FEARS of a massive ecological fallout spreading across the Balkans have grown with the intensifying NATO onslaught on Serbian chemical plants. Among other targets, NATO planes have deliberately hit plants manufacturing PVC, which is highly toxic. Massive oil slicks have been released into the river Danube from wrecked refineries, and Belgrade scientists have warned people not to eat fish. Towns in northern Greece have been warned that poisonous dioxins released into the atmosphere by the bombing could affect their water supplies and crops.
Dioxins can be produced by chemical reactions following explosions at pharmaceutical plants, oil refineries, fertiliser depots or electrical transformers.
The fears that this carcinogenic poison could be affecting foodstuffs were increased when the French government warned shoppers to avoid Greek-grown asparagus. There are reports that dioxin levels in Thrace have increased 15-fold since the bombing began.
The Union of Greek Chemists has echoed warnings of an "ecological catastrophe" in Serbia, while concerns are also growing in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania. Assistant Prof. Dr. Radoje Lausevic, Serbian Ecological Society Belgrade University The public in the UK and in Yugoslavia are largely unaware that bullets being fired by A-10 anti-tank aircraft and probably all Tomahawk Cruise missiles fired by the US contain depleted uranium (DU). The development of these radioactive weapons is based on the fact that uranium (atornic mass 238) is much denser than lead (atomic mass 207), and therefore its kinetic energy is sufficient to penetrate tank armour or concrete buildings more effectively than lead, prior to detonation.
The design of the bullet is to incorporate a long thin cylinder of DU housed in a plastic sheath or "sabot". This means in turn that the very small leading edge of the bullet pierces with maximum impact. The same principle is used in Tomahawk Cruise missiles, with the aim of piercing concrete obstructions rather than metal. The bullets were used in the them still lie in the deserts of that region where subsequently the incidence of leukaemia, cancer, and birth defects have risen sharply as a consequence of the ensuing environmental radiation.
The amount of DU scattered around the Gulf war zone is given as 350 tons, but including the nose cones of Cruise missiles and helicopter rotors, the figure is nearer 750 tons. This is 27 TBequerels of radioactivity, one fiftieth of the total alpha releases from Sellafield over its entire operating history.
The 1S happening in Bosnia, ( where DU was also employed.
Some 80,000 US Gulf War veterans now suffer from the so-called Gulf War syndrome, whose symptoms are identical to radiation sickness. The US military are well aware of this, and are on record as confirming that radiation from the surface of a DU shell carries a dose equivalent to a chest X-ray per hour. Each A-10 Thunderbolt 30mm cannon anti tank shell contains some 275g (10.1 Bq). A single 120mm Abrams tank DU shell contains When DU bombs detonate, uranium oxide is formed in tiny particulates (0.5 - 5 microns). These can be blown several hundred miles by the wind or suspended electrostatically in the atmosphere. The half life of Uranium is 109 (ten and nine noughts) years, so they do not decay.
Oné "hot particle" of this DU material in the lungs is equivalent to a chest X-ray per hour for life. It is impossible to remove, so the affected lung gradually irradiates the victim until death ensues. In the use of DU, both groundbased combatants and their targets are almost certain to suffer long term radiation sickness and premature death. The Pentagon view is that the short term effectiveness outweighs the long term situation, but this is an error.
The public at large are unaware that these weapons are weapons of mass destruction and that there have been requests for them to be placed, like cluster bombs, on the Geneva Convention banned list. It is said that the unprecedented use of Cruise missiles with DU inserts in Yugoslavia will have the same effect as the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. Again these calculations by eminent radiation physicists are not being released to the media. In other words the action of is likely to have a long term pernicious effect not only on that part of Europe, but on their ground troops if deployed, and almost certainly on the refugees from the Kosovo region.
This may be partly why NATO is reluctant to engage ground troops: You will see from CNN and other news program pictures that they are beginning already to wear submicron gas masks. The Yugoslav population however, together with aid workers and ethnic Albanians are largely unprotected.