Among the first victims of DU munition were the soldiers directly exposed to uranium dust. But those who have suffered the most and the longest are the civilian.

As part of NATO military operations, the USA used uranium weapons in 1994, 1995 and 1999 in the Balkans. It took two interventions by the UN Secretary General for NATO to release most of the 1999 target coordinates to UNEP. Bosnian civilians were only informed six years after the use of uranium weapons.

Offenders are also victims
In an amateur video shot by a soldier, Italian, Spanish and French soldiers can be seen handling uranium munitions with their bare hands and then deliberately detonating them. The shells had missed their targets and were meant to be “defused.” The film shows how smoke clouds envelop the soldiers and their
tents. Two of the 15 Italian members of the “disposal squad” later developed cancer
of the lymph glands, one fathered a severely malformed child.

In 2007, the Italien Minister of Defence, Parisi, revealed that between 1997 and 2007 37 Italian soldiers who had served overseas had died of cancer and 255 had been taken ill. The government agreed to pay the victims, or their families, 170 million Euros compensation. The Italian “victims in the armed forces group” reacted by accusing the state of misleading the public as the actual number of deaths from cancer among veterans was 164, while 2,536 had developed the disease.

5,000 days vs 12 seconds

Cape Arza in Montenegro was subjected to a 12-second attack with 30mm depleted uranium rounds. Attempts to decontaminate the area took 5,000 person-days and cost U.S. $ 280,000.

Uranium weapons are claiming lives in Europe – even in peacetime. Uranium  munitions were tested at a training area in Sardinia: lambs born with two heads died from radioactive toxins. 65 % of the shepherds developed cancer. A large number
of children were born with deformities.

First the sheep, then the children, then the shepherds. NATO’s largest firing range is in Salto di Quirra, in southeast Sardinia. Shepherds with large flocks who are allowed to graze on parts of the firing range have registered a strikingly large number of lambs with malformations since the end of the 1980s. For instance, there were lambs born with only one centrally-placed eye, with two heads or huge ears, some were born with tumours or cleft formations and many did not survive.

A practising paediatrician in a village to the northwest of the firing range reported
that 13 of the 26 children born between 1985 and 1987 exhibited malformations.

After the animals and the children came the shepherds. In the mid 1990s, 65 % of the shepherds in the village of Quirra had cancer, many of them died.

The victims remained silent for a long time. The armed forces were, and still are,
a major employer. It was not until 2008, when a new public prosecutor took office
that the matter began to be addressed. The course of the illnesses was very similar to that of many soldiers returning from action in the Gulf and Balkan Wars, in which
they were exposed to uranium munitions.

The public prosecutor ordered exhumations of the bodies of shepherds and, in 2011,
also took possession of the restricted military area. To date, there have been twenty
indictments in a case that has still not reached its conclusion.

German weapons bring death to Italy

In 1988, the armaments group Messerschmidt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) tested its Cormoran missiles in Salto di Quirra. According to Giancarlo Carrusci, the captain in charge at the time, the Cormoran was equipped with warheads containing depleted uranium. Over a great many years MBB also conducted tests involving more than 1,000 Milan antitank missiles on the island of Sardinia. Each missile carried more than 2.4 grams of radioactive thorium-232; this means they fired a total of 2.4 kilos of the alpha-ray emitter into the environment. Manmade isotopes of thorium were found in the skeletons of exhumed shepherds.