The front page of The Independent today (28th October 2006) confirms that enriched Uranium was used in bombs in the recent Lebanon conflict.

The main article is http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1935945.ece

A comment from Chris Bellamy, professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University is at http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1935931.ece

The report follows research by Dr. Chris Busby of LLRC (also of environmental consultancy Green Audit and the European Committee on Radiation Risk) using samples recovered from the Lebanon by Dai Williams of Eos.

The immediate question (Robert Fisk and Professor Bellamy both pose it) is Why? What is the point of putting enriched Uranium in bombs? The Independent report addresses a couple of possibilities but to the Low Level Radiation Campaign it seems far more likely that the enriched Uranium is meant to mask the use of Depleted Uranium, especially bearing in mind the provenance of much of Israel's arsenal. The American military has been concerned about bad publicity since at least 1991 — DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. (see this link for the full 1991 memorandum from a high-ranking US army officer: http://www.llrc.org/du/subtopic/rosalie.htm#ziehm, also cited in http://www.llrc.org/du/subtopic/faheyquotes.htm#ziehm).

Following the use of Depleted Uranium armour piercing rounds in the first Gulf War and in the Balkans conflict it was relatively easy to detect DU in environmental samples. This is because of the tell-tale ratio of U-238 to U-235. The link to subsequent increases in cancer and birth defects is intuitively obvious and scientifically credible, given that it is now generally acknowledged that "dose" from internal exposure to sources such as DU is a virtually meaningless concept.

There have been suggestions that confusion about DU in subsequent campaigns may have been caused by the use of Uranium metal (in e.g. bunker busters) in its naturally occurring proportions — i.e. undepleted. We may now have an explanation. A relatively small number of rounds or bombs made with slightly enriched Uranium — as we now see in the Lebanon — would mask a much larger number of DU weapons by increasing the amount of U-235 in the environment towards its natural abundance relative to U-238. (The natural proportions of these isotopes are U-235 0.7 percent; U-238 99.3 percent.) The military will then claim that the Uranium found after a conflict is the result of high explosives and soil disturbance unless, that is, someone with Dai Williams' courage gets samples from the conflict area before reconstruction work buries and redistributes the evidence.

Green Audit's report is at http://www.llrc.org/du/subtopic/lebanrept.pdf

We conclude by repeating, as we have for the last ten years, that Depleted Uranium weaponry is illegal because the radioactive aerosols produced by the impacting rounds have indiscriminate health effects. This contravenes the UN Convention on prohibitions or restrictions on the use of certain conventional weapons which may be deemed to be excessively injurious or to have indiscriminate effects (1980). See: http://www.llrc.org/du/subtopic/medact#illegal

The same must apply to enriched Uranium and the health effects must be assumed to be greater, in proportion to its mass, because particles of U-235 will deliver more energy to body tissue than similar sized particles of U-238. LLRC has photographed multiple radiation tracks from particles in an air filter recently recovered from a Lebanese ambulance. They indicate that the source is far more active than (depleted) U-238. The area of filter so far examined is small, suggesting that such particles are fairly common in that environment. We shall produce further briefings on this issue.

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Richard Bramhall, Low Level Radiation Campaign