In its fundraising promotions, NPR touts shows like Morning Edition as providing listeners a “deeper look” at complicated stories.
Sometimes that is the case, but not this month, in its coverage of an announced decision by the Biden administration to further escalate the violence in Ukraine by supplying that country’s military with controversial depleted uranium (DU) anti-tank shells. Morning Edition (9/8/23) glossed over the reason many nations consider their use an atrocity. In fact, many commercial news organizations did a much better job in reporting in depth on this story.
‘Not nuclear or radioactive’
Morning Edition co-host Leila Fadel had one source for the three-and-half-minute report: Togzhan Kassenova, a senior research fellow at SUNY Albany’s Center for Policy Research, whom she introduced as “an expert on nuclear politics.” (The Center describes itself as having “a long and notable history of managing and implementing grants and sponsored programs for the government of the United States, including projects for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Naval Research.”)
Kassenova, responding to questions from Fadel, misrepresented what DU is and what its risks are when used in battle. “Anti-tank rounds with depleted uranium are not nuclear or radioactive,” she claimed, adding without any further detail that “there are some safety implications that need to be kept in mind.”
In fact, as the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website explains, “Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive.” DU is a mix of U-238 and some other, rarer uranium isotopes that are left after the fissionable U-235 used in nuclear bombs and as reactor fuel has been refined out. All uranium isotopes are significant releasers of alpha particles as they decay; in other words, they’re radioactive. These low-energy but relatively large particles, not even mentioned by Kassenova, are essentially helium nuclei, composed of two protons and two neutrons. They can do serious cellular and genetic damage when uranium dust is ingested or inhaled.
Fadel didn’t question her guest’s effort to minimize the risk posed by uranium projectiles, though even the most cursory attempt to research the issue would have disclosed these problems.
‘A serious health risk’
Pentagon apologists for DU weapons typically note that alpha particles are so low-energy they “fail to penetrate the dead layers of cells covering the skin, and can be easily stopped by a sheet of paper.” True enough, but when introduced into the body, where the tiny alpha-particle-emitting particles can become lodged in lung or kidney tissue, they prove to be quite good at killing or damaging adjacent cells.
Critics of DU weapons, whom Fadel only mentioned in passing, explain that it’s not the shiny uranium tip of a DU shell that poses a risk. The risk comes when that shell penetrates tank armor and explodes in the interior at a searing temperature of over 2,000 degrees, reducing the entire vehicle and the soldiers in it to cinders. At that point, the uranium has become uranium oxide dust, and that radioactive dust blankets the target and a wide surrounding area. Given that its constituent isotopes have half-lives ranging from 170,000 to 4.5 billion years, the DU residue will effectively remain there forever, until blown, washed or carted away, or until it migrates down into the water table.
Had Fadel bothered to check with the EPA, instead of just adopting the Pentagon’s self-serving line that DU is no big deal as far as radiation risk is concerned, she’d have learned that the agency’s website states: “If DU is ingested or inhaled it is a serious health risk. Alpha particles directly affect living cells and can cause kidney damage.”
Competitors more complete
One-source reports on a controversial story like this one—where there is a long-running dispute about the use of a weapon—are lazy journalism, especially for a news organization that touts itself as providing more “depth” in its reports than its more openly commercial competition. (NPR gets 39% of its funding from corporate sponsorship, so it’s a stretch to call it “noncommercial.”)
Some of those competitors, in fact, ran more complete stories on the DU decision than Morning Edition did. The magazine Popular Science (9/8/23), for example, mentioned the EPA’s warnings about DU, even including a link to the agency’s article.
So did Associated Press (9/6/23) in an article by Tara Copp, at least when her article initially appeared on September 6. Unfortunately, Copp said she cut that paragraph in later revisions to make room for other background about DU.
The story by Copp, a former Pentagon correspondent, nonetheless stands out in corporate media coverage, providing a detailed account of where the US has been using DU weapons since Cold War days when the metal was first put into anti-tank shells and some rocket warheads.
She also mentioned reports of deaths, cancer and upsurges in birth defects that have sprung up in places where such weapons have been used in quantity. This information was left out of many other pieces on the Biden decision, including the one run by NPR.
Copp quoted a Russian source, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who called the US decision to supply depleted uranium ammunition to Ukraine “very bad news,” and said its use by the US in the former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Kosovo) had produced “a galloping rise” in cancers and other illnesses. “The same situation will inevitably await the Ukrainian territories where they will be used,” he added. (His points are backed up by reports in the Lancet—7/8/21—and Declassified UK: 7/13/23.)
Copp followed these claims with Pentagon denials about DU health risks. Its flacks for decades have denied that there is any evidence that the uranium oxide produced by DU weapons when exploded and burned pose cancer or birth-defect risks in impacted communities or among US troops. Given the history of misinformation from US government sources about US military atrocities over the years, it’s bracing to see a Russian source included in a US-based news article, even if that source might not be very convincing to US readers in the current political environment.
While there’s not enough evidence to draw ironclad conclusions, what’s available points to Peskov’s claims about Yugoslavia being at least arguable. Moreover, a 2013 article in Al Jazeera (3/15/13) by US journalist Dahr Jamail, based on data provided by the Iraqi government health department, showed that in Fallujah, where an all-out US destruction of that city of 200,000 people included significant use of DU shells, the cancer rate in Iraq before the two wars on Iraq had been 40 per 100,000, but jumped to 1,600 per 100,000 by 2005.
As Copp also noted, “US troops have questioned whether some of the ailments they now face [such as Gulf War Syndrome] were caused by inhaling or being exposed to fragments after a munition was fired or their tanks were struck, damaging uranium-enhanced armor.”
‘Adds to environmental burden’
In a September 6 article reporting on the Ukraine DU decision, written by Andrew Kramer and Constant Méheut, the New York Times acknowledged some controversy, saying, “Some advocates have expressed concerns that prolonged exposure could cause illness, or that spent ammunition could cause environmental contamination.” However, it dismissively concluded, “The Pentagon says those fears are unfounded.”
The Washington Post’s September 7 article on the depleted uranium weapons, by Adam Taylor, gave a voice to those “activists,” quoting a statement from the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons that called the US decision “self-destructive and deceptive.” The organization added that the new anti-tank weapon “adds to the war-related environmental burden of Ukraine, damaging its legal integrity as victim of aggression and illegal attacks.”
The Wall Street Journal, in a June 13 article disclosing the US was about to approve depleted uranium shells for delivery to Ukraine’s military, highlighted health and environmental concerns in its subhead: “The armor-piercing ammunition has raised concerns over health and environmental effects.”
Meanwhile, while Morning Edition host Fadel deserves a raspberry for her one-source, one-sided piece, her guest, research fellow Kassenova, at least should get credit for honesty in stating where her priorities lie. Asked by Fadel what her position was on the US provision of DU weapons, she said:
It is an important practical and symbolic action of support. Ukraine is losing people—both military and civilian—every day. So I think whatever can happen right now should be provided to the extent possible. So I am in support of the provision of these weapons.
Efforts by phone and email to obtain comments from NPR’s Fadel and from the University of Albany’s Kassenova went unanswered.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor here (or via Twitter: @NPRpubliceditor). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.
Neal Kashkare
I agree with the substance and thrust of this article. However, there is a lose of credibility by quoting the Russians with their comments on depleted uranium ammunition being shipped to Ukraine as “very bad news,” and it will eventually produce “a galloping rise” in cancers and other illnesses is bizarre. After all and it is well documented that the Russians have utilized depleted uranium anti-tank rounds and similar ammo against Ukraine since their invasion on February 24, 2022.
Rebecca Turner
You provide no links to evidence that the Russian army is using DU ammunition against Ukraine. I searched online and could find only allegations by obviously self-serving Western military and corporate media sources. It seems the case that Russia possesses DU ammunition, but it is far from clear that it is using them. Perhaps you have something more independent?
A Reasonable Person
Presumably you don’t believe (and/or want corresponding URL’s) that the Russians have bombed Ukrainian schools, hospitals and apartment buildings causing untold civilian deaths.
Rebecca Turner
As this was a piece about DU, I’m not sure why you are avoiding answering my reasonable request for evidence supporting your claim that the Russian army has used DU ammunition against Ukraine. I’m not disputing the evidence about Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure which are war crimes.
Roger Helbig
Where is the Russian use of DU kinetic energy penetrator rounds in Ukraine been documented? I have not seen any conclusive proof and have been looking for it since I know Russia has these rounds. What I do not know is if they have had tank-to-tank battles where these rounds have been employed to actually destroy a Ukrainian tank.
Dave Lindorff
What I said was that AP did something unusual for US mainstream journalism, which was to quote a comment from the other side of the story, in this case, Russia, and that the comment itself was “at least arguably” true based upon post conflict study of areas where US DU shells had been used. I stand by that. The Pentagon, as a source of information about US military actions, has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable, openly deceitful and self-serving, yet mainstream US journalists routinely go to Pentagon flaks for comment when reporting on controversial US military actions, like the bombing and showering of cannon and machine-gun fire on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan. Those journalists know this, but continue to treat the Pentagon as worthy of an ‘other side” call in their reporting, but typically won’t bother to go to a Russian source. It’s a double standard.
Roger Helbig
Lindorf has been lying about depleted uranium for years. NPR got it wrong if they said that DU was not radioactive since all uranium is radioactive. Uranium-238, though is one of the weakest natural radioisotopes with its half-life of 4.5 billion years, the age of the Earth. Thorium-232 is even weaker with its half-life of 14 billion years. Lindorf, though has it wrong when he says DU will kill far more than Russian tank crews and he probably knows it, but like Trump won’t admit that he knows. He has been pushing the propaganda that began with Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War that still dominates the internet. The propagandists gatherered together all of the infants with birth defects and blamed them all on DU and got the photos posted everywhere. What they never posted was the true medical condition and the medical community has never been concerned enough to identify that. To my knowledge only four of them have been identified and one of those was actually corrected by the BMJ by its medical practitioner readers. This was photo shown by East German Doctor Siegwart Horst-Gunther at a London lecture as being an unknown disease caused by depleted uranium. The correction is that it is dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. Robert C Koehler wrote about a photo sent to him by the dissatisfied Aghan refugee from Soviet invasion Mohammed Daud Miraki and years later I found that the photo actually showed retinoblastoma. Then I found the exact same photo from Iraqi Doctor Jawad Al-Ali on page 47 of Italian Prof Dr Massimo Zucchetti’s report to European Parlament Greens Depleted Uranium: A scientific approach to the hazards of the military use of depleted uranium. Retinoblastoma was first noted in 1600s Amsterdam a century before the discovery of uranium and that a century before the discovery of radioactivity. This eye cancer is not related to depleted uranium at all, but the bulging red eyes really grab the viewer’s heart. The best report about what happens on the battlefield where depleted uranium has been used is from Portugal which did actual testing of both soldiers who returned from Kosovo and citizens who had remained in Portugal and found the same results for uranium, The liars always never tell you that natural uranium is everywhere on Earth and every single person on Earth takes in about 1.3 micrograms of uranium daily. They also don’t tell you that natural uranium is 99.3% uranium-238 and that depleted uranium is 99.7 to 99.8% even purer uranium-238. NPR should have said that depleted uranium is not a radiological hazard. That is true; it is just sloppy reporting when they say it is not radioactive at all. I have written extensively at Depleted Uranium Fact vs Fiction on Quora and will gladly correspond with anyone who wants to contact me there.
Carlton Meyer
The EPA’s website says its dangerous.
Roger Helbig
The photos on this article show the 30mm rounds for the A-10 Thunderbolt II (Warthog) internal cannon not the 120mm main gun round for the M1 Abrams Tank that is being supplied to Ukraine. Since you are about accuracy in reporting, you need someone to make sure that illustrating photos are accurate too.
The 30mm rounds were used in the Gulf War and in the intial drive into Iraq in 2003. They also were used in the Balkans and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Post Conflict Branch sent three international field scientific teams which took samples analyzed by Swiss and Italian laboratories that resulted in three hundred page reports. These represent the most information about what depleted uranium actually does to the environment and population and Mr Lindorf never refers to any of them. A small number of these rounds were also fired during an A-10 strike on ISIS oil tanker trucks in Syria.
I don’t know if this site accepts URLs. If it does, I will gladly provide them for my posts.
Roger Helbig
Now that I have read the NPR piece, I see where the word “radioactive” was incorrect – the correct word is “radiological”. Depleted uranium kinetic energy penetrators are neither nuclear nor radiological munitions. They do not create a nuclear explosion. They are not intended to use radiation to inflict harm on the enemy. Russia has insinuated in its propaganda that depleted uranium kinetic energy penetrator rounds are both nuclear and radiological and they are neither.
Dave totally ignored the last words in the paragraph – “But it’s important to remember that depleted uranium is considerably less radioactive than natural uranium”. That is a totally accurate statement too. FAIR is basically accepting Lindorf’s lies about the harm that depleted uranium munitions cause and misleading its readers with the headline. NPR should have corrected radioactive to radiological, but they probably did not know that it was wrong.
The facts are that depleted uranium is highly concentrated uranium-238. It is not artificial or made by humans. It is the depleted tail of the uranium enrichment process that concentrate fissile uranium-235 in the enriched tail. The result is that the extremely lowly radioactive (thorium-232 is one of the few natural radioisotopes that is even less radioactive with its 14 billion year half-liife) uranium-238 is further concentrated from being 99.3% in natural uranium to 99.7 to 99.8% in depleted uranium. All uranium is chemically toxic and if you ingest enough of soluble uranium compound, you could experience kidney failure. None of the compounds created by the oxidation of uranium on the battlefield, though, are soluble enough to make this happen. None of the liars like Lindorf ever tell you this. There have been a lot of claims about DU-caused things made by people, even US soldiers who think that there is gold in depleted uranium, but none of the claims include kidney failure. The other problem with veteran claims is that we the people have no right to their medical records. For example, the late Douglas Lind Rokke who personally lied about me in late 2004 and stimulated my interest in him, his associates and depleted uranium, falsely claimed to have been made ill by exposure to depleted uranium, but no one can verify this, but I am going to ask the Department of Veterans Affairs since Rokke died of Covid in 2021. Lindorf to my knowledge has never done any serious research into depleted uranium beyond accepting what the propagandists claim is true. I have been researching it as a deadly serious personal hobby since 2004 and I have a lot of information and could use someone who would like to write the true story of depleted uranium.
Uranium ore is substantially more radioactive than natural metallic uranium. That is because it exists in equilbrium with all of the daughter decay products. None of these are present when ore is processed into uranium metal. Depleted uranium is uranium metal. Natural uranium consists of 1) uranium-238 with a 4.5 billion year half-life, the age of the Earth and it has thus far undergone one half-life so half of all the original uranium-238 is still present. 2) uranium-235 with a 700 million year half-life so it has undergone 6.4 half-lives and is only 0.7 percent of natural uranium today and 3) uranium-234 which has a 245,000 year half-life and is the most radioactive uranium isotope. Uranium-234 was not present when the Earth formed, but is created by the decay of uranium-238. Enriched uranium contains 3% or more uranium-235 plus some uranium-234. Depleted uranium contains less than 0.3% uranium-235 and 99.7 to 99.8% uranium-238. The International Atomic Energy Agency says this about future radioactivity –
Does the radioactivity of depleted uranium increase over time?
Yes and no. Uranium is a radioactive material with two primary isotopes, U235 and U238. These isotopes decay at a constant rate that has a half-life (i.e., time for the activity to reduce by half) greater than 100 million years. No significant change would be observed in the radiation emitted from these isotopes during a typical 75-year lifetime. However, the buildup of daughter products from the decay of these isotopes does increase the total radiation emitted from the material.
In the radioactive decay process, an atom transforms by emitting radiation in the form of particles or energy. Uranium undergoes radioactive decay very slowly. The half-life for U238 is 4.5 billion years. After one half-life, a container that originally held 10,000 kg of pure U238 would be reduced to 5,000 kg of U238, along with approximately 5,000 kg of associated daughter products. Many of these daughter products are also unstable and undergo further radioactive decay until they transform into a stable isotope of lead. As the U238 decays, the amount of daughter products increases which, in turn, increases the total radiation emitted from a container of U238. The radioactivity of the daughter products continues to increase until it reaches equilibrium with the activity of the parent nuclide (i.e., U238 or U235).
For illustrative purposes only, consider a storage cylinder of depleted uranium oxide which contains 10,000 kg of solid uranium dioxide. In the first year, the radioactivity at 1 meter from the cylinder would be approximately 0.26 mrem/hr (0.0026 mSv/hr). Standing in this position for approximately 37 hours would cause a person to receive the equivalent of one chest X-ray, 10 mrem (0.1 mSv). After 10,000 years, this radioactivity would rise to approximately 1.0 mrem/hr (0.01 mSv/hr), and a person standing in this position for 10 hours would receive the equivalent of one chest X-ray. After about 1 million years, the radioactivity would reach equilibrium at approximately 30 mrem/hr (0.30 mSv/hr), at a 1-meter distance. This radioactivity would result in the equivalent of one chest X-ray in approximately 20 minutes. [Note: The figures above were calculated using MicroShield v5.5, Grove Software, Inc. A cylinder with a 1.6-cm iron (7.8 g/cm3) shell was assumed to contain 10,000 kg of solid uranium dioxide (11 g/cm3). The radioactive isotopic content was projected to contain 99.7% U238, 0.3% U235, and 0.17kg of U234, and buildup due to air was included.]
Roger Helbig
I made a mistake in my last comment, I mistakenly credited the IAEA when in fact the lengthy quotation is from the Nuclear Regulatory Agency’s site about Depleted Uranium Deconversion. This explains why the depleted uranium hexaflouride that has been stored for decades by the Department of Energy is being converted to depleted uranium oxide.
Thomas Lee
I depend on NPR for most of my local, national & international news, but I take what they say just about as seriously as what my dog mumble after eating her dog food. The thing NPR did that lost my trust FOREVER was that THEY DID NOT REPORT THE SEYMOUR HIRSH REVELATION & ACCUSATION THAT BIDEN WAS BLEW THE NORDSTREAM PIPELINE IN A TIMELY REPORT OR BTREAT IT AS THE HOTTEST NEWS OF THE MILLEMNIUM. AS IF HERSH WAS A NOBODY. When NPR was created, the Republicans & conservatives poo-pooed it as if it would be government propaganda 24/7/365… I LIKE THE YOUNG FOOL I WAS THOUGHT IT WOULD BE THE PEOPLES VOICE. HOW WRONG I WAS. It turned out to become the lead ship of the deep states mighty Wurlitzure of worldwide American Propaganda along with Radio FREE Europe and Radio Liberty…!!!!!!! And a blunt weapon of Capitalist propaganda.
Dave Lindorff
Roger Helbig, who calles me a liar amid his barrage of BS comments here, pointedly fails to not his USAF was Lt. Colonel, and for years has been part of a presumably Pentagon-organized group of shills who fire off their propaganda anytime an journalist dares to publicize the dangers of depleted uranium. I way was because he’s been doing this for decades, and would long since have either been promoted to a higher rank, which he has not, or would have been forced to leave under the US military’s advance-or-leave policy for officers. Helbig, FAIR readers will note, did not mention my reference to the Lancet and Harvard reports on the results of DU use in Kosovo in his effort to debunk well documented evidence of the hazards of the use of DU weapons. Nor did he give any evidence for calling me a “liar.” As for his snark about the photo used in the FAIR article being 30mm shells fired by the anti-tank cannons on Warthog ground attack fighter planes, not the much larger 120 mm anti-tank rounds used by the Abrams tank, he failed to note that there is no caption with the photo saying what they are, which are 30 mm depleted uranium anti-0tank shells. Given his effort to hide his miilitary career from readers, I would suggest his pro-DU Pentagon propaganda skreeds and libelous name calling should lead to his comments being removed from this string.
Dave Lindorff
For more on Helbig, eho hsd s long shabby history defending US use of depleted uranium weapons for his old employer, cherck out:
https://theecologist.org/2007/feb/01/depleted-uranium-untold-story