Ban the Use of Cluster Bombs
“It looked like the ball boys and girls toss each other during Hmong New Year festivities. Six year old Sia Ya threw it to her four year old brother, He couldn’t catch it and it landed behind him, exploding and killing him instantly. Sia Ya died after two agonizing days and nights in the provincial hospital.” (Account of Laotian cluster bomblet accident in 1996 - Laos War “Legacy”)
I. INTRODUCTION
Cluster bombs were first used in the American conflict in Vietnam and Laos in the sixties. They became popular because they are one of the cheapest air delivered weapons available, costing about $60 per bomblet. They can be used against a variety of targets covering significant areas, rather than, for example, pin-pointing individual armored vehicles. They were believed to be a perfectly fit weapon during the Southeastern Asian jungle battles. Today, forty years after the war, unexploded submunitions still cause about 10 thousand innocent victims each year.
Despite the inhumane scars that followed its use in the above conflicts, cluster bombs were used again in the Balkans, in the Gulf War and today in Afghanistan. Now that we know their devastating long term effects, is it ethical to keep them in usage?
II. WHAT ARE CLUSTER BOMBS?
Cluster bombs, also called dispensers consist of two parts: the bomb shell itself and the hundreds of little bombs (called "bombies" by Laotians) that are contained inside of them. They are usually dropped from an aircraft - although they might also be launched like a missile. They "fall" away from the aircraft and are stabilized in flight by fin assemblies. I...
... middle of paper ...
...press_releases/PR051799.htm
http://www.landmineaction.org/assets/downloads/Cluster%20bombs%20report%20summary.pdf
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/29/ret.bomb.warnings/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2001/cluster_bomb/6.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2001/cluster_bomb/6.stm
http://www.mcc.org/clusterbomb/laos_legacy/melting_weapons.html
http://www.mcc.org/clusterbomb/laos_legacy/lucky.html
http://www.icbl.org/index/text/Detailed/1456.html
http://www.hrw.org/hrw/campaigns/kosovo98/flash6.htm
http://www.uxolao.org/
http://www.minesactioncanada.com/home/news_detail.cfm?NEWID=12&lang=e
http://www.essex.ac.uk/armedcon/themes/landmines/default.htm
http://www.icbl.org/
http://www.hrw.org/arms/clusterbombs.htm
Organizations working to ban Landmines:
http://www.boes.org/coop/lmines/
The terror of nuclear war, the fright of your home being destroyed before your eyes. This was what was facing 16 year old Sorry Rinamu in the novel The Bomb by Theodore Taylor. This historical fiction deals with the problems of Sorry and his small island facing the control of Japan and needs of the United States.
Though chemical warfare was proven effective and easily produced, the world council decided that it was inhumane to use. In 1972, chemical warfare was ban at the Biological Weapons Convention. At this convention, many country’s leaders voted that it was not right to use these weapons as a way to kill people. The leaders felt that a biological weapon was too dangerous to release. (opbw.org)
Grundberg, Andy. "A Dangerous Weapon." The American Scholar:. American Scholar, 1 Jan. 2008. Web. 8 May 2014. .
...ear bombs, one survey showed that 53% of Americans surveyed felt that the bombs should have been used exactly the way they were and only 4.5% felt that no bombs should have been used (Batchelder 111).
...d was mustard gas and it is still produced this day in third world countries. There are more lethal chemical weapons today and every country in the world continues to produce, secretly, a more powerful chemical or biological weapon for their own purpose. At the same time, we are continuously trying to improve our protective posture and equipment to handle any situation or mission that is given to us for the greater good of our nation.
In 1963, as protest to the authoritarian regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem, Buddhist monks began to go to public places in Vietnam and commit suicide, by drenching themselves in gasoline and setting themselves on fire. They did this as an act of civil disobedience, defined as an act of defiance of specific laws or policies of a formal structure which the individual or group believes to be unjust. The Buddhist civilization in Vietnam was not apparent to the Americans until the Buddhists began sacrificing themselves in Saigon’s public streets. The pictures of the monks engulfed in flames made world headlines and caused American intervention; and later the capture and killing of Diem and his brother. In contrast to these acts of civil disobedience, one can observe the actions of suicide bombers. In the Palestinian territories, those who support suicide bombing claim that it is merely a tactic of war in defense of their land and homes. Without superior weaponry, they see it as “a heroic act of martyrdom, a final act of resistance, stemming from desperation”(Suicide Bombers). Both the Buddhist monks and the “suicide bombers” in Palestine resort to self-sacrificial actions as their form of violent civil disobedience. Violent forms of civil disobedience should only be necessary to counter violence but never if it inhibits upon the liberties of the innocent. By this definition, the actions of the Buddhist monks are more justifiable than those of suicide bombers in the Middle East.
The civilians in those cities would die either by being charred to death, or by suffocating to death due to the lack of oxygen. Therefore, the atomic bombs were not a new thing, but rather they were another domino that fell on the gameboard of bombing raids. Another incentive to use the bomb involved the time and money spent by the Manhattan Project on the creation of the bomb. The Manhattan Project spent five years and two billion dollars on the atomic bombs.
Atomic Bomb The use of the atomic bombs on Japan was necessary for the revenge of the Americans. These bombs took years to make due to a problematic equation. The impact of the bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people and the radiation is still killing people today. People today still wonder why the bombs were dropped. If these bombs weren’t dropped on the Japanese the history of the world would have been changed forever. The Atomic bomb took 6 years to develop (1939-1945) for scientists to work on a equation to make the U-235 into a bomb. The most complicated process in this was trying to produce enough uranium to sustain a chain reaction. The bombs used on the cities cost about $2 billion to develop, this also making the U.S. wanting to use them against Japan. “Hiroshima was a major military target and we have spent 2 billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history- and won.” (3) The bomb dropped on Hiroshima weighted 4.5 tons and the bomb used on Nagasaki weighted 10 kilotons. On July 16, 1945, the first ever atomic bomb was tested in the Jamez Mountains in Northern New Mexico, code named “Gadget.” The single weapon ultimately dropped on Hiroshima, nicknamed “Little Boy,” produced the amount of approximately twenty- thousand tons of TNT, which is roughly seven times greater than all of the bombs dropped by all the allies on all of Germany in 1942. The first Japanese City bomb was Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. An American B-29 bomber, named Enola Gay, flown by the pilot Paul W. Tibbets, dropped the “Little Boy” uranium atomic bomb. Three days later a second bomb named ”Fat Boy,” made of plutonium was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. After being released, it took approximately one minute for Little Boy to reach the point of explosion, which was about 2,000 feet. The impact of the bombs on the cities and people was massive. Black rain containing large amounts of nuclear fallout fell as much as 30km from the original blast site. A mushroom cloud rose to twenty thousand feet in the air, and sixty percent of the city was destroyed. The shock wave and its reverse effect reached speeds close to those of the speed of sound. The wind generated by the bombs destroyed most of the houses and buildings within a 1.
Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003 (Brown). They were used against military targets "away from civilian targets", he said. This avoids breaching the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which permits their use only against military targets
...eased soldier, Tung, whom Kien has forgotten. “ ‘Maybe it was Tung. What do you think, Kien?’ ‘Tung who?’ asked Kien. ‘Crazy Tung. The guardsman, don’t you remember?’” (Ninh, 97). Yet, after the war, Kien cannot quit remembering all that died. “He mistook her first for a jungle girl named Hoa…Then, horribly, for a naked girl at Saigon airport on 30 April 1975.” (Ninh, 113). Kien returned to his pre-war culture of remembering the dead.
Terrorists can also use mortars in their attacks. Improvised mortars are extremely easy to make but can be inaccurate and unreliable, and so accidents are unavoidable. Most suitable for terrorist use are light mortars. A popular light mortar is the British 51mm Mortar, which weighs 6.25 kilograms and (its bomb weighs only 0.9kg). It has a range of 800 meters and a projected error of 2%.
Tu, Anthony. “Chemical Weapons Abandoned by the Imperial Army in Japan and China at the End of World War II.” Toxin Reviews 30.1 (2001): 1-5 Environmental Complete. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
March 1994. “Summary of Damages and Injuries.” The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 3-11. The “Day After.” Cultural Information Service.
Antipersonnel landmines kill thousands of people every year. Antipersonnel landmines do not recognize a cease-fire; they continue killing or maiming for many years after the conflict is over. Antipersonnel landmines do not discriminate between soldiers or civilians. On the contrary, more and more they are being used in an indiscriminate way, terrorizing civilians and transforming agricultural fields into killing fields. In addition, de-mining is a very slow and very expensive process, and after a war most countries are not prepared to cope with the constant health care demands imposed by the number of injured by landmines. Finally, landmines make it very difficult for refugees to go back to their cities and villages. As response to the landmine problem, the international community has come up with a treaty to ban landmines. On March 1, 1999, the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty came into effect; so far 134 countries have signed the treaty. Unfortunately, the U. S. is not one of them.
This news report assesses the effects of landmine explosion in the lives of Afghans and provides a detailed illustration of a case that happened in Lashkar Gah.