What's new
British Ordnance Collectors Network

Join over 14,000 collectors of inert military ordnance. Get expert identification help for shells, fuzes, grenades, and more — plus access our classifieds marketplace and decades of archived knowledge. Free to register, takes seconds.

Is depleted uranium safe (long term)?

someone told me, that DU is used in the pre-scored fragmentation steel liner of the BLU 86 cluster bombs. Is this possible?
I mean, that is the wrong use for this material, too
To the best of my knowledge, the BLU-86/B family, and the related BLU-63/B family, are comprised of a two-part sheet steel outer casing and a two-part steel fragmenting body. The later A/B models also include incendiary pellets, but they aren't DU-based.

The M74 APAM submunitions carried by the M39 and M39A1 ATACMS guided missiles use tungsten-based two-part fragmenting bodies, so again not uranium.

Uranium alloy-based submunition fragmenting bodies were thought about, but not implemented as far as I'm aware. An example image below.
 

Attachments

  • Production of Uranium Submunition Fragmenting Shells - US DoD - 1.jpg
    Production of Uranium Submunition Fragmenting Shells - US DoD - 1.jpg
    823.6 KB · Views: 14
Top