CLUSTER BOMBS: NOW SAFE FOR CHILDREN
Jul. 8th, 2008 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogYr headline of the day:
As a peacetime combat veteran, I naturally find this grimly amusing.
What they mean by “less deadly”, of course, is “more reliable”. The problem with cluster bombs is that they have a failure rate of anywhere between 5% and 30%. Which means that whenever you drop them, you end up with hundreds of unexploded bombs lying around populated areas that eventually kill tens of thousands of civilians a year – a quarter of them children [PDF].
Which is why 111 countries have adopted a treaty banning them.
The US is not one of them. Because how can you defend freedom if you can’t carpet-bomb a village where teh Terrors might be hiding?
So the Pentagon will fix this by designing cluster bombs with a max failure rate of 1%. So that way, instead of killing or maiming tens of thousands of innocent people, UXCBs will only kill or main thousands of them.
Progress!
FUN FACT: To be fair, the US isn’t the only country that refuses to ban cluster bombs. The others are: Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan.
Bombs away,
This is dF
As a peacetime combat veteran, I naturally find this grimly amusing.
What they mean by “less deadly”, of course, is “more reliable”. The problem with cluster bombs is that they have a failure rate of anywhere between 5% and 30%. Which means that whenever you drop them, you end up with hundreds of unexploded bombs lying around populated areas that eventually kill tens of thousands of civilians a year – a quarter of them children [PDF].
Which is why 111 countries have adopted a treaty banning them.
The US is not one of them. Because how can you defend freedom if you can’t carpet-bomb a village where teh Terrors might be hiding?
So the Pentagon will fix this by designing cluster bombs with a max failure rate of 1%. So that way, instead of killing or maiming tens of thousands of innocent people, UXCBs will only kill or main thousands of them.
Progress!
FUN FACT: To be fair, the US isn’t the only country that refuses to ban cluster bombs. The others are: Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan.
Bombs away,
This is dF
