The United States will announce this Friday the supply of cluster bombs, also called “fragmentation” bombs to Ukraine, with the aim that that country can better attack the trenches and other defensive positions established by Russia in the south and west of the country. At the moment, neither the characteristics of the bombs are known, nor the number of them that will be given, nor when the delivery to Ukraine will take place. The announcement comes as the delivery of European – albeit US-made – F-16 fighter-bombers to Ukraine is being delayed, and the Joe Biden government continues to resist pressure to deliver ATCMS long-range missiles to Ukraine. The US cluster bombs will be the first new weapons system Ukraine has received from the West since the UK began supplying it with Storm Shadow cruise missiles in May.
Cluster bombs are a controversial type of weapon, although in this conflict they have been used by both sides and, especially, by Russia. In fact, its manufacture, storage and use is prohibited in the 108 signatory countries – among which are not the US, Russia and Ukraine – of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Paradox of paradoxes: the Convention was an initiative of the then Prime Minister of Norway, Labor Jens Stoltenberg, who is now Secretary General of NATO. The Atlantic Alliance, however, does not participate in this arms delivery, since all its European partners have signed the Convention.
Fundamentally, a cluster bomb is a device -usually launched from an airplane, although there are also artillery launches- that explodes at a predetermined height and releases tens or hundreds of smaller bombs that cover a much wider radius. They began to be used by the United States in Vietnam and, since then, regardless of the virtues that each country proclaims, they have accompanied the human being in most of the great wars that have taken place. Great Britain used them in the Falklands in 1981; the Soviet Union in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989; Israel in Lebanon in 1978, 1992 and 2006; Russia in Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine (where it has bombed hospitals with them); France in Iraq in 1991; and the US and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, they have been used by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, and by the different contenders in the civil wars in Ethiopia and South Sudan.
The role of cluster bombs, according to the US military, was decisive in breaking the defensive lines that Saddam Hussein had erected in Kuwait in 1991. In the five weeks of bombing that preceded the entry of the ground forces into combat, the US According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, the United Kingdom and France dropped 61,000 cluster bombs that in total contained 20 million smaller bombs, called “submunitions.”
The tremendous surface area that these submunitions can reach, coupled with their small size, which allows them to fall into relatively small slits, is what makes cluster bombs a truly fearsome weapon, both against armored vehicles and against trenches. Against command bunkers, which are usually protected by concrete, however, they are often ineffective. For this reason, its usefulness can be very high in the offensive operations that Ukraine has been launching for a month against Russia in the south and west of the country. Nowadays, in addition, submunitions are also ‘smart bombs’, that is, they search for their own targets, with which they can be oriented to certain objectives.
Despite these advances, cluster bombs remain a problematic weapon. The military knows that unexploded submunitions can always remain, and their wide range of action multiplies the risk of some of the smaller bombs falling on civilian areas. Human Rights Watch has criticized the Biden administration’s decision to hand over the systems to Ukraine.
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