Cluster bombs away--for good?

Landmines and cluster bombs came under intense scrutiny during one of today's sessions at the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington. The two forms of munitions have a lot in common: they're deadly, they're completely indiscriminate, their mortal threat will persist for decades after their deployment, and just now they are mostly a threat to farm animals and small children. A final similarity? The Bush administration has firmly positioned itself in opposition to attempts to ban both weapons.

The United States stood alone among all industrialized, advanced powers, and stood with bedfellows as strange as Burma and China, in its resistance to the worldwide ban on landmines. Now as a growing global movement organizes in a parallel "threat" to the future deployment of cluster bombs, the U.S. again is standing, virtually alone, in the way of a world-wide ban.

As it lobbies to begin production of new "improved" landmines after a ten year hiatus on the production of such anti-personnel weapons (APLs), the Bush administration supports the continued use of cluster bombs even as just war types argue that the weapons are just about never morally appropriate for deployment in combat. The Israeli military came under intense criticism for its decision to drop cluster bombs over Hezbollah targets in civilian areas during its 2006 Lebanon incursion.

In use, a cluster bomb opens after it has been deployed releasing hundreds of airborne bomblets which flutter or drift to the ground before detonating, releasing a deadly cloud of shrapnel, napalm or molten metal which can cover three football fields. Indiscriminately deadly in wartime, the cluster bomb also suffers a high dud rate of 5 to 15 percent. That means that more than 1 million unexploded bomblets are now scattered around Southern Lebanon where they are often discovered by curious children or unwary farmers. More than 300 casualties from unexploded cluster bomblets have already been recorded there. Clean up efforts could persist for decades.

Laos, where the U.S. deployed 260 million cluster bomblets in 580,000 bombing missions during its undeclared war there between 1964 and 1973, still endures hundreds of deaths and casualties each year from cluster bombs. As many as 12,000 civilians, 40 percent of them children, have been killed in Laos since the end of the Vietnam War, and the dying will continue until all the bomblets have detonated or been demined.

As one participant at the cluster bomb conference observed: "I think we can call cluster bombs terrorism, let's call it what it is."

With I billion bomblets in out stockpile, the U.S. is largest producer, user, and exporter of these weapons in the world. Legislation currently pending before Congress, the Cluster Munition Civilian Protection Act, would require that no cluster bombs could be deployed in combat without reducing the weapons dud rate to 1 percent. That would essentially prohibit the use of the U.S.'s entire current stockpile.

The legislation also prohibits the use of U.S.-made cluster munitions in civilian-populated areas. It states that cluster munitions can only be used against "clearly defined military targets and will not be used where civilians are known to be present or in areas normally inhabited by civilians." This provision applies equally to use by U.S. armed forces and by any other government that receives U.S.-made cluster munitions, which must sign an agreement to this effect.

The bill finally requires that if cluster munitions are used, the president must submit to Congress within 30 days a plan for cleaning up unexploded submunition duds within 30 days of their deployment. Naturally the Pentagon is using the war on terror to justify its need for this particular weapon.

Not everyone agrees that that argument justifies the continued use of a weapon that so callously inflicts such a persitent threat to noncombatants. "The real threat to the military is that civil society is involved in these discussions," says Lora Lumpe of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines. "They don't want people, they don't want you, they don't want me, to say that the military can't do just anything they want to do in our name. They didn't want us involved with chemical weapons; they didn't want us involved with landmines, and now they don't want us involved with cluster bombs."

Cluster bomb banners hope to sign a global treaty on the anniversary of the Landmine Ban Treaty (still unratified by the U.S.) on December 3, 2008 in Oslo. More than 100 nations are on board already, and there is a chance that a new presidential election in the U.S. will mean the next administration will be willing to one day join them.