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Big questions revolve around cluster bombs' little leftovers

By SCOTT CANON

Cluster bombs are marvels of the Rube Goldberg variety.

A half-ton tube sails from the underside of a jet until it unlooses little bomblets by the dozens. Those minibombs then float to the ground on tiny parachutelike devices, spreading explosive charges over an area equal to several football fields.

They are a foot soldier's nightmare, like a shower of grenades that expands a bomb's bull's-eye 1,000-fold.

Some of the bomblets -- often they look like orange soda cans -- fall to the ground as temporary duds. On average, 5 percent.

In Afghanistan this month, the village of Shaker Qala ended up with 200-some yet-to-blow bomblets on the ground. At least nine villagers were reported killed and the rest left bewildered or terrified. The miss prompted U.N. officials to call on the Pentagon for notices about such bombing runs so civilians could better seek safe haven.

American military officials responded by saying the Afghans should pile sandbags around the sensitive cluster bomb leftovers and then stay back.

This part of the air campaign over Afghanistan revived a longstanding debate about the ethics of using cluster bombs.

Critics see them as inhumane for the way they put civilians in peril. Like land mines, they remain deadly long after troops have moved on.

Their use in Afghanistan will "deny people facing starvation the use of their land," said London-based Landmine Action. "These weapons are prone to missing their targets...They then pose a serious long-term threat to civilians."

The Pentagon and others think of cluster bombs as another weapon that, when directed at the right targets, weakens a foe without unnecessarily putting civilians in peril.

"We're going to use the entire spectrum of our conventional weaponry," said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We only use cluster munitions when they are the most effective weapon for the intended target."

Typically, cluster bombs are meant to kill troops moving in the open. Rather than blasting one huge crater on a narrow target -- when American bombs work right, their accuracy is within mere feet -- cluster bombs set off hundreds of smaller explosions aimed at troops spread over acres.

"The rampant use of cluster bombs, against a target without much military value, that's committing a war crime. I don't believe we're doing that," said Owen Cote, associate director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He routinely works with American military officers.

"There aren't any clean weapons," Cote said. "If you drop a bomb on a bunker where it turns out there are groups of families, that's much worse than a cluster bomb. They're not different from any other weapon -- it's how you use them."

And yet the debate is over whether cluster bombs fall into the category of weapons that, although they carry military advantages, pose such a risk to civilians that they violate ethics.

People on all sides of the argument concede that any weapon, down to the humble bullet, can accidentally kill war's unlucky bystanders. The question then becomes which kinds of arms pose too great a threat to civilians.

Land mines, for instance, are seen by many today as devices that linger too long after the fighting to justify the danger they pose to non-soldiers. After 20 years of modern warfare, for instance, Texas-sized Afghanistan is considered the most heavily mined country in the world, and civilian deaths from mines there come daily.

The United States has balked at signing on to treaties agreeing not to use land mines, arguing that to do so would put the country at a disadvantage with enemies who pepper the terrain with booby traps.

Still, most American mines are considered more humanitarian than most others. By design, most U.S. mines wear out. So instead of menacing a farmer's field for perhaps decades, 89 percent of American anti-personnel mines and 78 percent of U.S. anti-tank mines are built to become inert after a relatively short time. That way they generally pose a danger in wartime and tend not to blow later in peacetime.

Cluster bomblets work differently. They come in varying levels of sophistication. Some use heat and sound sensors designed to recognize a tank and pierce its armor. Others, the type experts say mostly likely dropped on Afghanistan, are set on simple fuses to explode shortly before hitting the ground.

Unlike most American mines, U.S. cluster bomblets aren't built to break down over time. That would cost more and change their design in a way that wouldn't always work when cobbled together into a multi-munition bomb.

"The problem is that some cluster munitions have a relatively high hazardous dud rate...so they present a post-combat risk to civilians," said Robert Sherman, director of the strategic security project for the Federation of American Scientists.

"They are inherently indiscriminate," agreed Steve Goose, program director for Human Rights Watch. "They don't know a soldier from a civilian."

Still, strategists say that a properly used cluster bomb is at least as humanitarian as more conventional warheads. Why carpet bomb a mountain pass with dozens of one-ton explosives -- some of which won't explode right away either -- when one cluster bomb might do the job?

"You wouldn't want to drop one where troops are mixed among civilians," said Tim Brown, an analyst at defense consultant Globalsecurity.org. "But if you've got troops out in the open, it can be the perfect weapon."

The devices are not new. American forces have dropped them, and seen the "duds" go off much later, since the Vietnam War.

"That is the tragedy of a war," said Robert Pape, a military scholar and political scientist at the University of Chicago. "`It would be irresponsible to put Americans or British forces in harm's way and not use these...If we want the Taliban troops to be weakened, what that means is inflicting real harm on them.

"This is real war," he said, "and real war is often hell."

To reach Scott Canon, national correspondent, call (816) 234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com.