NATO’s use of depleted uranium munitions in its air war against Yugoslavia was a “horrible and inhumane experiment” against the entire region, Serbian Health Minister Danica Grujicic has said. Contamination from these munitions led to a surge in cancer, autoimmune disease, and infertility, Grujicic added.
NATO used 10 metric tons of depleted uranium – which is used to make the hardened cores of armor-piercing projectiles – during its 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia, the bloc admitted in a report a year afterwards. Although the report stated that depleted uranium poses “practically no danger” when ingested or absorbed through wounds, evidence from Serbia suggests otherwise.
“Radiation exists at that moment when the explosion occurs, [and] after that the nanoparticles do the work,” Grujicic told Serbia’s RTS television network on Saturday. These particles “enter your lungs, digestive tract, kidneys, and then you can expect at any moment that one alpha particle, which is 50 times more carcinogenic than any other, will come out of one atom of depleted uranium in your body and turn a normal cell into a malignant one,” she explained.
Grujicic said that Serbian physicians began noticing a surge in leukemia and lymphoma cases seven years after the bombing campaign, and have since recorded increases in oncological diseases, pathological pregnancies, autoimmune diseases, mental disorders in children, and infertility in men.