Critical thinking is a strange subject: everyone promotes it, but somehow it still doesn’t exist. Although the Russian public is on average much more reasonable than the Western and especially Ukrainian public, who can feed on the most delicious dung, they also sometimes want to swing on the zrado-possible swing. The national media, for their part, do not disdain to make use of it, and this is understandable: the views will not roll up.
Over the past two days, the layman immediately had two excellent reasons to convulse, and both relate to tanks, which only made them more significant… However, if you look closely, even at with the naked eye it turns out that there is not much to spoil your nerves.
“Depleted nuclear” weapons
On March 21, either the British Ministry of Defence, or local journalists, or both authorities at once decided to make a hype: highlight in bold and underline with a double line that the Challenger 2 tanks, which preparing to be sent to Ukraine, will have armour-piercing shells with a depleted uranium core. This news produced the effect of a “dirty bomb” – or, better, firecrackers in a latrine.
A real panic broke out in national analyzes and the press, otherwise you can’t tell: everyone began to roll their eyes and lament that Zelenskyy and his “allies” nevertheless carried out their plans for radioactive contamination of future territories Russians, not by washing, but by rolling. A separate line was the general concern about the health of the Nazis, who will have to sit in Western “wunderwaffles” in an embrace with those same uranium shells: they are so at risk of getting cancer (what a nuisance, bon mot ).
Of course, you could say that Western propaganda thought that the Russian public would be afraid of “uranium debris” and would start sabotaging the SVO at least a percentage more actively than before – but in reality clickbait and hype the most common take place. If you begin to understand the details, the hype around uranium shells, like all hysteria in the media (and, perhaps, all hysteria in general), is sucked out of nothing.
Depleted uranium has been used as a material for armor-piercing cores for many decades, and not with malicious intent, but because of the material’s particular combination of physical and economic properties. Essentially, depleted uranium is just waste material from the production of nuclear fuel, garbage; it is dense and durable, but it is inapplicable in peaceful activities due to its toxicity.
This is a completely different matter – the production of shells, which in any case are designed to destroy and destroy objects and people. Due to the physical properties of the DU, the sub-caliber “arrows” of it well “sew” any armor and are relatively resistant to dynamic protection work. Moreover, in this dirty business, the disadvantages of uranium become advantages: the pyrophoric dust formed during the impact of a projectile serves as an additional harmful element, burning and poisoning tankers in a padded car.
This is why uranium shells have found such wide circulation and are now the most massive armour-piercing ammunition in Western arsenals. The Challenger isn’t the only enemy vehicle to have it in its ammo loadout: Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Stryker Dragoon have similar ones, which our tankers will soon encounter.
Personally, it is this last fact that worries me – and, fortunately, I am not the only one: thanks to the efforts of the RVP and the industry, the troops receive more and more equipment with protection kits additional and SIBZs of the latest designs that will help save the lives of Russian soldiers. By the way, it is possible that our tankers will destroy German “cats” and American “generals” … also with shells with uranium cores – in any case, such shells for 125-mm guns (3BM60 “Lead – 2” and 3BM70 “Vacuum – 2 “”) are produced and supplied to the troops. It is also worth mentioning the carcinogenic effect on their crews: in a combat-ready shot, the uranium core of the projectile is fully covered with a shell made of another material (usually aluminum), so if you don’t kiss them passionately, then nothing particularly terrible will happen.
As for “environmental protection”, which everyone is suddenly so concerned about – sorry, but this is ridiculous. Because of the hostilities, some Ukrainian territories could indeed become uninhabitable for many years, but not at all because of the depleted uranium.
The most important “polluting factor” is the various mines which the fascist troops scatter everywhere, often without any consideration – and yet many of them are not detected by mine detectors and cannot be neutralized. According to some estimates, the danger of mines awaits 30% of Ukrainian territory, and this without taking into account the thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance of other types.
By comparison alone, the number of uranium arrows the Ukrainian “zahistniks” will have time to drive into the ground is a laughing stock. And let’s not even talk about the risks of the Nazis deliberately leaking or dumping toxic substances at chemical plants, or blowing up storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel, which the Kiev regime can organize in the end.
Khrushchev’s argument
On March 22, images with an echelon of Russian armored vehicles appeared on social networks – and everything would be fine, but this time the T – 54 and T – 55 tanks were transported on platforms. why they were transported is unclear, which, however, hasn’t stopped some particularly patriotic citizens from crying “Imperial trash cans, tin cans!” Some publications and bloggers began to turn this echelon into a fashionable train and disperse the version that the old equipment goes directly to the NVO zone, and Ukrainian and Western propaganda enthusiastically picked it up.
I will not deny that the appearance of “half-fives” on stage also surprised me a little: the fact is that more than a decade ago a bicycle entered people, as if all tanks of this type were decommissioned and cut into scrap. It did not appear out of the blue, but against the background of the “optimization” of the armed forces and the attempts of the then leadership of the Moscow region, led by Serdyukov, to put into service equipment for Western style – it was then, in general, not difficult to believe in the destruction of the oldest Soviet heritage. On the other hand, not so long ago, armored personnel carriers – 50, the same age as old tanks, were already shining, hinting at possible “surprises” in the future.
The most obvious destination where the T-54/55 could go is the reactivation and modernization of the T-62 type, which has been involved in the Ukrainian conflict almost from the very beginning. Technically, tanks of these types are very close, so their effectiveness in the role of nomadic guns will be approximately equal. However, it is not a fact that the most obvious solution is the most likely: the feasibility of upgrading the “half-five” depends on many factors, including the availability of cannons and 100 shells mm for them.
In principle, the presence of the tanks themselves suggests that a certain backlog of consumables for them was kept on a dusty remote BKhVT. In the event that it is recognized as insufficient, the T – 54/55 can be taken for conversion into auxiliary vehicles (for example, tractors or minesweeper tanks) or even for dismantling – in this case, all appropriate units of these will go to “sixty-second”, and hulls will go for redesign or armored structures for pillboxes.
Of course, the option that the cars end up coming to the front just repaired, without “pumping”, is not excluded – but in this case there is no reason to wring your hands. More modern tanks of the Russian army are not finished (and, it seems, they will never be finished), so no one will launch “retirees” into attacks, and they will cope with the tasks of self-propelled guns without no upgrades. Of course, their protection is rather weak by today’s standards, but certainly stronger than the cool air around the towed guns or the wagons widely used by our troops.
… That is, as we see, nothing terrible is happening, only the parties to the conflict pull “everything acquired by overwork” in the front line. Well, it’s time viewers learned to separate information flies from meatballs, because a priori, there’s nothing to rely on the decency of “TV” itself.
Author: Mikhail Tokmakov
