Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

Instead of supporting a ceasefire and peace talks, the Biden Administration continues to pursue an extremely hawkish approach to the war in Ukraine. This is exemplified in one particularly disturbing decision which President Biden acknowledged was a “very difficult” call. That is the decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions.

Cluster munitions are bombs, rockets and artillery shells that contain submunitions that, when deployed, can leave behind unexploded ordnance. The unexploded ordnance can be buried in land, hidden from view, or lay in plain sight.

Children are the most common victims. The submunitions can be mistaken for toys. As an attractive nuisance, they resemble a bell with a loop of ribbon at the end.

Very little pressure or movement can explode a submunition instantly. A mistaken move can lead to a triggering that can literally shred a human being. Like a flying landmine, they blow off arms and legs and inflict fatal wounds. Cluster munitions can remain lethal to civilians for generations. After a war, when civilians return to a previous war zone, the bomblets are still there, lurking in subterranean fashion.

Cluster munitions are some of the nastiest, most savage weapons of modern warfare. The U.S. has already shipped these bombs to Ukraine and they are currently in use. Russia also has been widely using cluster munitions in Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Even before the new U.S., shipment, Human Rights Watch documented the use of cluster munitions by Ukraine between March and September 2022.

There is a 2008 U.N. Convention on Cluster Munitions that bans the use, sale or stockpiling of these weapons. The Convention has 111 state parties — countries that have agreed to be legally bound by its provisions. Twelve more states have signed but have not completed ratification. Among other states, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and 20 other NATO member states have all signed on. The United States, Russia and Ukraine are all holdouts. None have signed the Convention.

A big part of the reason these weapons have been banned is that more than half of those killed or injured by them are civilians. Their track record is a history of indiscriminate devastation. While new military technology is often touted by its partisans for its alleged accuracy, these bombs are the opposite. They are like a deadly mechanized spray over an area the size of a football field. Then there is the matter that many submunitions fail to explode on initial impact, leaving dangerous duds that can kill or maim for years to come unless the multiple bomblets are cleared and destroyed.

While the U.S. government has said the cluster munitions it is giving Ukraine fail less than 3% of the time, past use of the particular munitions the U.S. is providing suggests far greater failure rates. A 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service found that real-world cleanup operations “have frequently reported failure rates of 10% to 30%.”

Dud rates can be affected by the surfaces where submunitions land, as they need hard surfaces. It is entirely possible that you could have a higher dud rate if the submunitions are dropped in mud.

In a different context, the U.N. estimated that 40% of Israeli cluster bombs failed to explode on impact when Israel was fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. Large scale use resulted in a region infested with tens of thousands of unexploded submunitions.

Cluster munitions have now contaminated 24 countries including Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. NPR recently reported on the horrendous effects of cluster bombs on Laos. While an estimated 50,000 Laotian civilians were killed by cluster bombs during the Indochina War, about 20,000 civilians have been killed by cluster munitions since the war ended. It is estimated the Laotian dud rate was 30%.

Fifty years later, Laos has not reached the end of this nightmare. An estimated 80 million unexploded bombs remain. Between 1964-1973, the Americans flew 580,000 bombing runs over Laos and according to the Defense Department dumped 2,093,100 tons of ordnance on Laos. It is the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world. NPR reporter Lewis Simons says that to this day 1% of the dormant cluster bombs in Laos have been cleared even though the U.S. had pledged clearance.

The United States certainly could sign the Cluster Munitions Convention. The reasons given for use of the cluster munitions are lame. The primary reason given by the government is the temporary shortage of conventional artillery shells. We have a large back supply of cluster bombs. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, also has used the argument that Russia is using them which is a strange argument when claiming the moral high ground.

Do we really need to be sharing a disgusting weapon of war that has been condemned by a majority of the world’s nations as morally reprehensible?

Cluster munitions are not any kind of military game-changer. Russia has dug in and shifted to a long-term defensive strategy. It is time to recognize that the war between Russia and Ukraine is not winnable. It is stalemated. It may go back and forth with one side making incremental gains or sustaining losses but we can be certain of one thing: it will generate enormous human casualties for both sides.

As someone who sees Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a continuing war crime, nothing has changed my mind about that but I have been bothered by the too-optimistic perspective of too much war reporting. War gets sanitized and the story is told with the true horror removed. The victory that never comes is right around the corner. This pattern is all too familiar for those who lived through the Vietnam War.

Instead of pushing for a new Cold War against Russia, there is a need to de-escalate both to reduce the threat of a larger European land war and to reduce the risk of nuclear war. At least during the original Cold War there was recognition and concern about nuclear weapons and there was a nuclear freeze movement. By all appearances, the United States has lost that concern.

Cluster munitions should have been removed and banned from the battlefield long before now. Their evil became apparent during the Indochina War in the 1960s-1970s. The failure to ban cluster munitions is part of a broader failure of arms control. The only winner is the military-industrial complex which profits off every weapon system no matter how debased.

]]>