• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Backgrounder: The Campaign to Ban Cluster Bombs

Council on Foreign Relations

Prepared by: Lionel Beehner, Staff Writer
November 21, 2006

Introduction

International law does not ban the use of cluster bombs, though humanitarian groups claim they have killed or maimed hundreds of innocents in recent armed conflicts. Cluster bombs scatter hundreds of bomblets over a large area but with limited accuracy and high failure rates. After last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah, in which both sides were accused of killing civilians with cluster bombs, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on countries to ban cluster bombs and destroy their stockpiles. A proposal to limit their use during wartime came under review at a November 2006 conference in Geneva on the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a 1980 agreement that seeks to protect military troops from inhumane injuries and prevent civilians from being wounded or killed.

Why are some groups trying to ban cluster bombs?

Human rights groups say increased use of the bombs from the Mideast to Afghanistan is putting more civilians in harm’s way. Groups pressing a ban say the fallout from cluster bombs covers a swath of land the size of a city block and they often leave behind unexploded ordnance. Many do not explode on impact and, like landmines, pose long-term threats to civilians. “The issue of proportionality and discrimination is what’s basically at stake,” says John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. Handicap International, a UK-based anti-cluster-bomb group, estimates civilians make up 98 percent of those maimed by these bombs’ munitions, one-third of them children. These bombs’ failure rate can be anywhere from 1 percent to 10 percent or even higher (The cluster bombs used by the British military in Bosnia during the 1990s, for instance, had an abnormally high failure rate).

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.