When the contamination spreads with weather elements, almost 100 acres can become inaccessible to general public. The US army manuals direct the troops to handle the human causalities and destroyed targets as contaminated by radioactivity and toxic heavy metal. Since the US troop were not trained to protect themselves from DU contamination, about 400,000 Gulf War veterans have been potentially contaminated by depleted uranium dust from combet explosions and accidental fires. Depleted uranium presents the greatest danger to human health when insoluble DU dust is inhaled or when soluble DU dust is inhaled or ingested. The short-term effect of uranium chemical toxicity is kidney damage, just like from other heavy metal ions.
Birth defects are also possible when a mother is exposed to uranium during pregnancy.
Compared to the pre-war levels, excess birth defects have been observed in southern Iraq as well. The Department of Defense and Veteran Administration maintained that no chemical weapons were used during the Gulf War, discounted the health effects of depleted uranium dust, and invariably diagnosed the sick veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or similar psychological problems. At the end of 1996, the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight severely criticized both agencies for these policies. The committee found that exposure to multiple toxic substances, including depleted uranium, was a more likely cause of the veterans' illnesses. When the battlefield effects of DU weapons are carefully compared to the US regulatory limits on depleted uranium exposure and contamination, the claim that these new weapons are conventional can no longer be maintained.