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cluster bombs
War Forever. War Everywhere. War Left Behind.
The destruction of our world is the warfare that consumes so much of it and the reverberating violence each conflict leaves in its wake.
Sep 23, 2024
Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America’s post-9/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, are hardly the first to offer such lessons. Prior wars left us plenty to learn from that could have led this country to respond differently after that September day when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Instead, we ignored history and, as a result, among so many other horrific things, left our weaponry — explosives, small arms, you name it — in war zones to kill and maim yet more people there for generations to come.
Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.
That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.
Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.
A Deadly Glossary
Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.
Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.
As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.
Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.
Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”
According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.
How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.
After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)
Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.
Afghanistan, Every Step You Take
At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.
Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.
When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.
The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)
And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.
From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.
When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.
Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.
In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.
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Bipartisan House Amendment to Ban US Cluster Bomb Exports Fails
"The legacy of cluster bombs is misery, death, and expensive cleanup after generations of use," said Rep. Betty McCollum. "These weapons should be eliminated from our stockpiles."
Sep 27, 2023
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected a bipartisan amendment to the 2024 military spending bill that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions—which are banned under a treaty ratified by more than 100 nations but not the United States—to any country.
The House voted 160-269 on the amendment to next year's National Defense Authorization Act co-sponsored by Reps. Sarah Jacobs (D-Calif.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). Seventy-five Democrats voted for the measure, while 137 voted "no"; 85 GOP lawmakers approved the amendment while 132 opposed it.
The vote took place less than a week after U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States would send more cluster munitions to Ukraine.
"Many of us have this idea of American exceptionalism, that America is set apart from the rest of the world. Well, that's certainly true when it comes to cluster munitions and not in the way that we want," Jacobs said on the House floor before Wednesday's vote.
"America is an outlier. We are one of the few countries that hasn't become party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and that is a grave mistake," she asserted, referring to a landmark 2008 treaty, to which 112 nations are parties.
Jacobs continued:
These weapons maim and kill indiscriminately. In 2021, the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor found that over 97% of casualties from cluster bomb remnants were civilians, and two-thirds of those were children. That's because these bomblets are small, colorful, and interesting shapes, so to children they look like toys. So when kids find these unexploded bomblets stuck in trees, or in the water, or simply on the ground and try to pick them up and play with them, they could lose a limb or their life in the blink of an eye.... These weapons are unpredictable, and the human cost is far too high to justify.
Since the end of the Vietnam War half a century ago, unexploded cluster munitions have killed approximately 20,000 civilians in Laos, where the U.S. dropped more bombs than all sides in World War II combined. The U.S. rained as many as 270 million cluster bombs on Laos, and less than 1% of the unexploded bomblets have been cleared since. They are still killing civilians today.
"These cluster bombs are indiscriminate," Gaetz said on the House floor Wednesday. "They've killed tens of thousands of people... and when this is all done, we'll be right back here on the floor appropriating money to de-mine the cluster bombs that we're now sending, which seems ludicrous to me."
"These cluster bombs are indiscriminate. They've killed tens of thousands of people."
Since Vietnam, the U.S. has used cluster bombs in wars including the 1999 NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia; the 1991 Desert Storm war in Iraq and Kuwait; and in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen during the so-called War on Terror. U.S. cluster munitions have been linked to birth defects, miscarriages, cancers, and other ailments.
Earlier this year, the U.S. began sending artillery-fired cluster munitions to Ukraine. Russian invaders and Ukrainian homeland defenders have both killed and wounded soldiers and civilians with cluster bombs during the war.
"The decision by the Biden administration to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine in my opinion was unnecessary and a sad mistake," McCollum told her House colleagues Wednesday. "The legacy of U.S. cluster munitions... undermines our moral authority and places the U.S. in a position that directly contradicts 23 of our NATO allies who have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions."
"The legacy of cluster bombs is misery, death, and expensive cleanup after generations of use," McCollum added. "These weapons should be eliminated from our stockpiles."
"Sending these weapons anywhere makes us complicit in unavoidable civilian harm and creates blowback that undermines our national security."
Last week, Biden informed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the United States will provide Kyiv with long-range missiles with cluster munition warheads.
"Let's be clear," Jacobs added. "This isn't about one country, this is not about Ukraine. This is about protecting civilian lives and ensuring our national security all over the world. Because sending these weapons anywhere makes us complicit in unavoidable civilian harm and creates blowback that undermines our national security."
Multiple efforts by lawmakers to ban the export of U.S. cluster munitions have failed to advance. Earlier this year, the GOP-controlled House Rules Committee voted down a resolution proposed by Omar and Jacobs (D-Calif.), while backing another led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—whose controversial sponsorship doomed the proposal.
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Cluster Bombs Killed, Wounded Nearly 1,000 Civilians in 2022 as 73 Countries Refused to Join Global Ban
"It's unconscionable that civilians are still dying from cluster munition attacks 15 years after these weapons were outlawed," said one advocate.
Sep 05, 2023
The refusal of countries including Russia, Ukraine, and the United States to end the use and transfer of cluster munitions caused nearly 1,000 civilian deaths and injuries in 2022, according to the latest international report on the use of the widely banned weapons.
In the Cluster Munition Monitor 2023 report on Tuesday, a coalition including Human Rights Watch (HRW), Humanity & Inclusion, and the Colombian Campaign to Ban Landmines reported that cluster munitions killed or wounded at least 1,172 people last year.
Nearly 1,000 people were killed or injured by cluster bomb attacks—including 890 in Ukraine, which has been under invasion by Russia since February 2022—while at least 185 people were killed or wounded by the remnants of cluster munitions.
Cluster munitions explode in the air after being fired by rockets or aircraft and can disperse numerous submunitions across a wide area, creating de facto landmines in residential neighborhoods and other places frequented by civilians and making the bombs deadly for years after they initially explode.
The "immediate and long-term civilian harm and suffering" caused by cluster munitions are the reason they have been banned by 112 countries that have ratified the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, said Mary Wareham, arms advocacy director at HRW.
"It's unconscionable that civilians are still dying from cluster munition attacks 15 years after these weapons were outlawed," she said in a statement.
Twelve additional countries have signed the convention, signaling a willingness to abide by its ban on the use, production, stockpiling, or transfer of cluster munitions.
More than 70 countries, however, have yet to sign onto the agreement, leaving civilians in countries including Ukraine, Myanmar, and Syria in danger of the bombs.
In 2022, the remnants of cluster munitions killed or maimed civilians in Azerbaijan, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, with 71% of the casualties recorded among children, who sometimes mistake unexploded ordnance for harmless metal balls and pick them up to play with them.
There were no new cluster bomb attacks in Iraq in 2022, but 15 people were killed by their remnants and 25 were wounded, according to HRW. Ninety people were wounded by remnants in Yemen, where there were also no new attacks, and five were killed.
"This weapon must be stopped," said Beatrice Fihn, former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, after HRW's study was released.
According to HRW's report, Russia used old stockpiles of cluster munitions as well as new weapons in 2022 and the first half of this year. This past July, the U.S. began transferring to Ukraine cluster munitions that have a 6%-14% rate of delivering unexploded ordnance.
HRW says that the progress made by countries that have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions suggests that casualties caused by the bombs would be drastically reduced if the U.S. and other countries signed the treaty.
"The greatest obstacle to countries working to eradicate cluster munitions are governments that are unwilling to join the convention and that undermine its principles by using or transferring the weapon," Wareham said. "Overall, countries that have banned cluster munitions are making steady progress to destroy their stockpiles and clear contaminated areas, despite wide-ranging challenges."
There have been no confirmed reports of new use, production, or transfers of cluster munitions by any of the countries that have ratified the agreement.
State parties that have signed onto the treaty have collectively destroyed 99% of their cluster bomb stockpiles, amounting to 1.47 million munitions and 178.5 million submunitions.
Bulgaria destroyed the last of its stockpile in June, and Belgium destroyed 95% of its munitions in 2022. Eleven countries have retained live cluster munitions "for permitted research and training purposes," according to HRW.
"Cluster munitions are widely stigmatized weapons for ethical, legal, and humanitarian reasons," Wareham said. "Governments that buck the stigma against cluster munitions should reconsider their position in light of the terrible harm these weapons cause and join the international ban."
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