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Weapons Technology

True cost of cluster bombs

  • 11 November 2006
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Cluster bombs are an effective weapon. Since entering widespread use in the 1960s they have caused 2000 military casualties. They have also killed or injured an estimated 98,000 civilians.

The grim figures come from the first global assessment of the impact of cluster bombs, released on 2 November by the UK-based support group Handicap International (HI). It is timed to precede talks this week in which Sweden, supported by Austria, Mexico and New Zealand, will propose a ban on cluster weapons to members of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Cluster weapons are bombs or shells that contain dozens of "submunitions" designed to scatter over a wide area and then explode. An estimated 10 per cent fail to detonate and remain lurking until someone stumbles across them, sometimes years after a conflict is over. One-third of the casualties are children.

Campaigns to ban cluster weapons have been hindered till now by a lack of reliable figures. HI's assessment reports 11,044 confirmed casualties in the 23 countries where cluster munitions have been used. "Today we can add another 800 to that number," HI researcher Katleen Maes told New Scientist, as new reports have come in from Iraq.

These figures are a gross underestimate, she says, as most countries do not separate submunitions casualties from those due to other "explosive remnants of war". On this basis, HI puts the true number of killed and wounded at around 100,000.

 
From issue 2577 of New Scientist magazine, 11 November 2006, page 6
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A Useful Spinning Technique!

By Roger

Sun Aug 31 12:55:27 BST 2008

So, such an unbiased organisation as Handicap International (the main driving force behind the campaign to ban cluster bombs), has found that the measurable rate of civilian casualties due to cluster bombs is 11,844 over approximately 40 years.

Hmm, that's not very scary; it makes civilian cluster bomb casualties rarer than being killed by lightning (approx. 2,000 p.a. Worldwide, or ~80,000 in 40 years.) However, HI shows us how to deal efficiently with such inconvenient data: just multiply by an arbitrary fudge factor!

More dubious, though, is the claim that an "estimated 10 per cent fail to detonate." The skeptical reader might suspect that a product with a 10% defect rate would cause the users to be quite unhappy. I don't know what the true rate is; obviously, it varies from weapon to weapon. However, for one of the standard cluster bombs in US inventory -- the CBU-97 -- the primary fuze and dual redundant self-destructs combine to give a failure rate well under 1%.

Which leads, perhaps, to the most obvious point: if we wish to reduce the civilian risk from unexploded explosive ordnance, then we might consider legislating against unreliably fuzed explosive ordnance, regardless of its tactical configuration, rather than legislating against a particular tactical configuration, regardless of its reliability.

In the current political climate this seems unlikely to fly though; you see, cluster bombs are the most effective weapon for SEAD (suppression of enemy air defences), and hence a ban on them is especially disadvantageous to the US. On the other hand, US fuzes (and Western fuzes generally) are far more reliable than ex-Soviet and Chinese fuzes, and hence a ban on unreliable fuzes would be advantageous to the US and disadvantageous to Third World dictators and Chinese adventurists (or might be, if they didn't just ignore it like the antipersonnel mine ban.)

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