Executive Overview: Jane's Explosive Ordnance Disposal

Attention shifted towards submunitions soon after the ban on anti-personnel mines came into effect. This shift was based on a widespread perception that when they failed to explode, submunitions often posed a similar threat. Not only had bomblets caused post-conflict casualties in every recent theatre of operation (Gulf war, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq), they were still killing civilians in Laos 40 years after they were dropped there.

Now, while the mistakes of the Vietnam War may seem a thing of the past, it is difficult to understand why lessons from the more recent use of cluster munitions have yet gone unheeded. The appalling performance of the US BLU-97 bomblet, for example, was readily apparent during the first Gulf War, yet it was subsequently used in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, with similar tragic consequences.

The initial campaign against cluster weapons, led by the International Committee for the Red Cross, certainly gained the attention of user countries, but this did not result merely in an extension of the Mine Ban Treaty. Here was a weapon system valued by the military, representing heavy investment and ongoing development, and so, while US generals had been fairly evenly split between condemnation and support for landmines, few would be openly critical of submunitions. The 'users' constrained the discussions to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), while a fledgling 'Cluster Munition Coalition' (CMC) pondered CCW's next move.

Five years later, however, CCW had still failed to agree to any significant limitations on the use of cluster munitions and, by then, the CMC had lost patience. It seemed they were not the only ones though, for by the end of the third CCW review conference in November 2006, 30 countries had called for further action. Norway, which was coincidentally engaged in the testing and acquisition of its own submunition system, agreed to sponsor a separate initiative aimed at imposing limitations on the use of cluster weapons.

This process was accelerated by Israel's large-scale use of submunitions in Lebanon. The inevitable post-conflict casualties began immediately, catching the attention of a largely sympathetic international audience and swelling the ranks of the CMC. 354 of 1,003 words