Depleted uranium armor penetrators and Gulf War environmental contamination

Cited in passing — DU contamination of Kuwait and southern Iraq during First Gulf War led the Army (not the Navy) to discontinue DU rounds on environmental grounds.

One of the things they do is take a plasma torch — you've got an electrode, you've got copper, you have argon, and you're going to heat this material. A company up in Concord, Massachusetts called Nuclear Metals, which is a spin-off of the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department — they were the people making depleted uranium back when we used depleted uranium for rounds. Actually the Navy may still use it. It's very good for things like Phalanx and stuff. But the Army had to stop because of the first Gulf War — they contaminated most of Kuwait and southern Iraq with depleted uranium, and they decided it was environmentally unsound.

The shaped charge is basically a liquid metal jet of copper that eats right through the steel at near the speed of sound. If you put ceramic in there, the copper doesn't react with the ceramic, and so it doesn't destroy it. Now there's all kinds of different armors — it's proliferating, it's gotten very complex, and they're using supercomputers to model these things. One of the things they developed: depleted uranium, basically a half-inch diameter rod 36 inches long, fired at a target. When it hit the armor, the stresses in it would get to 300, 400 thousand psi, and most materials would fracture.

Depleted-uranium kinetic-energy penetrators left radioactive shell debris across Kuwait; Pakistani and Bangladeshi laborers were sent into the desert to retrieve them. Tom has personally seen a uranium penetrator drive through three feet of steel.

Anybody know about penetrators for armor? You want a high-density alloy so you have lots of momentum. What did they use in the first Gulf War? They used depleted uranium. The problem with those soldiers firing depleted uranium shells — they're not completely depleted of all radioactivity, and they left all these uranium shells all over Kuwait. The Kuwaitis weren't all that happy because then they had to send all these Pakistanis and Bangladeshis out there through the desert looking for all the shells, because they had a slight radioactivity to their desert now.