"Cluster munitions ... have killed or injured an estimated 56,000 to 86,000 civilians since World War II. The United States alone has spent more than $3.4 billion on demining operations since 1993"
nyti.ms/2rUWAWQ
nyti.ms/2rUWAWQ
"the 2017 [US] reversal was also tied to fears of war with Russia and China. Amid growing tensions with multiple adversaries, military leaders were determined to retain their existing stockpiles, of which BLU-97s make up the majority of airdropped cluster munitions."
"The weapons’ most memorialized victim was Guernica, the Basque village burned to ashes in 1937. George L. Steer, a reporter for The NYT, visited Guernica’s charred ruins after the attack and found dud bomblets bearing German markings. The era of cluster munitions had begun."
"In one day alone in March 1945, American napalm-filled cluster bombs started fires that killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese citizens. Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, of the Army Air Corps, used the same weapons to destroy 65 of Japan’s 68 largest cities"
"Other bomblets in the [US] development pipeline ... dispersed chemical or bio weapons, including insects that could be infected with communicable diseases, like the bubonic plague [&] spools of carbon fibers designed to shut down electrical power by shorting out part of a grid"
"But as of 2017, nearly every official manual that mentioned cluster munitions’ high dud rates and the deaths they caused during Desert Storm has been rescinded, made classified or edited to remove earlier passages."
nyti.ms/2rUWAWQ
nyti.ms/2rUWAWQ
