Depleted Uranium! When war becomes a nightmare of potential atrocities.
Depleted Uranium! When war becomes a nightmare of potential atrocities.
Is there such a thing as humane warfare?
For anybody paying attention present times are a nightmare of potential past atrocities. The picture above is the rusting hulk of a tank hit by depleted uranium ammunition. The US Marines love using it because it reduces armor plate to molten butter leaving a nice clean hole, and one shot kills all. It also means the destroyed tank is “hot” as in radioactive and anybody coming near it gets a dose of radiation that can cripple and ultimately kill. Like cluster bombs, depleted uranium is the weapon of choice for soulless war criminals.
I have been a spectator to too many wars and have come to the conclusion, that like cancer, we are in a societal stage VI. We are completely committed to recidivism, which like Einstein pointed out is insanity— doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Einstein also pointed out fighting a third world war, as we are now, the fourth could be fought with sticks and stones.
Einstein was a really smart guy who never went to university. He had a lot to say about the world as it was then and is now. But like a whole host of our forebearers Einstein gets our deaf ear. We are the petulant children of the cosmos doing our best to destroy ourselves as we are led into The Grand Abyss by knuckle dragging war mongering troglodytes.
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I first heard of Depleted Uranium(DU) ammunition with the 2003 US Invasion of Iraq. They also used it in Syria and it has just been reported they are sending DU ammunition to Ukraine.
The US has a penchant for developing and using very nasty weaponry including cluster bombs, the development of bio weapons and mind control drugs. Soon after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine they found there were dozens bio-weapon research stations disguised as health clinics. The CIA has a well established tradition of maintaining secret interrogation and “research” stations around the world. Read more here. What they are not legally allowed to do on American soil they do in more accommodating countries.
There is an international ban on the use of cluster bombs but the US is not a signatory. Read more here.
Inhumane weaponry becomes doubly more dangerous as wars progress and one side or the other finds itself with their back to the wall and must escalate to stay in the game.
From the outset of the Ukraine conflict Russia’s intervention has been very discreet in the force it brought out bear as it wanted to repatriate the four Eastern provinces of Ukraine, whose population is mostly ethnic Russian, with the minimum of loss of life and property damage. This is why it named it a Special Military Operation(SMO). It had strictly limited objectives it wanted to achieve with the minimum of military conflict.
Long before the conflict started Russia had hoped to negotiate security guarantees that would settle outstanding issues. Any negotiations were flatly and arrogantly rejected by NATO. This rejection was a tacit admission that NATO wanted war as it is in the business, and its ostentatious megalomaniac HQ in Brussels Belgium is nothing less that a temple dedicated to perpetual war.
This time last year the stage was set for war as NATO had pushed Russia into a corner where its only option was military intervention. NATO had to have Russia start the conflict as it could not be seen to initiate hostilities but was more than prepared with fetid blankets of propaganda and jingoism to paint Russia as the villain of the peace. Just as Saddam Hussein was America’s proxy in the 1980-1988 proxy war against Iran, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine would serve as NATO’s proxy for war against Russia.
Though peace negotiations were ongoing these were quickly sabotaged by NATO and it was clearly out to escalate the conflict to its advantage, to weaken Russia, and force regime change in Moscow.
With this conflict NATO made two horrendous miscalculations. The first was to completely misjudge Russia’s ability to withstand withering sanctions intended to bring down its economy. These same sanctions have back fired on NATO member countries devastating their economies— which was highly predictable!
Secondly, they vastly under-estimated Russia’s ability to sustain continuous warfare. Even now when Ukraine’s military is cannon fodder for Russia’s overwhelming fire power NATO’s only response is to escalate, scrambling to bring in more weaponry too late in the game.
There is a very dangerous symbiosis between compulsive escalation and the potential for the use of inhumane weapons; especially when one party has no scruples and is indifferent to consequences. When empires are in decline and their absolute power is steadily eroding the temptation to go “all in” looms large— up to and including nuclear weapons, where the use of cluster bombs, DU ammunition, chemical and biological warfare occur as mere preliminaries.
We should be thankful both Russia and China are showing such strident forbearance in face of America’s attempt to lure them into all-out war. They know the costs of war, the ruthless nature of their adversary, its endless bloodshed and lack of scruples.
We are facing a nightmare of potential atrocities, as the weaponry becomes more vile. How willing is Washington to further disgrace itself as the world community watches?