The United States is reportedly going to provide Ukraine with cluster bombs, a controversial decision because of the threat these indiscriminate weapons can be to civilian populations.
Ukraine has been seeking cluster munitions for months to help in its counteroffensive, seeing them as a tool to help dislodge Russia from its dug-in fortifications and to mitigate Kyiv’s constraints on artillery and other equipment.
The Biden administration has so far resisted sending these increasingly taboo conventional weapons. Cluster munitions — or dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs), as they’re officially known — are haphazard and notoriously faulty. Once fired, they release dozens of bomblets in the air that spread out and saturate football-field- or city-block-size areas. The direction or targets for those bomblets can’t be controlled, and they don’t always immediately explode, turning into de facto land mines. For those reasons, they are particularly dangerous to civilians during war, but also long after a conflict ends.
“They pose a huge danger to kids that pick them up; to farmers with their plows; to refugees returning to their homes, digging through the rubble; all sorts of civilians,” said Bonnie Docherty, senior researcher in the arms division at Human Rights Watch and the director of the Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative at Harvard Law School. “There’s a whole host of long-term dangers, as well as the immediate dangers at the time of attack.”
A 2008 international treaty bans the use, production, transfer, and stockpile of these weapons. More than 100 countries have signed on to that Convention on Cluster Munitions, including many NATO allies that are also supplying weapons to Ukraine. The United States, Russia, and Ukraine, among others, have not joined that treaty.
The US, with one exception, stopped the use of cluster bombs in 2003, but it has not outright banned their use by the American military….
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