Deadly Silence

What a cluster bomb looks like when it doesn't explode:






What a cluster bomb looks like when it does explode:





Editorial from the June 13 2008 National Catholic Reporter

Shameful silence on cluster bombs

Cluster bombs, an efficient way of spreading the deadly horror of land mines, are such a repugnant weapon that 110 countries, representing well over half the world's governments, met in Dublin, Ireland, in late May to sign a treaty banning the production, use and export of the sinister devices. Regrettably, U.S. leaders refused to join the consensus.

Not only did the Bush administration refuse to sign, it boycotted the negotiations that fashioned the treaty and used its muscle to try to convince others to hold off.

Cluster bombs, which can be dropped from a variety of airplanes, each contain about 200 "bomblets," according to Handicap International, which cofounded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Handicap International won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

Each bomblet is the size of a soft drink can and, depending on the flight of the bomb, can be scattered over wide areas. It is the equivalent of dropping, as one description, as one description put it, "a shower of tiny hand grenades," all capable of exploding and sending lethal shrapnel flying.

One particularly insidious characteristic of the weapon is that many don't explode when first deployed and, as is the case with conventional land mines, they can appear to the unaware as toys or other benign devices. Because they stay deployed over large stretches of land they have become deadly to thousands of civilians long after hostilities cease. Tens of thousands of civilians, including many children, have been killed or maimed because of innocent curiosity or by happening unawares upon one of the weapons.

U.S. insistence that these barbaric and indiscriminate weapons remain a necessary part of the 21st-century arsenal puts us in league with China, Iran, Syria and Russia, among others. With CHina and Russia, the United States is one of the principal manufacturers and exporters of the weapons, a fact that hardly boosts our already seriously eroded moral authority. It's difficult to claim the high ground of spreading freedom when your weapons maim children and prevent populations from using huge sections of a country.

The United States, in this case, has felt little pressure from the Catholic community to counter that coming from the military and weapons manufacturers. Pope Benedict XVI voiced support for the treaty effort in mid-May, but if the administration can ignore repeated papal condemnations of war (while simultaneously taking sound-bie advantage of the church's "culture of life" language), who could expect it to pay attention to papal protest against bombs used to make war?

Our bishops, too, have been noticeably quiet. Bishop Thomas Wensky, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on International Justice and Peace, was the lone signatory from the U.S. conference to an April letter in which international religious figures appealed for an international treaty.

Archbishop Wilton Gregory, now of Atlanta, commented in 2003, on the eve of the latest phase of the war against Iraq: "Any decision to defend against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction by using our own weapons of mass destruction would be clearly unjustified. The use of antipersonnel land mines, cluster bombs and other weapons that cannot distinguish between soldiers and civilians, or between times of war and times of peace, ought to be avoided."

His protest, mild at best, meant little. The war was undertaken, the cluster bombs were dropped and we've heard little from the bishops since.