Depleted uranium’s 4.5-billion-year half-life defeats any meaningful casualty count

Evidence

Environmentalists routinely face the quandary of how to convert into dramatic form urgent issues that unfold too slowly to qualify as breaking news—issues like climate change and species extinction that threaten in slow motion. Any environmentalist who seeks to tally the delayed-action casualties of “precision” warfare labors under a similar disadvantage. How many years, how many decades, how many generations will he or she be granted to come up with an always-approximate count that includes war’s after-dead? Since 1991, depleted-uranium ordnance has been deployed in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Serbia, Somalia, and Chechnya and—in unprecedented quantities—during the 2003 war in Iraq. Given depleted uranium’s 4.51 billion-year half-life, what can counting even mean? — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 625

Categorization

• XREF: ‘after-dead’ and the incalculable counting connect to ch.3’s claim that uncounted slow-violence casualties skew how wars are remembered. — connects to: The euphemism ‘depleted’ masks uranium’s radioactive and chemical threat in munitions — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 603; Counting war dead fails to capture ecological-time casualties like genetic damage — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 626

Broader Connections

• Counting war dead fails to capture ecological-time casualties like genetic damage #corroborates (0.92) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 626