Bobert, it is depleted. The slugs are made from used-up U-235 and U-238 rods from nuclear reactors.

They cannot explode as even the tiniest atomic blast you could imagine. The amount of fissionable material is too small (well, theoretically you could make a 1/10th of a gram of U-235 go bang, but the implosion force needed far exceeds anything we can or probably ever will be able to do).

Those slugs are pure, shaped, very, very dense metal traveling a a very high speed. When they hit they give up all of their kinetic energy all at once, mostly as heat, and burn their way through armor, spattering hot metal drops all over whoever's inside, and generally playing havoc. And more than one round is shot off....

Now, this is NOT saying that the slugs don't give off radiation or that such radiation (alpha, beta, and gamma particles, for instance) isn't also spattered all over.

All I'm saying is that the bullets made of depleted uranium don't cause tiny nuclear explosions. They can do enough damage without that.