Cluster Bombs

excerpted from the book

Rogue State

A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

by William Blum

Common Courage Press, 2000

The Pentagon puts them in the category of "combined effects munition." The manufacturer describes them as an "all-purpose, air-delivered cluster weapons system." Human rights and anti-landmine campaigners say that cluster bombs are indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction, and they have requested that they be placed explicitly on the Geneva Convention list of banned weapons.

Cluster bombs are ingeniously designed. After being dropped from a plane, the heavy weapon breaks open in midair, scattering 200 or more "bomblets", the size of soda cans. The bomblets then explode, shooting out hundreds of high-velocity shards of jagged steel shrapnel, saturating a very wide area. One description of cluster bombs says "they can spray incendiary material to start fires, chunks of molten metal that can pierce tanks and other armor, or shrapnel that can slice with ease through 1/4-inch plate-or human flesh and bone."

The yellow bomblets are aided by little parachutes which slow down their descent and disperse them so they hit plenty of what the manufacturer calls "soft targets"; i.e., people-military or civilian.

According to the Defense Department, US warplanes dropped 1,100 cluster bombs upon Yugoslavia in 1999, each carrying 202 bomblets. Thus, 222,200 of these weapons were propelled across the land. With a stated failure rate of 5 percent (other reports claim rates of 10 to 30 percent), this means that about 11,110 cluster bomblets were left Iying unexploded, ready to detonate on contact, in effect becoming landmines. Some members of the US military oppose signing The International Treaty Banning the Use, Production, Stockpiling and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Landmines because the treaty's definition of land mines is broad enough to cover cluster bombs. Under the treaty, an anti-personnel mine is one "designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person and that will incapacitate, injure or kill one or more persons." Human rights activists argue that since manufacturers of cluster bombs calculate "dud rates" into their design, the bombs can be included under the definition. The treaty entered into force on March 1, 1999 without the United States being a signatory.

Unexploded bomblets are even more of a concern than regular landmines because children in particular are drawn to the colorful devices with the little parachutes. (On April 24, 1999, even before the bombing of Yugoslavia had come to an end, five young brothers playing with an unexploded cluster bomb were killed, and two cousins severely injured, near Doganovic in southern Kosovo.) Landmines are usually laid down in more or less expected places, whereas unexploded bomblets can wind up in the back yards of homes, school playgrounds, anywhere. Moreover, the laying down of landmines is often tracked or mapped, the fields marked, not so with unexploded cluster bomblets. Some of them are designed to self-destruct after a set time period, but whether any of those scattered about Yugoslavia are of this type has not been reported. In any event, the Landmine Treaty does not recognize the distinction between "smart" and "dumb" landmines.

When the bombing ended in June, many areas of villages were left virtually uninhabitable, in desperate need of explosive experts who could find and incapacitate all the volatile live remnants. This will hinder agricultural and economic rehabilitation well into the future. Shortly after the end of the bombing, as people began to return to their villages and farms, more incidents involving the unexploded devices occurred, including one in which two British peacekeeping soldiers and three Albanians lost their lives in a Kosovo village.

The words of a Yugoslav orthopedist: "Neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs. They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. It's awful, awful."

Unexploded ordnance-mainly cluster bombs-are still killing and maiming people in Laos a generation after the massive US carpet. bombing of 1965-73. It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the two million tons of bombs dropped by the United States failed to explode, and there have been 11,000 accidents so far. "More than half of the victims die almost immediately following the accident. If the victim survives, the explosion often causes severe wounding and trauma, especially to the upper half of the body." Vietnam and Cambodia harbor similar dangers. As does the Persian Gulf. A 1999 Human Rights Watch report says that of an estimated 24 to 30 million bomblets dropped during the Gulf War, between 1.2 and 1.5 million did not explode, leading so far to 1,220 Kuwaiti and 400 Iraqi civilian deaths.

The effects of the unexploded munitions from the bombing of Yugoslavia have reached beyond that country's borders. Two months after the war's end, 161 explosive devices, including 97 bomblets, had been recovered by NATO minesweepers in the Adriatic Sea. The munitions caused deaths and injuries to Italian fishermen and cost others the majority of their year's profits. A fishing ban was imposed in the Adriatic to allow minesweepers to collect more of the devices. In addition, tourists abandoned the beaches along the Adriatic coast during the summertime for fear of encountering unexploded bombs.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is working on the development of newer and better cluster bombs-higher tech, heat-seeking, spraying superhot shrapnel, greater lethality...a cluster bomb suitable for the new millennium. America deserves nothing less.

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