 |
| |
|
|
Daz
|
 |
of the wasteland.
Jan 2003
time: 05:27
|
|
The Problem with Cluster Bombs: They Kill Indiscriminately Today and Tomorrow
Cluster bombs kill indiscriminately in two ways. First, their wide-area nature and often poor targeting mechanisms nearly guarantee that unintended victims will die or be injured when the weapons function as designed. Secondly, submunitions continue to kill long after the battle is over because of their failure to explode on contact or as designed. Dud rates are often in the 10-15% range, but may range as high as 30%. While the term dud suggests deactivation, in reality many of the duds are armed but failed to function on initial impact. These submunitions may explode at the slightest touch, and are highly lethal, frequently killing more than one person because of their wide fragmentation patterns. Like landmines, cluster munitions must be located and destroyed one by one, a costly and time consuming process.
In 1976, thirteen nations called for a ban on anti-personnel cluster weapons. Those countries were Algeria, Austria, Egypt, Lebanon, Mali, Mauritania, Mexico, Norway, Sudan, Switzerland, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia. They focused on the immediate effects of cluster weapons, stating in a working paper that:
These anti-personnel fragmentation weapons tend to have both indiscriminate effects and to cause unnecessary suffering. At detonation a vast number of small fragments or pellets are dispersed evenly covering a large area with a high degree of probability of hitting any person in the area. The effect of such a detonation on unprotected persons - military or civilian - in the comparatively large target area is almost certain to be severe with multiple injuries caused by many tiny fragments. Multiple injuries considerably raise the level of pain and suffering. They often call for prolonged and difficult medical treatment and the cumulative effect of the many injuries increases the mortality risk. . . . When the normal weapon effect is so extensive as to cover areas of several square kilometers in an attack by a single aircraft, these weapons are hardly capable of use anywhere without hitting civilians incidentally.
The past two decades of experience not only reinforce these conclusions but demonstrate the additional negative side effect of cluster weapons, that being the creation of de facto unmarked minefields.
As with land mines, children often fall victim to submunitions. Attracted by a combination of size, shape, and/or color, children often pick up submunitions and are killed or injured. A recent study sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kosovo found that children were five times more likely to be killed or injured by submunitions than by land mines.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
gsmoove23
|
|
It gets worse. I've found this site posted on a number of websites claiming to be an al-jazeera mirror, http://www.aljazeerah.info/ , which is obviously trying to pose it as a propagandist organization. Everything on the website is geared toward anti-american anti-war diatribes Nice bit of propaganda itself, I thought I had found the actual site for a few minutes. Check the legal bit at the bottom about the use of copyrighted material. Nice touch.
|
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:27.
Apolyton Time is 00:27. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
28-03-2003 13:07
) Might as well cut off the water supply...
Attachment: 
|
