Depleted Uranium Will Cause Cancer and Birth Defects in Ukraine
The Biden administration is preparing to send depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition to Ukraine for use in its Abrams tanks, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Washington’s most loyal lapdog, the British government, already announced in March that it would be sending armour-piercing rounds made with DU to the Kiev regime along with Challenger 2 tanks. Russian President Vladimir Putin has in turn threatened the use of DU rounds in retaliation.
The use of DU shows the emptiness and hypocrisy of claims by both sides of imperialists, whether the U.S./NATO or Russia, to be fighting for the liberation of Ukraine and the well-being of Ukrainians. DU munitions cause widespread damage to DNA that have been linked to birth defects, increased cancer risk, and disruption to normal functioning of major organs such as the heart, brain, liver, and kidneys. Deploying DU in Ukraine will inevitably leads to a rise in cancer, birth defects, misery, and suffering among Ukrainians for decades to come.
One only has to look at the former Yugoslavia or Iraq to see the horrific effects of DU munitions. NATO admitted that it fired 30,000 DU shells during its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, while the Serbian military claimed 50,000 shells. Serbia subsequently experienced a wave of aggressive cancers among young and old alike, contamination of the country’s soil, and generations of deformed children. The U.S., U.K., and allies deployed DU extensively against civilians in their brutal subjugation of Iraq: first during the 1990 Gulf War and then after the 2003 invasion. The result has been an epidemic of birth defects. The Middle East Research and Information Project described in 2020 the many congenital anomalies documented by the Fallujah Hospital’s birth defects Facebook page:
Babies in Falluja are born with hydrocephaly, cleft palates, tumors, elongated heads, overgrown limbs, short limbs and malformed ears, noses and spines. The accompanying case reports are brief and often incorporate prognoses like “incompatible with life” or “stillborn.”… While most of these children do not survive, some live for weeks, months or years, often in pain and with grave disabilities.
Ben Norton, assistant editor at The Grayzone, pointed out that Ukraine’s economy relies heavily on agriculture and that DU munitions could poison its land. British journalist Richard Medhurst, noted in his video podcast, “If you love Ukraine, if you care about Ukraine, depleted uranium is the last thing you would tell them to use. If you look at what the United States has done, everywhere they've used depleted uranium, it's like dropping a nuclear bomb.”
The use of DU should give pause to any honest person who supports their own imperialist government’s policy in Ukraine, on the basis that “We must defend Ukrainians!” Sending endless weapons and military aid to Ukraine to fuel this ongoing proxy war, which has no end in sight, is justified by the need to protect Ukrainians from Putin’s invasion. Let’s be clear: this is a reactionary war on both sides, between rival gangs of imperialists over access to markets, raw materials, and spheres of influence. Putin’s regime in Russia, and Zelensky’s regime in Ukraine backed by U.S. imperialism/NATO, are both corrupt, authoritarian right-wing governments dominated by oligarchs.
Working people have no interest in the victory of either side. Instead, workers must maintain an internationalist class position and recognize that the only way to secure the self-determination of Ukrainians is through the revolutionary struggle against capitalism around the world. It is the duty of workers in Russia to overthrow Putin, of workers in Ukraine to overthrow Zelensky, and for workers in Canada, Britain, and the United States to overthrow our own imperialist governments.
The U.S. and NATO are not at war in Ukraine to help Ukrainians, but to weaken their imperialist rival Russia. For this reason they are happy to keep the war going as long as possible, fighting to the last drop of Ukrainian blood. We saw the results of a similar proxy war the previous decade in Syria, where Washington and its allies also funded and armed far-right forces to weaken an official enemy government. In Syria they armed jihadists like ISIS and Al-Qaeda; in Ukraine they’re arming neo-Nazis like the Azov Regiment. Ukrainians are being fed into the meat grinder as cannon fodder against Russia with shocking casualty rates. The longer the war goes on, the more Ukrainians are wounded and killed, and the more the country’s vital infrastructure is destroyed. But none of this matters to Western imperialists, so long as they give Putin a bloody nose.
Use of DU munitions is just the latest step in escalation of the war, but one that will sicken, deform, and kill generations of Ukrainians—all in the name of defending Ukrainians. One is reminded of the words attributed to a U.S. major in the Vietnam War following the Battle of Bến Tre, in which U.S. forces bombed and shelled the town causing large civilian casualties: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” In both cases, what is being “saved” is not the people of a country suffering through a murderous proxy war, but the profit margins of imperialists abroad.
In Vietnam, the U.S. was eventually forced to withdraw after massive opposition to the war, which if it had gone on would have brought the U.S. to the edge of revolution. The only way to end the suffering of Ukrainians today is for workers at home—in the West, in Russia, and in Ukraine—to overthrow our own capitalist ruling classes, who are the only ones to benefit from this war.