U.S. allies are beginning to call out Joe Biden after his administration agreed to sell controversial cluster bombs to Ukraine in their ongoing war against Russia.
The United States agreed to send over the munitions which are banned by an international treaty signed by 123 countries, including a number of those U.S. allies, because of the danger it poses to civilians in war zones.
According to the BBC, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Spain all publicly voiced their opposition to the sale with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, citing his country’s commitment to cluster munitions while New Zealand’s PM sounded off a bit more calling the weapon “indiscriminate”.
Chris Hipkins said the weapons were “indiscriminate, they cause huge damage to innocent people, potentially, and they can have a long-lasting effect as well”. The White House had been made aware of New Zealand’s opposition to the use of cluster bombs in Ukraine, he said.
Meanwhile, a government spokesperson for Germany, played a little more cover for the United States saying that the Biden Administration probably didn’t come to this decision “lightly”.
What makes cluster bombs so deadly, especially for civilians is the dud rate. It’s said cluster bombs carry a dud rate anywhere from 10 to 30 percent meaning many of the smaller clusters will go undetonated and could very well come into contact with civilians after the initial drop. U.S. weapons manufacturers claim that there’s actually a two to five percent dud rate according to the Washington Post while the Pentagon claims that their own testing showed a 2.5 percent dud rate.
Even a 2.5 percent dud rate would go against a mandate handed down by Congress that no munitions could be sold by the U.S. with a dud rate over one percent.
Unfortunately, Biden is finding ways around that:
There is no waiver provision in the 1 percent limit Congress has placed on cluster munition dud rates, written into Defense Department appropriations for the last seven years. Biden would bypass it and Congress, according to a White House official, drawing down the munitions from existing defense stocks under a rarely used provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, which allows the president to provide aid, regardless of appropriations or arms export restrictions, as long as he determines that it is in the vital U.S. national security interest.
Unsurprisingly, it always comes down to “U.S. national security interests”.
