Ban Cluster Weapons

[ORAC]

Letter in today's Times. Comments?

Dangers of cluster bombs in Iraq
From Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden and General Sir David Ramsbotham

Sir, The continuing casualties in Iraq are not confined to the anarchy on the streets (report, August 8). Unicef has reported that more than a thousand children have been injured by cluster and other unexploded munitions since the end of the short war.

During the fighting, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, argued that we had to use these indiscriminate weapons or put coalition forces at risk. In the event, we saw that such relatively ineffective munitions are no longer needed by the military, given the widespread availability of precision systems.

Weapons which by their nature kill and maim civilians long after a conflict is over have no place in a civilised country’s arsenal. We should now prohibit cluster munitions, whether dropped from the air or fired from the ground. The UK could set an example to the world by removing them from our inventory, just as we have already done for landmines.

Yours faithfully,
TIM GARDEN,
DAVID RAMSBOTHAM,
Saferworld,
46 Grosvenor Gardens, SW1W 0EB.
August 7.
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Biographies:

Timothy Garden read Physics at Oxford and International Relations at Cambridge. He flew fighters, bombers and helicopters during his 30 years in the military. His senior appointments in the Ministry of Defence included Assistant Chief of the Air Staff and Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Programmes). As an Air Marshal, he was the Commandant of the Royal College of Defence Studies. After retirement, he became the Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs until mid 1998.

He has published extensively on security topics, including a book on nuclear strategy and another on military technology. He is a member of a number of academic advisory boards including the NATO Defense College in Rome, and was a member of the panel of experts for the recent UK Strategic Defence Review. He was awarded a CB in 1992 and a KCB two years later. He is an honorary fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies.

David Ramsbotham served in Kenya, Borneo and Gibraltar as well as Germany and Northern Ireland. He commanded his Regiment in Belfast between 1974-5, and the Belfast Brigade from 1978 - 1980. From 1982-84 he was the Army's Director of Public Relations, which period included the Falklands War. In 1990 he took up his last appointment as Adjutant General, during which time he also served as an ADC (General) to HM the Queen.

Following a number of key appointments after his retirement from the Army, David Ramsbotham became Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, a post he relinquished in July 2001. He was awarded the OBE in 1974, the CBE in 1980, appointed KCB in 1987 and GCB in 1993.

[Jackonicko]

It may not be very PC but isn't this a reason to
1) Spend more effort and money on post war clearing up of such munitions and
2) Dedicate some effort to producing munitions which have a limited lethality shelf life?
Rather than pressing for an outright ban of weapons which clearly do still have a limited role to play.

And wouldn't this have been a more sensible approach than the outright ban on landmines, too?

[contact_tower]

And wouldn't this have been a more sensible approach than the outright ban on landmines, too?

Take it you have walked and lived in an area with high land mine density Jacko....... :yuk:

[tony draper]

I thought cluster munitions had a delay deliberatly inbuilt, ie some of the munitions in the case are set to detonate at random times over a given period to make it more difficult for a enemy to clear runways ect.

[BEagle]

They do. But that's assuming that the enemy just tries to pick them up or bulldoze them off.....

Along came an old tank chassis with a jet engine on the top followed by a tanker full of water. Aim jet engine exhaust at cluster munitions, switch on. Inject water into exhaust plume; result - very high powered stand-off runway re-opener.....

"Bug.ger", thought the man at Huntings, "Never thought of that...".

[Impiger]

Cluster weapons were originally designed for use in the anti-armour role but have been supceded by much better tools for the job. They remain the optimum weapon against troops in the open or soft-skinned vehicles. Even poorly dug in artillery batteries are a good target (the Army also have an artillery cluster munition). To use a sub-optimal weapon against any target risks not achieveing the desired effect and thus prolonging hostilities with greater loss of life etc.

Of note today's air dropped cluster weapons are not designed with time delays or automatic duds to pose a hazard to the clear up operation. Dudding rates per sub-munition were once around the 4-5% but are now reckoned at less than 3%. Equally interesting the injuries to civilians in Iraq post conflict have not actually featured many cluster bomblets. Most accidents have come from unsupervised access to Iraq army conventional weapons dumps.

[tonybliar]

Jacko makes a good point or two but it seems to me that we could do worse than stop the wasted over target effort by taking steps to further reduce the dudding rate and incorporate an additional disabling device to function after impact.

Can't understand why these two very senior officers want the military to tie another hand behind their backs - how many do they think we've got?

[WASALOADIE]

It seems to me that these 2 senior officers have themselves a nice little earner. Having earned a nice salary and taken a very handsome pension they now work for "Saferworld" condemning our military's equipment to the scrapheap and earning themselves, no doubt, another stash of cash fighting the cause and speaking at do gooders events.

[BillHicksRules]

Impiger,

I am afraid that your information is incorrect.

Please see the attached

"Dangerous explosive duds from cluster munitions used by allied forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War are still being found and destroyed in Kuwait at the startling rate of 200 per month, according to official documents obtained by Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch released a new briefing paper today warning against the use of cluster bombs in Iraq.
Documents from the Kuwait Ministry of Defense show that 2,400 explosive cluster munition duds were found and destroyed in Kuwait in 2002, and a similar number the previous year.

"The use of cluster munitions in Iraq will endanger civilians for years to come," said Mark Hiznay, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the new briefing paper. "Cluster bombs also threaten U.S. and friendly soldiers during combat."

Human Rights Watch has issued detailed analyses of the U.S. use of cluster bombs in the Persian Gulf War, in Kosovo, and in Afghanistan.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the United States and its allied coalition dropped bombs containing about twenty million submunitions, and also reportedly fired artillery projectiles containing more than thirty million submunitions. These resulted in millions of hazardous duds, each functioning like an indiscriminate antipersonnel landmine.

At least eighty U.S. casualties during the war were attributed to cluster munition duds. More than 4,000 civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munition duds since the end of the war.


Human Rights Watch called attention to four particular types of U.S. cluster munitions that have had high failure rates in combat or in testing:


The Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) with M77 submunitions has had a failure rate of 16 to 23 percent. Each standard volley of twelve MRLS rockets would likely result in more than 1,200 explosive duds.

155mm Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition (DPICM) artillery projectiles with M42 and M46 submunitions have had a failure rate of 14 percent.

Rockeye CBU-99/CBU-100 air-dropped bombs with Mk 118 submunitions. This Vietnam-era cluster munition was used extensively in the 1991 Gulf War and has accounted for a very large percentage of the explosive duds subsequently encountered. Almost 20 percent of the cluster munition duds found in Kuwait in 2002 were from Rockeye bombs.

The CBU-87 Combined Effects Munition with BLU-97 submunitions had a failure rate of at least 7 percent in Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. More than 10,000 air-dropped CBU-87s with more than 2 million submunitions were used in the Gulf War; more than 1,000 with over 200,000 submunitions were used in Afghanistan.


The United States has cluster munitions containing more than one billion submunitions in current stockpiles, including more than 434 million 155mm DPICM artillery submunitions and more than 309 million MLRS rocket submunitions.

Human Rights Watch has called for a global moratorium on use of cluster munitions until the humanitarian problems are addressed. Short of that commitment, Human Rights Watch urges that the United States, United Kingdom, and others that may deploy cluster munitions in Iraq take the following steps:


Prohibit the use of any cluster munitions in attacks on or near populated areas;
Suspend use of and withdraw cluster munitions that have been tested and identified as producing high dud rates;
Refrain from using or transferring out-of-date types of cluster munitions in an effort to "clean the closet" of stockpiles;
Record, report, track, and mark known or suspected cluster munition strike areas; and,
Preserve this information so it can be disseminated quickly in clearance efforts"

Source : HRW 18/03/03

[Impiger]

I was actually referring exclusively to the recent bit of action and in particular about RAF dropped weapons. I believe the number dropped was actually quite small - around 60. In any case the RBL 755 class of weapon will go out of Service in due course and I know of no plans to replace them. Better if the open toed sandal tree hugging brigade just bided their time a while and what they desire will come about - but then there'd be no political grandstanding in that!

[Jackonicko]

Contact Tower,

No I haven't. But despite my civilian wishy-washy liberal sensibilities I'm persuaded by military friends that sometimes (and when properly used, recorded and mapped) landmines have fulfilled an invaluable function, and that the ban was not necessarily a good thing for our military effectiveness, and for protecting the lives of our servicemen.

What colossal experience of landmines leads you to a different conclusion, pray? :rolleyes:

[Fox3snapshot]

Unfortuantely the mass and indiscriminate laying of mines by the majority of the worlds warring countries (Afghanistan as a small example and many of the 3rd world nations) have made the concept of laying a pretty, well charted, and fenced minefield a farce in the big picture.

Don't get me wrong though, with a well executed approach to the laying and subsequent clean up, things would be dandy and serve as a fundamental deterent.....but, well, that aint ever gonna happen.

:sad:

Some sad figures for you from Afghanistan:

Every 3 hours a child is blown up in as a result of the estimated 10 million land mines layed, one third of Afghan mine victims are children. In 1999 up to 10 civilians were killed or badly injured by landmines daily. And lets not forget there has been (and is!) another war since these figures were released.

:(

[contact_tower]

What colossal experience of landmines leads you to a different conclusion, pray?

Well, when you see the damage a PMA-2 makes on a 5 year old boy (I'm not talking about in a trainingvideo) you kinda get a wakeup call. Night patrols on roads that might have been mined since last time is allso something that gives you a less then warm and fussy feeling. (Local car hitting a TMRP-6 500m in front of us etc)
Sure mines are a cheap and effective way to defend yourself or funnel enemy movement to where you want, but the price is never paid by the soldiers in the conflict, but by the civilian population several years after the war ends, and the troops go home. You might say that "oh we make a map and clean it up when we leave". That has not happend in recent conflicts where mines have been used on a large scale! One cannot use the argument that one nation is so responsible that they can use mines, but others cannot. (Ex the US can, but the Serbs cannot)

Say we go somewhere so "save the people from a regime" and leave bomblets and/or mines, the public is surely going to love us.

(And no, I don't hug trees or wear open toed sandals, and no I do not think I have a colossal amount of ex. I just think it's common sense in todays inviroment)

[Jackonicko]

But isn't that partly because we hear about the irresponsible and indiscriminate use of mines?

And wouldn't it be better to try and come up with codes of practise which might be adhered to, rather than trying to impose a ban which will not?

I'm aware of the dreadful legacy left by landmines in Afghanistan, Angola, etc., but had understood there to be other examples of occasions where the 'Good guys' used them in a rather more selective and responsible manner.

I'm just very suspicious of anything which has Princess Di's fingerprints all over it, and of anything which any of our serving forces personnel regard as 'having their hands tied behind them'.

[Ali Barber]

I understand mines have been used to great effect in keeping the North Koreans in the north. Don't know how well they're mapped should the country ever re-unite.

[SPIT]

Hi
Just a quick question. When they were used did the do the job that they were ment to do and approx how many Allied lives did they save.:confused: :confused: :rolleyes: