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By Root 2392 0

propaganda from books and movies like Jaws, the ratio of humans slaughtering sharks to sharks even attacking humans is approximately 20 million to one.66 It is true when we talk about CEOs making decisions that lead to profits for the corporations they run and death for those humans (and nonhumans) they poison, and the victims of these CEOs for some reason refraining from similarly poisoning the CEOs, the politicians who protect them, and the families of both. And it’s true when we talk about more intimate forms of violence, like those perpetrated en masse by men against women and children, and the relative rarity with which the women or children fight back. I wrote a book about the violence that took place within my family when I was a child. The violence was rigidly one-way: my father beat his wife and children with impunity. I remember the only time my brother defended himself by returning a single blow: he received the worst beating of his miserable childhood. Why? Because he had broken a fundamental unstated rule of our family (and of civilization): Violence flows in only one direction.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about depleted uranium, in part because of some pictures I’ve seen. First the depleted uranium, then the pictures.

So-called depleted uranium is what’s left of natural uranium after the “enriched uranium”—the fissionable isotope uranium 235—has been separated to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. The term depleted uranium is something of a misnomer in that it implies that the remaining uranium has become significantly less dangerous, more, well, depleted. But depleted uranium—99.8 percent uranium 238—is just as toxic and about 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. And with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, it will truly be one of this culture’s trademark gifts that keeps on giving: it will kill essentially forever.67

The United States has made a lot of it, well over a billion pounds. Beginning in the 1950s, the feds started trying to figure out what they were going to do with all of this stuff. Providentially, uranium is extremely dense—about 1.7 times heavier than lead—and so can be used to make an artillery shell68 that easily penetrates steel. Even better, it’s pyrophoric, meaning heat from the impact causes it to vaporize, releasing huge amounts of energy. If you don’t mind toxifying and irradiating the surrounding countryside and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, depleted uranium makes a tank-busting shell extraordinaire.

What this means in practice is that leaders of government and industry solved the problem of disposing of U-238 in typical win-win (for them) fashion by giving it away free to both national and foreign arms manufacturers (perhaps it never occurred to anyone in power that the planet had already come up with the best solution for storing uranium: keep it in its natural state underground). I suppose we should be thankful that the researchers didn’t deem DU’s most effective use to be in forks or the heating elements of toasters, or else we’d be up to our glowing eyeballs in it at home. But this gratitude is in truth unfounded, because that plan has long been floated by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences and many others as a way to get rid of various radioactive wastes. They want (note the use of present tense) to redefine certain forms of radioactive waste as “Below Regulatory Concern,” recycle them (it’s great to be green!), and thus give citizens “authorized doses” of radiation.69 We should also be grateful, I guess, that they didn’t just decide to put the DU in our water supplies and tell us it’s good for our teeth. Oops, they’ve already done something like that, too. As is true for DU, fluoride is a toxic byproduct of this way of living (in this case the production of aluminum, fertilizer, cement, and weapons-grade plutonium and uranium). Also as is true for DU, fluoride is extremely costly—if not impossible—to dispose of safely. The feds didn’t know what to do with it. Perhaps because fluoride didn’t work very well either in artillery shells or toaster