"I remember gazing down as the plane started to descend and feeling deep sorrow. So many giant craters. The scarred land is a reminder of America’s deadly mistake, a reminder of the lives we took," Mike Burton recalled in a recent opinion piece in USA Today. The US veteran served in the air force during the Vietnam War and has since become a leading advocate in the fight to ban cluster bombs and destroy existing stockpiles.
Land of bombs
The country he is talking about in his recollection is Laos. During the Vietnam War, the Southeast Asian country became a major target for the US air force tasked with cutting supply lines between Laos and North Vietnam.
The tactic of using cluster bombs did not work, Mr Burton writes in his article, but US action has ruined and continues to ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Laos to this day.
Between 1964 and 1973, the Americans flew nearly 600,000 bombing runs over Laos, which means dropping some explosive device every eight minutes on average, for nearly a decade. Pentagon statistics from 1973 reveal that more than two million tons of cluster bombs and other explosives were deployed, making the Southeast Asian state the most heavily bombed nation in world history.
Of all the explosive devices, cluster bombs have caused the greatest devastation, with some 260 million dropped on Laos alone, 80 million of which have not exploded to date, posing a serious threat to civilians, especially children. According to the International Red Cross, 300 civilians die each year in the Southeast Asian country from unexploded cluster bombs scattered around in rice paddies, playgrounds and other areas across the country, according to a report by the International Red Cross.
In Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – bombings also affected the latter country, where 20,000 people were killed between 1979 and 2023 – some 40 per cent of civilian casualties are children.
Apart from the above-mentioned countries, the United States has also used the weapons that is banned by more than a hundred states in countries such as Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, Iraq and Afghanistan. Parties in the civil wars raging in Syria and Yemen have also used cluster munitions, maiming or killing a large number of civilians. The Soviet Union, and later Russia, have also deployed such ordnance, and in the war in Ukraine both sides accuse the other of having used cluster bombs.
Why are cluster bombs so dangerous?
It is no coincidence that the use and manufacturing of cluster bombs have been banned by more than a hundred countries. They are munitions, usually dropped from aircraft, but also launched from artillery systems, and the projectiles contain hundreds of small bomblets. Once at the right altitude, the projectiles release these submunitions, which land on the target area with the help of a parachute-like structure. They detonate on impact. If they go off.
The greatest danger is posed by unexploded bomblets, which behave like landmines: innocent civilians can step on them or otherwise come into contact with them at any time, and tragedy is inevitable.
Bloody exercise continues
On 7 July, the White House confirmed information that had been circulating in press reports for days: the United States will supply cluster bombs to Ukraine. Since then, regardless of party lines, media across the globe and most of the world's governments have expressed their disapproval over the decision and strived to dissuade Joe Biden from supplying weapons that would inflict suffering for Ukrainian civilians for years. The move is justified by saying that Kyiv needs the cluster bombs to be able to more effectively break Russian defensive lines during their counter-offensive.
Washington has tried to explain the transfer of the controversial weapons by saying that US-developed cluster munitions have very low failure, or dud rate, slightly more than two per cent. Compared to this, Russian devices have dud rates of between 30 and 40 per cent.
However, The New York Times pointed out in an article that the figure from Pentagon is not realistic, as the shipment will include stockpiled older bombs with a much higher dud rate than the more recently manufactured munitions, with failure rate reaching more than 14 per cent or even 23 per cent in some estimates. US officials have drawn on a rather surprising argument in a bid to whitewash the arms supply: if Russia is using them, why shouldn't Ukraine?
Russia has already spread tens of millions of these bomblets across Ukrainian territory. So we have to ask ourselves: Is Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions on that same land actually that much of an addition of civilian harm, given that that area is going to have to be de-mined regardless?
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan argued.
Where are the boundaries?
However, most of the world does not agree with this argument.
Joe Biden should not be dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine,
Donald Trump warned recently. The former US president pointed out that these munitions can kill and maim innocent Ukrainian civilians for decades to come, long after the war. The World Bank estimates that Ukraine's full demining package will cost more than 37 billion US dollars. This amount could increase significantly if Kyiv starts to use cluster bombs – not to mention the surge in civilian casualties.
That the United States is prepared to provide a weapon so clearly flouting international humanitarian law – and still causing civilian casualties – contradicts the principled commitment of our allies who have signed the treaty. It demands the question, 'Where are our boundaries?'
as asked in an opinion piece penned by Titus Peachey, a steering committee member of a US organisation campaigning to ban cluster munitions. As we follow the evolution of US foreign policy since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine – especially in the case of arms supplies – the answer to Mr Peachey's question becomes increasingly clear: probably nowhere. For Washington, there is no line it wouldn't cross when it comes to defeating Russia – at least it appears so for the moment.
