23 January 2001 NATO Committee to Disseminate Data on Depleted Uranium to Members Asked about concern by some European countries about the dangers of traces of plutonium contained in depleted uranium, Defense spokesman Admiral Craig Quigley said January 23 that the United States has been responsive in supplying information. "NATO has set up an ad hoc committee on depleted uranium (which is chartered) to be a body through which information is provided and then disseminated to all 19 of the NATO nations so they can have a common database of understanding and all member nations have access to the same information in relatively the same amount of time," Quigley said. DOD sent representatives "about a week and a half ago to brief that group, which was brand new at the time on some of our studies, on impacts on health and the environment of depleted uranium," he said. "We have subsequently provided information, as best we understand it, on the presence of plutonium and other transuranics in the depleted uranium products themselves. . . The purpose here would be to provide that information and have the committee on depleted uranium get that information out to all of our allies, more or less simultaneously." Asked whether the presence of the transuranics, or trace amounts of various isotopes, present any health hazard, the spokesman said "that's the key question, and we have seen nothing in our studies that would indicate that this has more than an insignificant amount of impact on either personal health or the environment. (These are) incredibly small quantities we're talking about here in depleted uranium products, both the armor and the munitions themselves, and the presence of these transuranics we just see having no significant impact." Pressed on the subject, Quigley read from one of the studies the Defense Department has conducted and provided to the ad hoc NATO committee on the impact of having trace elements of plutonium in the depleted uranium. Quigley read, saying "If you inhaled 1 millionth of an ounce of depleted uranium that contained the levels of plutonium found in our studies, this would result in your inhaling one-twenty-third of a quadrillionth of a gram of plutonium, corresponding to an estimated increased in fatal cancer risk of about one in 13 trillion." He confirmed that "the source of the contamination were the plants that produced depleted uranium themselves," saying that the plants were in use in the 1950s to the 1970s. "In those plants, we found trace elements in the equipment itself that would have produced these trace elements in the depleted uranium as it was processed through those plants." Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Website: http://usinfo.state.gov/) Return to the Washington File