty bombs. The evidence of citations such as they are tell the whole story here, "Metal of Dishonor", "Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets" and "Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War".

First, it is not my paper. Second, I don't have an electronic copy of the extensive bibliography, or I would have posted it. But let's just say these are not isolated sources. Some of the things I read, which was only a small part of the research, included declassified documents from the Manhatten Project.

I should also add, that the intended audience of the paper was a college freshman english class, so it stands to reason that it will read as such. The format was my fault. Ididn't realize you were going to grade the paper. Especially considering how well you document your posts.

I agree that there is a lot of junk info online, but there is also a lot of good information that we would not otherwise have access to. Google University is a wonderful thing.

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[kelpdiver 2]

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I should also add, that the intended audience of the paper was a college freshman english class, so it stands to reason that it will read as such. The format was my fault.

I don't follow. Why? Freshmen are capable of reading well written scientific articles. Writing them, too.

The repeatedly shown political biases and the very limited citation list cast considerable doubt on any scientifically based claims being made. The article was a hit piece on the practice of DU ammunition. I suspect there is a lot to be said for this subject, but this author is clearly exaggerating the scope of the damaging effects, killing its credibility.

As Dorbie pointed out, a microscopic amount of U-238 in the body can't result in a continuous supply of contaminating semen. The author also makes sloppy references to the halflife of Uranium, rather than of U-238. And after explaining that alpha decay is stopped by the outer layer of the skin, talks about how radioactive the alpha decay of U-238 is.

The Moret author cited repeatedly might have a reasonably constructed paper, but what you cited as proof was utter crap.