We went to hear Ramsey Clark talk tonight about the presumed pending attack on Iraq. He mentioned something that disturbed me greatly -- the US use of depleted uranium shells against Iraq during the Gulf War.

When I got home, I did a google and came up with this, from the number 2 ranked link:

Iraq and Kosovo may be thousands of miles apart, but they share the dubious distinction of contamination with radioactive residue from depleted uranium (DU) bullets used in American air strikes. After several years of silence, US officials finally admitted that 340 tons of DU were fired during the Gulf war. In Kosovo, American delays in providing details of quantities and target points have frustrated international efforts to assess health risks. Despite repeated requests, NATO waited almost a full year after the start of bombing in March 1999 to say that 31,000 DU bullets--a fraction of the number fired in Iraq--were fired by A-10 "tankbuster" aircraft over Kosovo.

Hello, dirty bombs!

Pardon my ignornance, but could someone please either a)justify this, or b)explain to what's going on? Is this not nuclear warfare? Or are we splitting hairs that because there was no fission, it's not really use of nuclear weapons of slow mass distruction?

Granted, I'm no media political junky. Maybe this has surfaced before. But this little fact -- 680,000 pounds -- certainly hasn't made the front pages. Where's the outcry from the Left? From the Sierra Club or World Wildlife? Why no spotlight from the media? What the hell is going on in our name?

No wonder they're pissed at us.

November 2002: some unfinished notes on depleted uranium from a WHO report.