War is Hell
By Leonard Fein
Yes, war is hell. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that. But in truth, rocket scientists - more specifically, bomb-makers, a kind of sub-category of rocket scientists - should know that even better than others.
I have in mind the current reports on the residue of cluster bombs that are killing and maiming people in Kosovo today. NATO (the American and British components thereof) dropped 1500 cluster bombs during the course of the air war against Serbia. Each bomb, in turn, released between 150 and 200 "bomblets" - a word my spell-checker wisely refuses to recognize and I stubbornly refuse to add to my word processor's dictionary - small bright yellow canisters that float down to the ground on individual parachutes and there detonate, except when they don't. The ones that do detonate presumably destroy that which they are intended to destroy - tanks, soldiers, whatnot. But one knows in advance that some ten percent will malfunction, will not detonate when they land. In the Kosovo case, it seems that the ten percent figure was rather dramatically increased because the "bomblets," it turns out, were dated. Like the prescription drugs in your medicine cabinet, they are good only until the date specified. After that, who knows? The current estimate is that the failure rate in Kosovo may have run as high as 30 percent.
The arithmetic is simple. Even at the 10 percent failure rate, we're talking about more than 25,000 bomblets strewn about the countryside. At the higher end, there may be as many as 90,000. And the harsh fact is that these attractive yellow canisters with their cute little parachutes are immensely tempting to children. And yes, they will explode; their failure on initial impact does not inhibit them from blowing up months or years later in a child's hand. The results, when that happens? In one recent incident, two soldiers were killed as they sought to move cluster bombs; the explosion was so powerful that not enough was left of their bodies to recover.
Easy questions first: Who authorized the use of out-of-date bomblets, thereby upping the lethal debris from ten to thirty percent of the total? Has that person been arrested? Indicted for murder, or for war crimes? Fired, perhaps? At least transferred to a less sensitive job? Anything?
And then the hard question: Who authorized the use of any cluster bomb at all, knowing that in the best of circumstances, ten percent would lie in wait to do their killing after the war? We know about "collateral damage," and we know about "friendly fire," and we know that bad people lay land mines - in the case of Kosovo, the estimate is that there are 500,000 mines in the ground - that have sorry consequences long after the soldiers have gone home, long after "peace" has been restored.
But hey, we're the good guys, no? We are supposed to care about these kinds of things. We're supposed to use the least amount of force required to do the job. And a citizen is entitled to suppose that in this instance, the definition of "least" includes a consideration of residual consequences. Those of us who quietly cheered the NATO "intervention" - until now, I would not have thought to place quotation marks around that word - assumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that our generals and their masters would behave responsibly. And perhaps, by their lights, they did. Do we not then deserve some insight into how they did their calculations, how much if any weight they gave in devising their ordinance mix to this pesky problem of residual casualties? For it is difficult in the extreme to accept that there was no alternative but to prescribe post-war death for some hundreds, or thousands, of bystanders. War, von Clausewitz famously wrote, "is a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means." Must we now add that peace is a continuation of war by bomblets whose makers and deployers knew all along of their lethal residue?
We marked, this week, the anniversary of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. I vividly recall the flag-raising ceremony at my Habonim camp the next day: Miriam Falk, the head of our camp, said to us, "Chevreh, a terrible thing happened in the world yesterday. A new kind of bomb was dropped on a Japanese city called Hiroshima, and our world will never be the same." I was eleven years old at the time, and I was enormously flattered that I was being taken so seriously, initiated into the high drama of adult concerns. We've somehow managed, save for Nagasaki a few days later, to keep the big bomb in handy storage all these years. Now come its shrunken offspring, our civilized alternative. Are these less deserving of notice? Does J. Robert Oppenheimer's citation from the Bhagavad Gita at the explosion of the first atom bomb in Alamagordo, New Mexico, not apply equally to these? "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." By what right, and by whose authority, was this residue planted, allegedly in our name?
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