U.S. Leads Challenge to Ban on Cluster Munitions

[marmar]

Published on Saturday, November 19, 2011 by Inter Press Service
U.S. Leads Challenge to Ban on Cluster Munitions

by Sandra Siagian


UNITED NATIONS - Deliberations are underway for a United States-backed proposal to allow the continued use, production, trade and stockpiling of cluster munitions at the Fourth Review Conference of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) in Geneva.

Delegates from some 100 countries have been meeting since Monday and will continue until Nov. 25 to consider whether to allow a controversial new protocol to the CCW permitting the use of cluster munitions produced after 1980.

Cluster munitions are an indiscriminate weapon designed to break open mid-air and release between a dozen and a few hundred sub-munitions. Each is the size of a soda can and impacts an area as large as several football fields.

When the sub-munitions explode, they fire hundreds of fragments of metal that travel at the speed of a bullet, which can kill or seriously injure anyone in the area. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/19-0

[Tesha]

1. Chains you can believe in! (NT)

[RC]

2. How can anyone defend the US as not being a terrorist state?

Land mines is another terrorist device we like to use.