The U.S. military is trying to go green, and not just with berets or fatigues. In a multimillion dollar project, the Army has come up with a new bullet said to be just as deadly as the old lead-based one but cleaner for the Earth. In the new bullet, a less toxic tungsten composite replaces the lead. It's just one of the Pentagon's efforts to keep troops trained for combat while protecting the environment on military land.
Critics say the armed forces have a long way to go on that score.
It's used in the M-16 rifle, a weapon issued to every Army infantry soldier, and an estimated 200 million rounds are shot a year. Researchers studied different combinations of metal to design a slug that would perform the same as the old one, have the same density, ballistic quality and so on, said Michael Dette of the Army Environmental Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. They settled on a tungsten composite slug and kept the old copper casing to produce a bullet Dette says actually turned out to be more accurate and causes less barrel erosion. Soldiers won't notice a difference, he said. The Army, which produces ammunition for all the services, started limited use of the new version in 1999 and is producing 50 million rounds this year for practice at a new range in Alaska and an old contaminated one in Massachusetts.