It was a Friday when the nightmare broke out. On March 26, 2003, a projectile hit a neighborhood in Baghdad. This bomb was not normal; When it reached the ground, it fired a huge amount of shrapnel, killing a woman and injuring four adults and five children. One of them, Ahmed, sustained injuries to his neck, stomach and right leg. This joke was a cluster bombs like those that the United States will send to Ukraine; a weapon that has been banned by more than a hundred countries because of its destructive power and which the governments of Biden, Putin and Zelenskyy have not condemned.
Death in a thousand parts
The operation is as simple as it is effective. And its use is as old as the shrapnel fired from ships-of-the-line in 18th-century naval battles; albeit with logical caveats. According to the United Nations, they are “conventional munitions intended to disperse or release other types of explosive submunitions” when they hit their target, “each munition weighing less than 20 kilograms”. Essentially, the projectile contains hundreds of bitter surprises that can range from anti-personnel grenades, shrapnel destined to finish off the infantry and even landmines. The latter are among the most dangerous, as they “contaminate” the area by not exploding while waiting for a person or vehicle to step on them.
At the military level, they are ideal for destroying infantry, as their explosion creates a huge cloud of small projectiles. However, they exhibit a multitude of problems that have led to them being banned in more than a hundred countries. The most remarkable thing is that between 10 and 40 percent of the subminisments hidden inside do not explode on impact. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, these “dummies” are becoming a death trap for civilians in the area. If they explode again, their radius of action, as the organization “Handicap International” puts it, corresponds to that of four soccer fields.
Ultimately, their error tolerance when triggering is very high. That is: its precision is lower than that of other explosives, which poses a risk to society. In fact, with these types of weapons, it is practically impossible to distinguish between military and civilian weapons when thrown in the middle of cities. The numbers are succinct: Since 1943, when they were first deployed, they have killed between 56,500 and 85,500 non-armed forces. The war in Ukraine has condensed this data; It is estimated that they have caused hundreds of deaths since 2022. The largest attack occurred in April, in which fifty civilians died and another three hundred were injured.
History of Cluster Bombs
The use of cluster munitions throughout history has been studied down to the millimeter. In 2008, the NGO Human Right Watch produced a detailed report analyzing the various conflicts that sparked them. And how could it be otherwise, it was during World War II when they first met. In 1943, the Soviet Air Force used them against German armored divisions with great success. The Third Reich then hit back with the SD-1 and SD-2 butterfly bombs in the Kursk ledge. The latter was particularly deadly, as its shrapnel could hit targets up to 150 yards away.
With the onset of the Cold War between 1965 and 1975, its use spread. The United States dropped around 790,000 cluster munitions in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. From them came 383 million submunitions and shrapnel, which meant not only the deaths but also the maiming of tens of thousands of civilians. The Soviets, for their part, used them extensively Afghanistan war. As detailed in the Human Right Watch report, from 1979 to 1989 they were fired from air force rockets at military and civilian targets.
Israel has also used it in recent decades. As Mauricio Amar of the BCN Department of Studies, Extension and Publications explains in his dossier on cluster munitions, the country attacked armed groups in Damascus in 1973 and in Lebanon in 1978 and 2006. “The last time it was during an invasion, and it claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians,” he specifies.
On the part of old Europe, France used them in various African territories, as did Britain in Afghanistan. “It is estimated that the UK and US dropped 61,000 cluster bombs containing 30 million submunitions during the Gulf War,” adds the expert.
The historical comparison is painful. During World War II, the British Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force (the British and American air forces) dropped 1.5 million explosives on Germany. Compared to the enormous number of cluster bombs that have been dropped recently, this number is ridiculous. And those to come, because Human Right Watch has evidence that Russia and Ukraine have been using them since 2014 to break down enemy resistance in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Not to mention how many times they’ve been in the news over the past two years.
When were cluster bombs banned?
The international community began addressing the issue of this type of explosives and ammunition in 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, with support from the UN. In the end, the treaty resulting from days of deliberations was ratified by 111 countries. Ban Ki Moonwho was Secretary General of the United Nations at the time, was optimistic: “Signing the convention will create a new international standard that will improve the protection of the civilian population, strengthen human rights and improve development prospects.”
According to Amar, the treaty committed states never to use cluster munitions, but also “not to develop, manufacture, acquire in any way, store, conserve or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly.”
In return, countries that joined the pact were required to destroy their stockpiles of cluster bombs, clean up any “contaminated” areas, assist the victims, and assist other nations affected by the pact’s effects. Since then, any violation of these points has been considered a “serious crime”.
However, Ukraine, Russia and the US have not ratified the document. The ban does not apply to them, nor does it apply to ninety other areas. There is no denying that since the treaty was signed, 99% of the world’s stockpiles of cluster munitions have been destroyed.
