Biden has made a pledge that will kill Ukrainian children for generations

Fifty years from now, a Ukrainian child will be blown up while playing in the dirt. This isn’t an especially bold prediction. If history is any guide, it’s a near certainty. That’s what happens when you litter a country with cluster bombs in the way Ukraine is experiencing.

Here, the signal case is Laos, which has the awful distinction of being the most bombed country per capita in history. The Americans ceased dropping cluster bombs there 50 years ago. More than 20,000 Laotians have been killed or injured in the meantime. Nearly half are children. And it’s still happening today.

A child looks out of a damaged bus as he and other displaced people arrive at the Ukrainian Red Cross centre in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, last year.Credit: AP

For those unfamiliar, cluster bombs are shells filled with large numbers of small bomblets. When dropped from above, the shell breaks open mid-flight and the bomblets are released, scattering over a wide area, with the aim of exploding in every direction on impact. They are devastating weapons, tearing through armoured vehicles, and maiming whoever is nearby.

This makes them especially effective against enemy soldiers dug in trenches, as the Russian troops are. But inevitably, some of these bomblets don’t detonate, and lie for decades in wait for someone to set them off by stepping on one, or by disturbing them doing any number of the innocuous things Ukrainian kids will do.

That’s why Joe Biden’s pledge this week to send American cluster bombs to Ukraine is so significant. This, says Biden, was a “difficult decision”, and no doubt it was. But it’s also one America keeps making: in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. In Serbia and Kosovo. In Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.

Obviously, the Ukraine case is unique. These other cases involved America invading as a hostile power; Ukraine is asking to be given cluster bombs for use in its own country, for its defence. That makes America’s impulse to help understandable, but it doesn’t automatically mean the US should acquiesce. There’s a reason 123 countries have signed the convention to ban them. And there’s a reason some of America’s closest allies – including Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Spain – have opposed Biden’s decision.

Indeed, the problem is reflected in the absolutist nature of America’s response when Russia began using cluster bombs in Ukraine. Here’s America’s representative to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield: “Russian forces [are] moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions … which are banned under the Geneva Convention.”

Now it turns out cluster bombs do have a place; that it’s not the weapons per se which are banned, but only their use when directed against civilians. That last point is surely a nonsense because cluster bombs are, by their very nature, indiscriminate. Forget discriminating between soldier and civilian: they don’t even discriminate between current and future generations.

Unfortunately, several of America’s other justifications seem similarly fragile. Take the idea that the use of American cluster bombs will be less indiscriminate this time around. Partly this is based on technology. Put simply, it is the “dud” bomblets – the ones that don’t explode on impact – that kill civilians for decades. In Laos, about a third of all bomblets were duds, but in Ukraine’s case, America is sending cluster bombs that the Pentagon claims “are tested at under a 2.35 per cent dud rate”.

Except the Pentagon tests these things on flat, relatively hard land. That’s very different from a real war zone, where bomblets might land in mud, water or sand. Real-world observations find something more like 14 per cent of them don’t explode: a figure well beyond what anyone – including the Pentagon – would call an acceptable level.

Bombs dropped on Laos range from anti-tank mines to cluster bombs.Credit: Kurt Johnson

Similarly, Ukraine has given written guarantees it will not use these bombs in urban areas. The logic is clear enough – avoiding population centres means fewer casualties – but it’s incomplete because only part of the damage done by cluster bombs shows up in the form of casualties.

Once an area is bombed, the land itself becomes a liability. You can’t use it for agriculture, and if you do, you can only till the soil very shallowly and at terrible risk. You can’t build on it, which means you can’t build critical infrastructure like roads. Economic development grinds to a halt. The trend in Laos is unmistakable: the poorest areas are overwhelmingly those that were bombed. The fact that Laos is a mostly rural country hasn’t spared it such ruinous consequences.

America’s more interesting argument is that since Russia has already dropped tens of millions of bomblets on Ukraine (with a dud rate likely around 40 per cent), putting America’s cluster bombs in the hands of the Ukrainians will make little difference. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan says: “Is Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions on that same land actually that much of an addition of civilian harm, given that that area is going to have to be demined regardless?”

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak greets US president Joe Biden on Monday to discuss the US’ decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine.Credit: Bloomberg

But this glosses over the task of demining, as though dropping millions more bomblets makes no real difference. Demining is slow, dangerous work. At current rates, Laos won’t be bomblet-free for another 100 years. How long for Ukraine?

Ultimately, then, this must collapse into an argument by necessity. Yes, cluster bombs are terrible. Yes, they should be banned (and arguably are). Yes, they will devastate Ukraine for generations to come. But Russian victory is too terrible to contemplate, and justifies any means necessary. It’s an attractive argument, but we ought to be wary of it if only because it seems to apply to every war. It’s precisely what justified the bombing of Laos. The cause is always urgent. Loss is always intolerable. The enemy is always evil. And extreme measures will always be justified.

At some point, if you’re not careful, every war becomes an exception to the rules of war. So, if we’re going to walk such fraught terrain, the very least we can do is establish the true necessity of doing so. To show that there is truly no way for Ukraine to prevail with conventional weapons: that the resort to cluster bombs is not merely one of cost, convenience or efficiency. I’m happy to leave that part of the debate to weapons experts, but let the rest of us demand one thing: that the answer will remain compelling in the wake of that explosion 50 years from now.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.