At 11:00 a.m. on May 7, 1999, nato airstrikes in niš, a southern city in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, had been going on for more than a month.
The first few air raids and bombs have landed on waterworks, machinery factories and other places, convincing residents that the downtown living area will not become a target of NATO air raids, and letting down their vigilance against the planes roaring overhead.
An old lady walked out of the house and rushed to the wet market as usual, picked out a bag of eggs and carrots, and was about to go home to prepare a lunch for her family.
Suddenly, death descended from the sky. A bomb quickly landed from the plane in the center of the wet market, immediately taking the old lady's life.
What followed was the surprise of the crowd within a few hundred meters of the surrounding area, and the first explosion was only the beginning of death!
Only to see the bomb as if with a doppelganger, split into dozens of tennis ball-sized bombs rushing in all directions, in an instant, caused 15 deaths within a 100-meter range, more than 60 injuries, and most of the survivors were left with lifelong disabilities.
This is the internationally notorious weapon of mass graves in the name of nuclear weapons in conventional weapons .
As the name suggests, a cluster bomb is a collective bomb inlaid with multiple submunitions inside.
Unlike ordinary bombs, which kill targets once, this bomb is special in that it can carry out multiple saturation attacks with wide coverage.
When the bomb is dropped to the target, the mother bomb will decompose into dozens to hundreds of sub-bombs on its own.
It whistles in all directions, forming a near-saturated carpet bombardment of enemy targets, and theoretically the combat radius of cluster bombs can reach the size of a football field.
Deterred by the murderous power of cluster bombs, in 2008, 107 countries in Oslo, Norway, gathered here to sign a cluster bomb convention prohibiting the production, transportation, use and transfer of cluster bombs.
Surprisingly, the list of conventions does not contain the word China, which to this day has not indicated its intention to accede to the convention.
If China does not join, is it as some Western countries believe that it is unwilling to bear the moral righteousness of the world's major powers?
What conditions must be met before China is willing to join the Convention?
(NATO bombs residential areas in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)
To clarify these issues, we must start with the Number One "Fan" of Cluster Bombs, the United States.
(1) There is one stone in the world of cluster bombs, and the United States monopolizes eight buckets
Cluster bombs originated in Nazi Germany in World War II, but the country that really carried forward this weapon and became a "nuclear weapon in conventional weapons" was the United States.
In order to more effectively kill and injure the Viet Cong troops hidden in the jungle deep in the Vietnam War, the U.S. military deliberately developed an MK20 (stone eye) cluster bomb that could effectively kill and injure the enemy in a large area from 1963, and officially installed troops after 7 years.
(Vietnam War)
Weighing more than 200 kilograms, this stone-eye bomb can carry 247 submunitions, each of which is only 0.63 kilograms, and the submunition is extremely powerful despite its small power.
It can penetrate tank armor between 50-80 mm, effectively killing enemies and destroying ground targets such as tanks and fortress positions in a range of 4800 square meters, and the bomb has since spawned different versions of bombs, which made the Viet Cong suffer greatly in the Vietnam War.
However, the most "highlight" war of cluster bombs was in the Gulf War.
At that time, the main Iraqi forces were retreating from Kuwait, and the Iraqi army convoy carrying countless heavy loads was crowded on the vast road.
The U.S. military, which had air supremacy, was as excited as if it had caught a big fish and carried out a bloody slaughter of these convoys.
Only to see bombs suddenly transform into countless steel needles after landing from the sky, and the average bomb split into 5,000 pieces.
The flesh-and-blood Iraqi army immediately became like a sieve, and its tragic situation even the American troops in the sky could not bear to look directly at it, calling it a hellish scene.
In addition to the Gulf War, cluster bombs have also repeatedly shown their might in NATO's bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Israel's bombing of Lebanon.
One example is the bombing mentioned at the beginning of the article, when NATO claimed to be preparing to bomb the airfield, but was dropped into a residential area due to pilot error.
What is "valuable" is that this highly effective weapon has an ultra-low price that does not match it.
For example, a U.S. CBU-87 cluster bomb costs only a measly $14,000, or about 1/100 of the price of a Tomahawk cruise missile.
Therefore, since the day of its birth, the United States and other major military powers have loved this weapon and have increased their efforts to produce it.
According to statistics, there were about 1 billion cluster bombs in the world by 2010, of which the United States alone accounted for 800 million, and others such as Israel and Russia also held a considerable number of cluster bombs.
While using it on a large scale on the battlefield, the United States has not forgotten to "gift" other countries and regions, and has made a lot of money from low-cost cluster bombs at high prices.
In 2010, the United States sold 521 CBU-105 cluster bombs to India for $260 million, and arms companies made a fortune.
Cluster bombs are good, but there is only one drawback - it is easy to kill civilians indiscriminately.
Cluster Bombs: A Terrorist Nightmare for Civilians The United States categorically refuses to sign the Ban Convention
As mentioned earlier, cluster bombs can carry out a large-scale secondary attack at the moment of explosion, and it is very easy to accidentally injure civilians near the combat target.
Worst of all, there is a serious dud probability of this bomb.
Although the United States claims that the bomb has a dud rate of only 1% at most, this is only the ideal state under the laboratory, and the actual battlefield dud rate is much higher than this figure.
According to the statistics of relevant international organizations, after a cluster bomb is split into dozens to hundreds, about 5%-20% of the submunitions will fail.
These "dormant" bombs are only temporarily "hibernating", and once the civilians come into contact with them, they will activate the bombs and cause casualties.
Among them, the number of civilians in Vietnam who lose their lives every year due to cluster bombs left behind by the US military reaches more than 300, most of which are caused by children inadvertently touching them during play in the wild.
As a result, the bomb was called a "vulgar weapon" by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
In addition, these duds are equally re-polluting of the land. Vietnam originally had a lot of fertile fields, but after the cluster bombing, the locals had to abandon their farmland for fear of the threat of duds.
Duds are as firmly attached to Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon and other countries like cosmos, and the New York Times has estimated that it will take at least 300 years to remove all of Vietnam's cluster duds.
So in 2008, 107 countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain, signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, initiated by Norway.
It is agreed to jointly destroy any cluster bombs in the country, to produce, use and transfer the weapon throughout the chain, and to allow Member States to try to help the main victims of cluster bombs.
As the world's number one cluster bomb power and the main producer of cluster bomb disasters throughout Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Laos and other places, the United States refused to sign it on the grounds that "until an alternative to cluster bombs can be found".
By 2010, under strong pressure from all sides, the United States changed its tune again, claiming that it would ban the weapon in 8 years, but it would still use it as appropriate on some necessary occasions.
The fact that the United States does not sign it is tantamount to saying that the ban on cluster bombs has created a huge hole that can never be filled. As long as U.S. cluster bombs circulate within the allowed range, even if the signatory countries go to great lengths to ban them, they will not be able to stop these weapons from wandering.
Therefore, from the perspective of national defense and security, if all countries and regions in the world join the convention, then there is naturally no problem for China to join.
If the United States, the first major country in the cluster, does not participate in the convention, will China join the convention to weaken its national defense strength by tying its hands and feet?
In addition, there are other significant loopholes in the content of the Convention. For example, no more than 10 submunitions are stipulated, and some technologically advanced countries can continue to produce cluster bombs of less than 10.
It should be noted that although China has not signed the Convention, its contribution to restricting the elimination of cluster munitions is no less than that of those countries that have signed up.
(iii) China: "Signatories" not signed to the Convention
There are many cluster bomb convention entries, but the real core is mainly two articles:
- Limit the use of cluster bomb technology in warfare.
- Help cluster bomb victim countries to clear the remaining duds.
These two are the latter being the most difficult, time-consuming, laborious and costly.
If you compare China's performance on cluster bombs over the years, you will find that China actually plays the role of a signatory.
First, China has always strictly controlled the transfer of cluster bomb technology and has never delivered such bombs to countries subject to Security Council sanctions and embargoes.
China has also repeatedly advocated addressing the cluster bomb issue within the framework of a fairer CCW.
- China undertook most of the cleanup of cluster duds. There is no shortage of Chinese peacekeepers in Lebanon, Vietnam, Laos and other places in the world's major cluster bomb disaster areas.
Unlike most people who think that a dud bomb is detonated as soon as it is found, the demining process in China is far more complicated and difficult than this.
Since many duds are buried in residential areas or near fruit trees in farmland, considering that these orchards are the pillar industry of the local people,
The Chinese peacekeepers took the measure of carefully placing duds in open areas and detonating them again, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive, and it was easy to cause heavy casualties without paying attention, but fortunately, the Chinese officers and soldiers did all the demining tasks well.
In Lebanon, from 2006 to 2022, Chinese peacekeepers have cleared more than 10,000 cluster duds and mines from 2 million square meters, handing over one complete orchard after another to local farmers.
During the construction of the railway in Laos, China spent only half a year cleaning up 459 cluster duds and other fragments of shrapnel dropped by the U.S. military, and repeatedly donated medical supplies to dud victims.
For the performance of Chinese demining officers and soldiers, UN officials praised: "The performance of the Chinese battalion is very outstanding! ”
During the Lebanese peacekeeping period, locals often spontaneously prepared drinks, fruits and vegetables, and ate pot pulp to comfort Chinese officers and soldiers.
Logically, who pollutes, who governs, China has never used this notorious weapon on foreign land since 49 years, but in the morals of a big country, to clean up the mess left by the United States, Israel and other countries, even if it does not sign the convention, there is no place to blame.
epilogue
It is foreseeable that in the future, this murderous weapon will continue to stay on the international battlefield for a long time, and I hope that humanity can withdraw the cluster bomb from the battlefield as soon as possible.