Fort Carson On Roster of Contaminated Army Bases

Hundreds of pounds of depleted uranium likely buried at Fort Carson, Army says
The Gazette
By: Tom Roeder
Published: October 18, 2015

The Army says 12,405 acres may have been contaminated during the Davy Crockett days. Fort Carson is joined on the roster by installations in Hawaii, Washington state, Georgia, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and California.

The Davy Crockett weapon in this undated Army photo featured a 51-pound warhead that packed a nuclear punch. To train with the weapon and aim it in combat, troops used a 1-pound spotting round made from depleted uranium. An estimated 1,400 depleted uranium rounds were fired at Fort Carson.

The Cold War legacy of nuclear waste at Fort Carson was quietly exposed in a routine application by the Army for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission permit to leave uranium buried on the post.

Depleted uranium, as much as 600 pounds, is thought to be in the ground at several sites from training shells fired in a 1960s classified program to give soldiers a nuclear- tipped bazooka called the Davy Crockett, according to Army documents. The training rounds were smaller spotting shells to train crews on the use of the atomic weapon without the big boom and a mushroom cloud. The Davy Crockett was never fired in combat.

Since discovering the uranium munitions in Hawaii in 2005, the service has done 10 years of detective work to figure out which bases participated in the testing program.
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