BAN THE CLUSTER BOMB

Caleb Rossiter reports: The coalition of anti-landmine advocates who helped win the 1997 treaty banning the devices, which has been signed by more than 135 countries, is now seeking to ban "submunitions"-- better known as cluster bombs. These are beer-can-size fragmentation bombs spewed out of huge air- or artillery-delivered canisters to blanket an area the size of two football fields. Current US submunitions have a failure rate of about 5 percent, meaning a lot of duds are left lying around where civilians--frequently children--will explode them and be killed or injured. Some activists call for a total ban of the weapons, but at least attaching backup fuses costing $10 would reduce failure rates to 1.7 out of 1,000. The landmine activists have helped convince the major military powers to move forward on negotiations to find a technical solution, under the aegis of the UN's Convention on Conventional Weapons. Talks could begin this December. Meanwhile, activists should demand that the Pentagon halt exports of high-failure submunitions, update its current acceptable-failure standards and replace the Air Force's stockpile of millions of high-failure submunitions.

ISRAEL AND THE ICC

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