just refreshing their ammo stock and dumping the old one, also giving reason for military complex factories to stay open, and help 'create jobs' and all that washington nonsense.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Yes. That tends to be why they're banned by most countries.
The dud bomblets stay around, and get picked up by kids. Then go boom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions
Mines but with extra steps
Good article but they didn't need the sensationalist title. "often" implies >50% in common discourse. The cited rate is 14.8%. terrible, but not often. Downvoted, unfortunately.
Edit: as comments below, and some searching online: "often" is subjective. So no, does not imply ">50% in common discourse"
I wouldn't say 'often' implies >50%, to imply that I would use something like 'mostly' or 'generally'. I think if you think about a 15% failure rate in something else, for example starting a car, saying it often fails would be pretty apt.
Context matters, 15% failure rate for a weaopon is certainly often. Furthermore, what that means in the context of cluster munitions is that they just sit there long after the conflict is over, so when people stumble on them decades later they get maimed and killed.
This is currently happening in places like Vietnam that were subjected to these horrors by US. Now it's going to be the turn for the people of Ukraine.
Any pretenses that US actually cares about the people of that country have now been dropped.
One in six fails to detonate in a cluster munition that has around a hundred grenades? Holy fuck that's fifteen unexploded grenades on a former battlefield every time they fire the weapon, I was previously against cluster munitions and I was just assuming it was like a 1% failure rate.
If the US actually cared about Ukraine, we wouldn't send cluster munitions. We have deliberately used these things to make farmland and schools into minefields for decades, we know exactly the harm they cause. Ukraine is fighting this war on their home turf, their home turf is where the cluster munitions will remain undetonated until some child steps on them.
The US wants to see the Russians slaughtered. The PR line is that we want to defend Ukraine, but using cluster munitions is not a thing you do somewhere you're trying to defend. We're perfectly happy to have a bunch of Ukrainians slaughtered if it means we can take down some Russians too.
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