This is an interesting piece of news...
Exclusive: British tanks gifted to Ukraine will come equipped with controversial depleted uranium rounds, it has emerged.
declassifieduk.org
...which seems to have only just come to light following a question in the commons on March 6th.
No doubt Russia will call them 'dirty bombs' and make more threats.
Of course, there's two sides to the story when it comes to the contamination of Ukraine.
Russia's invasion is leaving a toxic trace on Ukrainian soil, contaminating crops and posing a serious long-term risk to human health.
www.bbc.com
I think depleted uranium is too toxic a substance to use for anything. Especially anything that's going to break apart and become airborne dust. Depleted uranium is not all that radioactive, but it does break down into more radioactive elements and chemically uranium is very toxic. Even if you don't get a serious dose of radiation, you don't want to ingest or inhale uranium.
The armor of western tanks has been designed to defeat HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) ammunition and depleted uranium ammunition may be necessary to kill one, but Russian tanks have proven very vulnerably to HEAT. Anti-tank missiles usually use HEAT warheads. HEAT ammunition is probably cheaper than depleted uranium and it's safer for the environment.
So that's what you find when you go a tad beyond the fringes.... From the left, MAGA right. From the MAGA right, Bernie boys?
I learn so many interesting things from this thread
I've observed that extreme politics tends to meet around the back side. Nazi Germany and the USSR's Soviets had completely opposite political views on paper. The former was an very extreme form of nationalism rooted in conservatism gone nuts and the latter an extreme liberal government rooted in the most liberal of ideologies. In practice both governments behaved very similarly with only fairly minor differences.
Politics is usually much healthier when the people in power are close to the center, either center-left or center-right. Things get out of balance when radicals with extreme ideas start to get power. It isn't a bad thing for the radicals to have a voice on the outside. Many good changes have come about because ideas that started in the fringes ended up becoming a thing. Most of the social changes of the last 120 years started as fringe ideas that moderated as they became mainstream ideas and finally just part of the culture. For example women's suffrage was a radical idea in the 1890s, and it was controversial in the democracies as it became legal in the democracies in the early 20th century, but today it's considered an unalienable right and people in those democracies get upset with countries that don't have women's suffrage, even if their election system is a corrupt joke.
There are good ideas out on the fringes, but they are usually unworkable in their initial form. The process of moving towards the center forces people who think about how to make things work look at them and tweak them to make them more workable. Some ideas like women's suffrage didn't need a lot of tweaking, but just needed to marinate in the consciousness of the population for a while.
The radicals on the fringes, if they get power, think the world will be a better place if everyone just sees their ideas in action and they try to force it on their population. Between the ideas often being half baked or the population just not being ready, the ideas usually fall flat. Then they decide if they just push harder, utopia will result and people start getting hurt as those who resist the changes the most get sent off to concentration camps and prisons. The thought police take over and the country falls into an authoritarian hell.
With things like stopping US support for Ukraine, the ideals driving it come from a very different place, but in the end the behaviors are similar. And neither side is really thinking through the implications of letting Russia get away with taking part of Ukraine.