Decommissioning cluster bombs is barking mad
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By Dan McCurry
So Gordon Brown is serious that cluster bombs will be decommissioned. Is he barking mad? It seems that the reason for wasting munitions in this way is that cluster bombs can blow up; surely that’s the point of bombs. When I was a child growing up in the east end in the 1970s we were forever being evacuated because an unexploded WW2 bomb had been found. These days there isn’t a patch of the east end that hasn’t had luxury flats built on it, but back then our favourite playground was derelict houses from the bomb damage of the blitz decades earlier. To find the street cordoned off due to an unexploded bomb was a fairly routine occurrence. Why are cluster bombs any different from any other bomb? The fact that some bombs don’t go off is not unique to cluster bombs, it’s a problem with all bombs, so why don’t we just ban bombs?
The whole point of cluster bombs is that they are dropped in a package and disperse into a number of small munitions shortly before hitting the ground. This is useful for tearing up air-strips and roads. If we ban them we have to revert to dropping huge bombs that are likely to cause collateral damage, i.e. kill people who are not the target.
The campaign to end cluster bombs compared them to landmines, but there is no comparison at all. Landmines are put in the ground with the intention of not exploding. This is morally unacceptable. Cluster bombs are dropped with the intention of doing their job, exploding, this is completely different.
What distinction is being made here? Why not ban bullets? Or better, let’s ban bullets fired from machine guns but not those that are fired from rifles.
What distinction is being made here? I have no idea, but it’s the same logic that led Gordon to order that cluster bomb munitions be destroyed.
We’re losing people in Afghanistan due to a lack of boots, yet we’re pouring resources into destroying munitions for no logical reason whatsoever other than the fact that someone said they’re like landmines; that some of them don’t go off. If we have a technical problem, let’s fix the technical problem, not destroy resources just for the sake of it.
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