Geographies of Toxic War

Thousands of tons of nuclear waste, in the form of weaponized depleted uranium, were dropped on Iraq between 1991 and 2011. The consequences for Iraqis, who have and will confront environmental and public health dangers from DU’s use, have been catastrophic. Environmental suffering often remains unseen alongside the more spectacular horrors of war. The effects of depleted uranium are not unknown, but the ontologies that its use has fashioned are uncertain and contested. While these uncertainties are pressing for Iraqis, depleted uranium’s history, its effects, the environmental suffering it caused are also global. In the late 20th century, DU was remade into a military commodity in the United States and other nuclear‐power countries. Manufactured into a technology of war because of its “heavy” armor penetrating qualities, DU has circulated widely. The effects of its use were terrible in Iraq, but not only there. From the 1970s through the 1990s depleted uranium was manufactured in weapons factories in places like Concord, Massachusetts and Colonie, New York. There too the toxic and environmental effects of depleted uranium were deeply felt, threatening land, bodies, water, and public health. I intend to address global connections – the political economic and material – in which depleted uranium circulated as well as its effects. I will raise questions about war geographies as seen through circulating weapons and the spatial and temporal scales of environmental suffering. My intent is not to compare varieties of suffering. Iraqis have suffered in ways that remain hard to comprehend. Rather my aim is to raise questions about global histories of toxicity, the kinds of global material geographies that were made historically, and to think about the political consequences of establishing connections between communities that have most directly faced the fallout of toxic war.