GENEVA: Believe the advocates of a treaty banning cluster munitions and the international community is about to take a decisive step toward curbing the use of a weapon that inflicts terrible suffering, particularly on civilians. Believe the U.S. government, and the measure they propose threatens to undermine the NATO alliance that has underpinned Western security since World War II. Delegates from more than a hundred countries will open a conference in Dublin on Monday that will try to hammer out a treaty banning the production, use, stockpiling or transfer of cluster munitions - bombs or artillery shells packed with up to several hundred bomblets or submunitions that are sprayed over wide areas of territory. Major producers and stockpilers of cluster munitions, the United States, Russia and China, will be absent and are opposed to a treaty, but disarmament experts liken the cluster treaty to the Ottawa Treaty of 1997 banning land mines, which was shunned by the major powers but has proved influential in shaping the policies of countries outside the convention.
GENEVA: Believe the advocates of a treaty banning cluster munitions and the international community is about to take a decisive step toward curbing the use of a weapon that inflicts terrible suffering, particularly on civilians. Believe the U.S. government, and the measure they propose threatens to undermine the NATO alliance that has underpinned Western security since World War II.
Delegates from more than a hundred countries will open a conference in Dublin on Monday that will try to hammer out a treaty banning the production, use, stockpiling or transfer of cluster munitions - bombs or artillery shells packed with up to several hundred bomblets or submunitions that are sprayed over wide areas of territory.
Major producers and stockpilers of cluster munitions, the United States, Russia and China, will be absent and are opposed to a treaty, but disarmament experts liken the cluster treaty to the Ottawa Treaty of 1997 banning land mines, which was shunned by the major powers but has proved influential in shaping the policies of countries outside the convention.
Believe the U.S. government, and the measure they propose threatens to undermine the NATO alliance that has underpinned Western security since World War II.
A country that believes in torture cannot possibly see a problem with cluster bombs. I believe the UK will cling to them as well.
"If we didn't have them, everybody else would be able to use them against us" keep to the Fen Causeway
