ISLAMABAD, Nov 12: While Osama bin Laden claims to have nuclear and chemical weapons and threatens their use if the United States did so, defence experts say that the Americans are already dropping highly dangerous ordnance on Afghanistan that could have devastating effect on people’s health in that beleaguered country and also in Pakistan.

A leading military expert told Dawn that since Oct 7 the United States Air Force has been raining down depleted uranium shells at targets inside Afghanistan, especially against the Taliban front lines in the north.

“There is widespread radiation in many areas that could adversely affect tens and thousands of people in the two countries for generations to come,” he said.

Exposure to radioactive contamination from depleted uranium, or DU, is known to cause lung cancer, leukemia, the blood cancer, and birth defects as has been the case in the two countries where the Americans and their allies have used this weapon in recent years — Yugoslavia and Iraq.

“DU causes slow death,” said a medical doctor.

US-led NATO air force bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, using DU shells, to drive away Yugoslav forces from one of its provinces — Kosovo — where the pre-dominant population is Albanian. When a weapon made with a DU tip or core strikes a solid object, like the side of a tank, it goes straight through and then erupts in a burning cloud of vapour.

The vapour settles as dust, which is chemically poisonous and also radioactive.