Lancelin and the mad greenies

I was googling Lancelin tonight in order to find out some stuff for my next blog, and found this crap:

Green left frogshit

MP earning his money

The first article alleges that depleted uranium rounds have been used at Lancelin. Hmm. Let's think about that.

According to my friend Wikipedia:

Most military use of depleted uranium has been as 30 mm and smaller ordnance, primarily the 30 mm PGU-14/B armour-piercing incendiary round from the GAU-8 Avenger cannon of the A-10 Thunderbolt II and M230 of the Apache Helicopter[9] used by the U.S. Air Force. 25 mm DU rounds have been used in the M242 gun mounted on the U.S. Army's Bradley Fighting Vehicle and LAV-AT. The U.S. Marine Corps uses DU in the 25 mm PGU-20 round fired by the GAU-12 Equalizer cannon of the AV-8B Harrier, and also in the 20 mm M197 gun mounted on AH-1 helicopter gunships. The US Navy's Phalanx CIWS's M61 Vulcan gatling gun used 20 mm armor-piercing penetrator rounds with discarding plastic sabots which were made using depleted uranium, later changed to tungsten.

DU is used by the U.S. Army in 120 mm or 105 mm cannons employed on the M1 Abrams and M60A3 tanks.

To start with, it's pretty bloody clear that DU is not used in bombs - it is used in projectiles, particularly kinetic projectiles. If DU did get into Lancelin, how did it get there? The navy doesn't shoot it out of its guns, so they couldn't have delivered it. I don't think any Abrams tanks have been driven around Lancelin by the yanks, so they couldn't have shot it off. I doubt a ship with a phalanx sailed up close to the coast either and fired off a few bursts towards the land.

So the only way DU could end up there is if an A-10 or a Harrier flew around and did a bit of ground strafing, and I don't think many A-1o's have been used in Australia.

In other words, the stupid greenies have no way of explaining how any DU might have possibly gotten there. This is probably because your average greenie doesn't know one weapon system from another, and is therefore susceptible to the stupidest ideas invented by fantacists.

The second link includes a letter that explains quite logically why there is unlikely to be any DU there. DU rounds are expensive, and are generally not fired off during training these days. That just seems to make common sense to me, but most greenies lack common sense, so I can see why they could work themselves into a tizzy over this.

In short, they are idiots.