CHAPTER 13 : Cluster Bombs

The Pentagon puts them in the category of combined effects munition. The manufacturer describes them as an all-purpose, air-delivered cluster weapons system. Human rights and anti-landmine campaigners say that cluster bombs are indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction, and they have requested that they be placed explicitly on the Geneva Convention list of banned weapons.

Cluster bombs are ingeniously designed. After being dropped from a plane, the heavy weapon breaks open in midair, scattering 200 or more bomblets , the size of soda cans. The bomblets then explode, shooting out hundreds of high-velocity shards of jagged steel shrapnel, saturating a very wide area. One description of cluster bombs says they can spray incendiary material to start fires, chunks of molten metal that can pierce tanks and other armor, or shrapnel that can slice with ease through 1/4-inch plate-or human flesh and bone. 1

The yellow bomblets are aided by little parachutes which slow down their descent and disperse them so they hit plenty of what the manufacturer calls soft targets ; i.e., people-military or civilian.

According to the Defense Department, US warplanes dropped 1,100 cluster bombs upon Yugoslavia in 1999, each carrying 202 bomblets. Thus, 222,200 of these weapons were propelled across the land. With a stated failure rate of 5 percent (other reports claim rates of 10 to 30 percent), this means that about 11,110 cluster bomblets were left lying unexploded 2, ready to detonate on contact, in effect becoming landmines. Some members of the US military oppose signing the International Treaty Banning the Use, Production, Stockpiling and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Landmines because the treatys definition of land mines is broad enough to cover cluster bombs. Under the treaty, an anti-personnel mine is one designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person and that will incapacitate, injure or kill one or more persons. Human-rights activists argue that since manufacturers of cluster bombs calculate dud rates into their design, the bombs can be included under the definition.3 The treaty entered into force on March 1, 1999 without the United States being a signatory.

Unexploded bomblets are even more of a concern than regular landmines because children in particular are drawn to the colorful devices with the little parachutes. (On April 24, 1999, even before the bombing of Yugoslavia had come to an end, five young brothers playing with an unexploded cluster bomb were killed, and two cousins were severely injured, near Doganovic in southern Kosovo.4) Landmines are usually laid down in more or less expected places, whereas unexploded bomblets can wind up in the back yards of homes, school playgrounds, anywhere. Moreover, the laying down of landmines is often tracked or mapped, the fields marked; not so with unexploded cluster bomblets. Some of them are designed to self-destruct after a set time period, but whether any of those scattered about Yugoslavia are of this type has not been reported. In any event, the

Landmine Treaty does not recognize the distinction between smart and dumb landmines.

When the bombing ended in June 1999, many areas of villages were left virtually uninhabitable, in desperate need of explosive experts who could find and incapacitate all the volatile live remnants. This will hinder agricultural and economic rehabilitation well into the future. Shortly after the end of the bombing, as people began to return to their villages and farms, more incidents involving the unexploded devices occurred, including one in which two British peacekeeping soldiers and three Albanians lost their lives in a Kosovo village. 5

The words of a Yugoslav orthopedist: Neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs. They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. Its awful, awful. 6

Unexploded ordnance--mainly cluster bombs-is still killing and maiming people in Laos a generation after the massive US carpet-bombing of 1965-73. It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the two million tons of bombs dropped by the United States failed to explode, and there have been 11,000 accidents so far. More than half of the victims die almost immediately following the accident. If the victim survives, the explosion often causes severe wounding and trauma, especially to the upper half of the body. 7 Vietnam and Cambodia harbor similar dangers. As does the Persian Gulf. A 1999 Human Rights Watch report says that of an estimated 24 to 30 million bomblets dropped during the Gulf War, between 1.2 and 1.5 million did not explode, leading so far to 1,220 Kuwaiti and 400 Iraqi civilian deaths.8

The effects of the unexploded munitions from the bombing of Yugoslavia have reached beyond that countrys borders. Two months after the wars end, 161 explosive devices, including 97 bomblets, had been recovered by NATO minesweepers in the Adriatic Sea. The munitions caused deaths and injuries to Italian fishermen and cost others the majority of their years profits. A fishing ban was imposed in the Adriatic to allow minesweepers to collect more of the devices. In addition, tourists abandoned the beaches along the Adriatic coast during the summertime for fear of encountering unexploded bombs.9

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is working on the development of newer and better cluster bombs-higher-tech, heat-seeking, spraying super-hot shrapnel, producing greater lethality...cluster bombs suitable for the new millennium. America deserves nothing less.

CHAPTER 14 : United States Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons Abroad

Poison gas and germ weapons turn civilization on its head. Diseases are not fought, but carefully cultivated; doctors use their knowledge of the functions of the human body to

devise ever more effective means of halting those functions; agriculturalists deliberately induce fungi and develop crop destroyers...Modern nerve gases were originally designed to help mankind by killing beetles and lice: now, in the hands of the military, they are, literally, insecticides for people. Chemical and biological warfare, as one writer has put it, is public health in reverse . 1

Bahama Islands

From the late 1940s to sometime in the 1950s, a joint US-Canadian-British team sprayed bacteria known to be dangerous in this area of the Caribbean. Thousands of animals died as a result of the tests. It is not known whether there were any human victims. Details of the tests are still classified.2

Canada

In 1953, the US Army used air blowers atop trucks to disseminate potentially dangerous zinc cadmium sulfide through the city of Winnipeg as part of its chemical and biological weapons tests.3

China and Korea

In the early part of 1952, during the Korean War (1950-53), the Chinese claimed that the United States was dropping quantities of bacteria, insects, feathers, decaying animal and fish parts and many other strange objects that carried disease, over Korea and northeast China. The Chinese government declared that there had been casualties and quick deaths from plague, anthrax and encephalitis, amongst other diseases. They took testimony from some 36 captured American airmen who had purportedly flown the planes with the deadly cargo, and published 25 of these accounts. Many of the men went into voluminous detail about the entire operation: the kinds of bombs and other containers dropped, the types of insects, the diseases they carried, etc. Photographs of the alleged germ bombs and insects were also published. Then, in August, an International Scientific Committee was appointed, composed of scientists from Sweden, France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil and the Soviet Union. After an investigation in China of more than two months, the committee produced a report of some 600 pages, many photos, and the conclu-sion that: The peoples of Korea and China have indeed been the objectives of bacteriological weapons. These have been employed by units of the U.S.A. armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose.

However, some of the American airmens statements contained so much technical biological information and were so full of communist rhetoric- imperialist, capitalist Wall Street war monger and the like-that their personal authorship of the statements must be seriously questioned. Moreover, it was later learned that most of the airmen had