100 Nations Sign Cluster Bomb Ban Treaty, U.S. Not One of Them

More than 100 nations have made an agreement to ban current designs on cluster bombs. A meeting with diplomats that took place for ten days in Dublin, Ireland has made some process into saving many lives in the future.

While most nations are backing the treating some of the heaviest users of the devices opposing it including Israel, India, Pakistan, Russia, China and the United States.

Most nations realize that this move could make the world a safer place. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Britain will be one of the countries that retires cluster bombs.

The first draft of the new convention banning cluster bombs went before delegates from 109 nations on Wednesday afternoon. The deal was reached much quicker than had been expected.

Cluster bombs are made up of when a large container is opened mid-air and drops hundreds of smaller individual bombs across a wide area. These bombs generally explode on contact but have been known to fail until at a later date. In recent military history they have been used in Cambodia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Lebanon.

Mr Brown said: “We have decided, after a great deal of discussion, that we can help break the log jam so that we can get international agreement that would ban cluster bombs.

“We have decided we will take all our types of cluster bombs out of service.

“I believe that is going to make a difference to the negotiations that are now taking place. I look forward to other countries following us in this action.”

One major issue in the works now is how to deal with situations where one nation signs the treaty but another nation that is involved in coalition operations have not.

That could very well come into play as both Britain and Canada having signed the treaty while the United States has opposed it. There is a very real stumbling block between the UK and the US concerning the fact that the US is using UK soil to stockpile the cluster munitions.

United States State Department expert Stephen Mull says that the ban called for in Dublin is impractical.

“We think that it will be impossible to ban cluster munitions as many in the Oslo process would like to do, because these are weapons that have a certain military utility,” Mull said.

“So rather than ban them, we think that a much more effective way to go about this is through technological fixes that will make sure that these weapons are no longer viable once the conflict is over,” Mull said.

This “impractical” peaceful ban calls for the signed nations to never use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer cluster munitions. The nations have six years to destroy any munitions they already have obtained.

These bombs have been widely used in the conflict between Israel and Lebanon with Israel firing at least 4 million submunitions that were from the Vietnam War era into Lebanon. About a quarter of the bombs that were fired did not explode at the time of impact. Since the time that the war in the region has ceased more than 200 causualities have been reported.