[Sethomas]

The Japanese invented the gun, silly, though I think that gunpowder was first made by the Chinese.

As far as DU goes, it should be pretty obvious that it's extremely lethal and there's no excuse for using it in combat. Use common sense, people. For one thing, the cancer issue is only the tip of the iceberg. Uranium is one of the most dense of the naturally occurring heavy metals, which means it has properties that are particularly nasty on living things. Just for reference, the lightest naturally occuring Uranium (which I would assume comprises DU bullets) is 238 atomic units; mercury is only 200. (If you wonder why gold is 196 AU and drinking Goldschlager never seems to cause any problems, I believe the narcissism in gold that results in its high ductility and maleability prevents adverse effects from its atoms.) Heavy metals have a strong effect on the body's delicate electric impulses, thus resulting in severe neurological defects. Eat leaded paint chips and you'll probably develop an anxiety disorder, play with too much mercury and you'll probably get palsy for months or years, come into contact with uranium or plutonium and you're looking at severe motor skills damage that may degenerate into paralysis or death.

I think it's a fair assumption that the self-adhesive properties that result in the "self-sharpening" phenomenon described by Rorschach would cause minimize the amount of uranium that would enter the bloodstream from the pores of our soldiers who would presumably handle the bullets while loading their rifles. If not, it might be years before problems make themselves evident. But the problem we're looking at now is that there is a thousand tons or more of the stuff introduced into the Iraqi ecosystem. This isn't a problem that's likely to surface any time soon, but when it does it's going to hit hard. Bullets that found there way on the ground or in the soil will get rained on and will shed loose atoms into the water. The water, even if it's not drank, will end up in crops, or like mercury will run off into the ocean wherein it will difuse into fish tissue and thus be eaten later. I can't tell you exactly how lethal depleted uranium would be, but to give you a ballpark idea I believe that a spoonful of plutonium (AU: 244) dumped into a water supply could potentially kill an estimated 2 million people.

As far as radiation goes, it really seems like uranium would lose its desired properties once it decays below an atomic weight of 238. According to my periodic table, all elements with an atomic mass of 208 or more have lethal radioactive properties at their ground state. It'd be absolutely rediculous to purport that DU can be stable with 30 neutrons fewer than its ground state, so I'd be pretty incredulous to claims that DU bullets pose absolutely no threat as a carcinogen.