US A-10 Attacker or Tungsten Carbide Bomb Replacing Depleted Uranium Bomb

According to U.S. media reports, the ammunition of the tank killer A-10 attacker, often called Warthog by the U.S. Army, has reached its life limit. In the future, tungsten carbide projectiles will be used to replace its original depleted uranium bombs. A-10's signature weapon is the 30mm GAU-8/A rotary machine gun with the nose. It is the most powerful of the existing machine guns in the United States. However, its use of depleted uranium shells has been controversial.

Depleted uranium bomb is made of cemented carbide containing uranium 238 as the main raw material. It has high hardness and melting point. In addition, uranium metal powder can spontaneously ignite, even if it does not need to be filled with other explosive materials, it will get secondary combustion effect after hitting the target. However, after the 1991 Gulf War, depleted uranium bombs became famous not only because of their ability to destroy tanks, but also because of doubts about their radioactivity.

The main component of depleted uranium ammunition quota is uranium 238, which is not radioactive in itself, but because it is a by-product of the preparation of radioactive isotopes such as uranium 235, it is impossible to absolutely exclude the radioactive isotope of uranium, so depleted uranium ammunition is still radioactive. After the Gulf War, many U.S. veterans said their health had been seriously damaged by the war, and the public believed that it was caused by depleted uranium bombs, so the banning voice was growing.

Regardless of the radioactivity of depleted uranium bombs, after all, the United States will not easily give up a powerful deterrent weapon. However, if their own life span has reached the upper limit, that is another matter. It is understood that the average service life of PGU-14/B shells used by GAU-8 machine gun is 32 years. If they are used again, the grain will deteriorate. As long as one shell in the chain is unstable, it will be a fatal disaster to the whole machine gun system, that is to say, these shells must be replaced.

According to the report, it is generally believed that the U.S. military will replace the depleted uranium bomb with tungsten carbide shells. Tungsten is also a kind of metal with high hardness, but its strength is not as strong as that of depleted uranium projectile in terms of the nature of the projectile alone, so some people worry that its armor-piercing capability may be reduced slightly. However, in the past decade of war, the A-10 rarely attacked solid tanks with machine guns, and most of the time, attacked tanks with missiles. Most of the machine guns are in the wide area of fire.

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