The Cloud Cast by Depleted Uranium Grows Ever Larger Over NATO

BRUSSELS — Depleted uranium may or may not be a danger to life and health, but for the U.S.-led NATO alliance, fallout from mounting controversy over the American munitions that contain it is proving extremely noxious.

“The hysteria and panic on this has become unbelievable,” a NATO official said this week, shaking his head in dismay.

For the incoming Bush administration, the dispute has arguably become the most urgent issue it will have to tackle with its European allies. It comes at a delicate time for the 19-nation alliance: The Europeans have growing ambitions in the area of defense and foreign policy, and several real or potential differences--including over U.S. plans for a national missile defense system--threaten a transatlantic rift.

U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen contended this week that depleted uranium, which is used in antitank munitions fired by U.S. A-10 warplanes and Abrams tanks, poses no greater a health risk than lead paint.

But the unexplained deaths of at least 23 European soldiers who had served in the Balkans, where the munitions were used, have stirred fears on this side of the Atlantic that low-level radiation or heavy-metal poisoning from the uranium was the cause--and that the Americans and the Atlantic alliance may have tried to conceal the matter.

The mushrooming controversy has brought the North Atlantic Treaty Organization under more intense scrutiny in Europe than at any time since the alliance’s 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. For a week, it has been the stuff of headlines and lead stories in media from Greece to Britain, generating a public outcry.

“The Americans knew for a long time what risks they were exposing their own personnel and the civilian populations to. But they can’t admit it,” Frederic Lorre, the Belgian co-author of a book to be published on depleted uranium, claimed in an interview with the Brussels newspaper Le Soir. Paul Quiles, chairman of the defense commission of the French Parliament, charged the United States with lacking “honesty” toward its allies.

Concerns About How Dispute Will Play Out

Inside and outside NATO, some Europeans say it is essential that the depleted uranium issue not be allowed to develop into the most damaging kind of conflict for the alliance: an America-versus-Europe dispute. In countries such as France and Italy, a degree of anti-Americanism is often a popular element of policy positions, and some people believe that is helping drive public positions on this issue.

“The political exploitation of the ‘Balkan syndrome’ has gone over the danger level,” Giuseppe Pisani, chief whip of the conservative Italian opposition party Forza Italia, told reporters this week. “The government and its coalition are creating a climate to put into question the Atlantic alliance, the main pillar of Italian foreign policy.”

For the new Bush administration, which already has made its reluctance to get into foreign entanglements clear, the depleted uranium affair may be a seminal experience in forming its view of NATO and the Europeans.

“My bigger fear is that in Washington, George W. [Bush], Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice are watching all this, and this has confirmed their fears about, quote, ‘feckless’ European allies,” one NATO official from the United States said. “The Europeans couldn’t do a thing by themselves in Kosovo, and we had to pick up the cudgels, and now what are the Europeans doing? Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

Alliance Seeks to Reassure Critics

In an attempt at damage control, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson announced Wednesday that the alliance will cooperate with any inquiry on potential health risks arising from depleted uranium and would hurriedly set up its own group to exchange information that NATO has.

NATO, Robertson declared, has “nothing to hide and everything to share.” Current scientific evidence, he stressed, has established no link between exposure to the munitions and cancer or other illnesses.

The secretary-general’s news conference was attended by more reporters and TV crews than any NATO-organized event since the aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia more than a year and a half ago, a measure of how great European concern is.

At alliance headquarters here in the Belgian capital, officials admit to being flummoxed at the proportions the controversy has taken. European governments, they contend, have no more reason to be surprised by the use and properties of depleted uranium than Capt. Renault was in “Casablanca” when he feigned shock at hearing that gambling was going on at Rick’s.

“The Italians say they want to know how many DU [depleted uranium] munitions were used in Bosnia,” said a NATO official from continental Europe. “That information has been on the Internet for three years.”

What’s more, the alliance’s top official in uniform, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, is an Italian, Adm. Guido Venturoni.

As for Quiles’ charge of U.S. dishonesty, the European NATO official noted that the prominent French Socialist once served as his country’s defense minister and that France has depleted uranium anti-armor rounds in its arsenal as well.

“Quiles knows very well what their properties are; in fact, I believe it was under him that the French military started using them,” the official said.

A French Defense Ministry document, seen by The Times at NATO, states that the “radioactive toxicity of depleted uranium is extremely weak.” As for chemical toxicity, the French report says that if absorbed in large doses, depleted uranium is harmful “like other heavy metals, such as lead.”

Skeptics point to an internal document of the German Defense Ministry, which was published by a Berlin newspaper this week and refers to a warning issued by NATO on July 1, 1999. Earlier that year in Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic--U.S. A-10s fired more than 30,000 depleted uranium cannon rounds at Serbian armor. In the mid-1990s, about a third as many shells were fired by American planes at the Bosnian Serb tanks besieging Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s capital.

The NATO memorandum warned of a “possible toxic danger in handling vehicles struck by depleted uranium munitions” and recommended that peacekeepers from alliance nations and other countries who were deployed in Kosovo use masks, gloves and other protective gear if they came into contact with destroyed Serbian vehicles.

At this week’s meeting of the ambassadors of NATO countries, the United States, France and Britain turned down a request from Italy and Germany to declare a moratorium on the use of depleted uranium shells.

“What we have to do is act on the basis of our analysis of the facts,” Robertson said. “I would not agree to the use of the munitions if I believed there was a hazard.”