Poison and promise

Tatjana, a 38-year-old civil servant from Belgrade, pregnant with her second child, was anxious. It was a sunny day in May 2019 and she had agreed to meet for a coffee, to take part in my ethnographic research on the intersection of private and public remembrance of the 1999 NATO bombing in Serbia. Back then, she lived on a small, suburban farm, without a bomb shelter, located near a military facility that had been exposed to daily aerial attacks. Despite Tatjana’s willingness to share her experiences, she was extremely distracted.

Waiting for the results of what seemed like a routine prenatal test was preoccupying Tatjana. As far as I knew, her first pregnancy had gone well and nothing suggested that she was an especially nervous person. I attempted to reassure her, highlighting her familiarity with the process. But she caught me off guard, explaining that she wasn’t worried about her personal health or age but the risks of depleted uranium. With heightened anxiety in her voice, she said, ‘I’m so afraid that something might go wrong because of everything that it does.’

That spring, Serbia marked two decades since the bombing. Throughout 78 days of commemoration, the bombing returned through not only speeches and ceremonies but also relentless media attention to its lasting aftereffects. Depleted uranium played a central role in this discourse. A byproduct of the uranium enrichment process in fuel production at nuclear power plants, depleted uranium is a highly dense metal used in the arms-industry’s production of armour-piercing ammunition.

During the 1999 NATO bombing, US troops used bullets made with depleted uranium in several areas of Serbia and Kosovo. While not widely discussed before 2019, on this big commemorative year, it became the keyword: an invisible radioactive particle, planted by the aggressors to stay in bodies and other elements of nature forever. Throughout the commemorative period, depleted uranium was closely tied to an epidemic of cancer in Serbia, the invisible contamination referenced in countless headlines and talk shows. By the time Tatjana and I shared a coffee, depleted uranium was no longer just a technical term or a wartime past. Its radioactive nature had become a common explanation for why ordinary life feels precarious, and why even a pregnancy test could be haunted by a war from twenty years ago.

From contamination to sovereignty

In the space of just a few years, however, the meaning of ‘nuclear’ in Serbia changed dramatically. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, destabilizing European energy markets and driving up gas prices, drove the emergence of a new language of crisis around energy supplies, dependence and security. Nuclear energy has regained political appeal across Europe, reappearing as a possible path toward energy independence. The anxieties of invisible contamination and long-term health risks in Serbia may not have disappeared but have been pushed aside by a more immediate political urgency: energy security.

In official rhetoric, nuclear ceased to signify past injury and instead began to promise future sovereignty. In April 2024, the Ministry of Mining and Energy opened a formal cooperation track with EDF France, presenting it as part of Serbia’s energy transition and low-carbon future. In July 2024, the turn became even more visible when five ministries signed a memorandum with scientific institutions and state energy actors, including the Vinča Nuclear Research Institute, SRBATOM (the Serbian Radiation, Nuclear Safety and Security Directorate), EPS (Electric Power of Serbia) and EMS (Elektromreža Srbije), to develop nuclear capacities. By November 2024, parliament had amended a 35-year-old energy law that previously prohibited the construction of nuclear power plants, enabling the state to undertake potential measures to build a nuclear facility.

While changes in policy and ideological directions are common in Serbia, they generally take place once ruling structures shift across the political spectrum. What is curious in this case is that this development unfolded under the same regime: the long period of political dominance shaped by the SNS (Serbian Progressive Party) and its leader, Aleksandar Vučić. If such opposite meanings can be attached to the same issue without undermining political credibility, then, it seems, what matters is not the object itself – uranium or nuclear energy in general – but the authority to define what it means.

An incoherent narrative

For years after 1999, depleted uranium hovered on the margins of public discourse, periodically mentioned but never fully clarified. The issue had greater resonance internationally than in the Balkans. In 2001, six Italian peacekeeping soldiers, who had served during the 1990s Yugoslav wars in Bosnia or Kosovo, died from leukaemia. Their deaths, labelled as ‘Balkan syndrome’, were linked to depleted uranium exposure. In Serbia, however, the subject remained largely silent.

The turning point came in 2015, when oncologist Professor Slobodan Čikarić publicly linked Serbia’s cancer mortality rates – at that point within the top three in Europe – to the 1999 bombing. Despite the announcement’s alarming nature, the issue did not immediately gain widespread public consensus. And when the media began to circulate reports, the news was contradictory: some doctors and public figures presented depleted uranium as the hidden cause of rising cancer rates, damaged fertility and Serbia’s broader demographic decline; others disputed such sweeping claims or tried to introduce more cautious interpretations. The result was an atmosphere of confusion, in which the general public’s fears could grow.

Gradually, the incoherent narrative started to solidify. However, rather than forming around scientific evidence, the growing involvement of political and media institutions began shaping what depleted uranium meant. From 2017 onward, the focus moved from technical questions for physicists and radiation specialists to moral and affective issues of injustice and national suffering. Pro-government media began amplifying the appeals of neuro-oncologist Danica Grujičić for a state laboratory that would finally uncover the ‘truth’ about the consequences of the bombing. National television was among the first to officially politicize depleted uranium in an episode of the talk show Upitnik, when Dr. Grujičić appeared alongside the Minister of Environmental Protection, Goran Trivan, who promised to resolve issues surrounding the consequences of NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The potential environmental and health problems posed by depleted uranium became a public drama in which truth was something the state could mediate, authorize and, eventually, deliver.

The first political solution came in 2018, when the Serbian parliament established the Committee for Research of the Consequences of NATO Bombing, publicly framing it as a body with the duty to provide truth to the nation. Members of this body were also members of parliament and the majority not professionally related to the issue. Soon thereafter, several ministries created another body: the Coordinated Body for Establishing the Consequences of NATO Bombing. With these two institutions, the matter decisively shifted from scientific language to that of state action.

Even though scientific knowledge did not completely disappear from view, depleted uranium attained more meaning through political positioning. Expertise became blurred: the voices of nuclear physicists disappeared from public discourse, especially those critical of the governmental narrative, while medical doctors, lawyers, politicians and quasi-academic figures who expressed readiness to delegate the issue to the state were granted visibility. By the twentieth anniversary, tabloids and television no longer treated depleted uranium as an issue to be investigated but as a looming national disaster already underway. Headlines announced: ‘World Experts: NATO destroyed the genetic material of Serbs with depleted uranium’; and ‘“Balkan Syndrome” killed between 10,000 and 18,000 people in Serbia’. Different actors offered different casualty figures, causal chains and timescales of harm.

But coherence at the level of data was less important than coherence at the level of feeling. The cumulative effect was to make depleted uranium legible as the main symbol of Serbian suffering at NATO’s hands: invisible, slow-moving, inherited and, therefore, terrifying. Fears like Tatjana’s became part of ordinary language through which precarious futures were imagined. Depleted uranium was considered a threat that could accumulate in soil, dust, and in the bodies of pregnant women and their children.

Loaded cultural significance

But Tatjana’s fears and those of others, which had bypassed scientific facts, were vulnerable to further uncertainties. By early 2020, when COVID-19 broke out, the hierarchy of danger shifted, pushing depleted uranium aside. The long-term threat of radioactivity gave way to an immediate danger woven into everyday life through hospitals, case counts, masks, emergency measures and vaccines. Then two years later, Europe’s dependence on gas from an increasingly aggressive Russia influenced plans in some quarters for a ‘nuclear renaissance’, including Serbia. What had recently stood for poisoned land, damaged bodies and endangered futures reappeared as a promise of security, sovereignty and protection. But how is it possible for the same language describing nuclear to move so quickly between fear and reassurance, between injury and salvation?

Part of the answer lies in the peculiar public perception of radioactivity. It isn’t something most people can directly verify or measure in everyday life. Radioactivity has to be explained, represented, narrated and imagined. For that reason, it rarely enters public life as a stable object of shared knowledge. In the case of depleted uranium in Serbia, its meaning was mediated through doctors, television hosts, parliamentary bodies, ministers, tabloid headlines and official statements. It didn’t enter public life as a neutral object; it arrived already loaded with historical anxieties and cultural associations.

Apart from the international ‘Balkan Syndrome’ investigation into the health impacts of depleted uranium, nuclear radiation in general carries long-term associations with the Cold War. This legacy is embodied in fixed images of the destruction caused by the atomic bomb, dystopic pop-culture representations of nuclear apocalypse, the Chernobyl disaster, the Fukushima TEPCO disaster, invisible contamination, and the sense that entire futures can be destroyed by forces ordinary people cannot see or control. This makes nuclear language unusually mobile and powerful. It can be attached to poisoned soil, rising cancer rates, damaged fertility and endangered children, just as it can be a source of energy independence, low-carbon transition, and national protection. What gives nuclear its force is, therefore, not only what it materially is, but the fact that its meaning is never exact without mediators. At the same time, its emotional charge is already historically prepared. Its meaning depends on those who claim the authority to interpret it.

Persuasion over contradiction

In the context of the Yugoslav wars, addressing Serbian victims has been a troubled matter. Within the dominant moral grammar of transitional justice, Serbia has been cast above all as a perpetrator, with large internationally resonant war crimes to its name such as the Srebrenica massacre and the Siege of Sarajevo. The suffering of ethnic Serbs has remained politically awkward, morally ambiguous and often suspect. Serbian victims are not entirely absent from public discourse, but they rarely occupy the position of clear, legible innocence. Depleted uranium became useful as it offered a way around that impasse. As an invisible, delayed and seemingly indiscriminate form of harm, it could stand for a wounded national body without reopening all the messy questions of wartime responsibility. It made it possible to speak of poisoned children, damaged genes, sick bodies and contaminated land – in other words, of innocent life under attack. Once articulated through committees, official promises, televised debates and anniversary rituals, the ‘truth’ about depleted uranium could finally nominate a form of suffering that had long remained difficult to claim.

Once political authorities, state media and officially sanctioned bodies had gained the upper hand in defining what depleted uranium meant, contradiction no longer posed a serious obstacle. The same nuclear vocabulary could be made to signify cancer in one moment, and energy security, sovereignty and protection in another. What made this possible was not the coherence of the evidence but control over its interpretation. Nuclear ceased to be only a question of contamination or energy. It became a way of telling a story about the collective body itself – its suffering, its vulnerability and its future.

And interpretations of nuclear teach us a valuable lesson about contemporary forms of populist governance that do not need consistency at the level of facts but authority at the level of meaning. Populism defines the people as vulnerable, identifies hidden or external threats, and reserves the right to name both danger and protection for itself. In that sense, the successfully navigated contradiction between uranium as a source of harm and uranium as a source of protection is a sign of how a political meaning is being controlled. What matters is not consistency in what uranium means, but continuity in who gets to decide what it means. The same power can make both stories persuasive, because it has become strong enough to decide what the collective body should fear and what it should trust. What remains constant is not the meaning of nuclear, but the position of those who speak in the name of a threatened collective and present themselves as its guardians.

Malleable meaning

The power over what nuclear means became visible once again in March 2025, around the twenty-sixth anniversary of the NATO bombing. By then, Serbia had been shaken for months by student-led protests, triggered by the deadly collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy on 1 November 2024. The protest was increasingly directed not only at the government but also at national television, the main information institution co-opted by the government. Protesters blockaded the broadcaster’s buildings, accusing it of distorting or minimizing the demonstrations. It was in that atmosphere, amid one of the deepest challenges to Vučić’s rule in years, that depleted uranium returned to Radio Television Serbia in the form of U-238 – Depleted Uranium, a documentary commemorating the NATO bombing. The same state-backed channels through which nuclear meaning had recently been shaped as a promise of energy sovereignty, when authority was under pressure, reactivated it as a language of trauma, injustice and unresolved national suffering.

Nuclear has never had to mean one thing consistently. Its value lies precisely in its malleability: as a sign through which power could once again tell the collective body what threatened it, what had wounded it and why it still needs protection. As the twenty-seventh anniversary of the NATO bombing approaches, and Serbia heads toward elections, it remains to be seen whether depleted uranium and nuclear energy will again assist in shaping public reality, at the moment when the country may actually decide something about its future.