Red and Yellow Terror Pills

"Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon," writes Robert Fulghum in my favorite of his musings. "And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air--explode softly--and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air," depositing boxes of crayons "with the sharpener built right in.... And people would smile and get a funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination."

Earlier this week, writer and social justice activist Leonard Fein spoke at Harvard Hillel. He described the combined-effects munitions, more commonly known as cluster bombs, and their hundreds of brightly-colored bomblets that spread out over a target, and I was reminded of Fulghum's words. Yet with a cluster bomb, the child's idyll world is horribly transformed.

It all starts well enough: "The bomb carrier starts to descend and it comes apart and small little bomblets come out and when they hit the ground they will destruct," an Air Force spokesperson at the Pentagon told me.

"The area where you are dropping [cluster bombs] is usually a combat area," he explained to me. Since there are many types of weapons to choose from, "the Air Force or any [Department of Defense] operation takes a very serious look at a particular weapon or any sort of munition to be used; it is not a random decision and it is made looking for a particular effect."

In the case of the cluster bomb, it is their ability to pierce armored vehicles, blow up personnel and otherwise alter the battle plans of an enemy brigade on the move that has made them a vital part of American campaigns in Iraq and more recently in Kosovo.

The weapon is of course not perfect: "It's not a precision munition," the Air Force spokesperson added. "There are 5 percent [of the bomblets] that will not explode on impact They just sit there. You don't want to pick it up or go play there because you don't know what caused them not to go off."

But this can also be part of how they are intended to work. "If they are run over or inappropriately handled, they are certainly dangerous," the Air Force spokesperson said, noting that in a combat zone this adds to their overall effectiveness.

However, when a country tries to regain peace, the unexploded bomblets, or "duds," retard the process. They stay and do not know tank from child, peace from violence. These bitter presents of war, perhaps hiding under a tree branch, brightly colored and coded, are dangerously inviting.

"They are an attractive tool for the inexpensive spreading of death," explains William M. Arkin, the chief military consultant to Human Rights Watch, which issued a report about the danger of duds titled "Ticking Time Bombs." The report states that the actual dud rate, as measured in the Gulf War, was close to a quarter of the bomblets, over four times the official Air Force estimate. Arkin said duds result from a variety of reasons and that their fuse work is often shoddy. He added that the cluster bombs have "Gameboy-like electronics," in an effort to create widescale destruction at minimum costs.

With approximately 1,100 bombs dropped over Yugoslavia, there may be tens of thousands of duds lying in the former battlefields. The world got a dramatic look at the sort of damage these bomblets can cause when in June, two British Gurkha peacekeepers died while collecting unexploded bomblets from a schoolhouse in Negrovce. The explosion was so fierce that no part of their bodies could be found.

Yesterday, the London Guardian reported that four Serbian children died and two more were seriously injured in Mogila when a bomblet they had discovered detonated.

And so, in the aftermath of the bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, the final deaths have not been counted. Hiding in the countryside is American and British munition destined to kill.

This may seem a familiar story. "Cluster bombs obviously have effects similar to land mines," said Marissa A. Vitagliano, coordinator for the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines. "We abhor them." Vitagliano agreed the situation is hauntingly reminiscent of the damage inflicted by the fields of abandoned land mines that remain around the globe.

And her organization should know about the gravity of these issues: it helped found the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its work.

Vitagliano said her organization, in light of recent events, considered adding cluster bombs to its international treaty in progress. But, citing the current opposition of the United States to the land mine treaty, among other reasons, she said it would not be feasible at this time. However, Vitagliano did say that "one of the fears is [that] as the mine ban treaty becomes universalized other countries may see cluster bombs as a replacement."

"What we have learned with land mines is that they have legitimate military uses, but our day-to-day experience is overwhelmed by the irresponsible uses of mines," Arkin said. He said that international pressure--alongside effective military alternatives--made the land mine treaty possible.

"We are on the cusp of the same type of debate for cluster bombs," Arkin said. He acknowledged the complexity of the issue from a military standpoint and stressed that "if their use was restricted to appropriate targets, we probably wouldn't have the types of problems we have seen in Yugoslavia."

Arkin also pointed out that the number of cluster bombs used in Yugoslavia was a mere fraction of the number sprayed over Iraq, and that this is already a recognition of "the adverse humanitarian impact" of these bombs.

There is clearly a lot to be learned about cluster bombs and whether, in the parade of deadly weapons, theirs is a particularly ghastly part. The Defense Department will release a preliminary report on the Kosovo campaign in mid-October. However, when I talked to its spokesperson he was unsure if the report would discuss cluster bombs.

Yet it appears that now is a particularly good time for those who feel any weapon with such potential to destroy truly innocent civilians and peacekeepers should be banned. The land mine campaign has opened the world's eyes to the long-term ravages of war and so these NATO tools must also come under scrutiny.

"We have a new aesthetic created by the campaigns against land mines and against blinding lasers in 1995, that makes people more confident they can ban the weapons," Arkin said.

Perhaps someday we can drop crayons instead.

Adam I. Arenson '01, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears biweekly.