Are cluster bombs good for us?
Why we posted this: The British prime minister has been praised for signing an anti-cluster bomb agreement. But this attempt to clean up warfare may not matter much and may even backfire.
The original story:
Cluster bomb ban treaty approved
BBC Online
28 May, 2008
Summary of the story:
An international conference in Dublin has listened to the campaigners. It has agreed to a treaty that bans the manufacture, storing and use of cluster bombs. It is being heralded as a means of making war more acceptable in the 21st century. Gordon Brown has commented, “I am confident that this agreement is in line with British interests and values, and makes the world a safer place”.
Some air-dropped or ground-launched cluster bomb submunitions fail to detonate on impact. Once a conflict has ended they become de facto anti-personnel mines killing and maiming people.
However, Russia, the US or China, the main users of cluster weapons, failed to even attend the conference and will not support the ban.
livingissues comment:
Sometimes cluster bombs kill civilians long after a conflict has ended. Last year it is estimated almost 400 civilians were so killed. That’s tragic. But it does not necessarily make the case for a ban, as was usefully argued by Oliver Kamm in The Times. Across Europe we are still discovering unexploded ordinance from the Second World War more than 60 years on. Yet nobody, except pacifists, proposes to ban the use of all types of bombs, and few think the war was not worth fighting.
Clearly cluster bombs are deadly weapons, but war is a deadly business. Cluster bombs have a military purpose. They destroy and disperse tank formations or airfields, perhaps even breakup troop formations. If cluster weapons are banned other equally lethal means will be used to do the same job.
It might be better if the politicians concerned themselves with ensuring their wars were justified, cleaning up battlefields afterwards, and obeying the long-established Geneva Conventions, than with trying to pretend that war can be sanitized.
