more on cluster bombs

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun May 9 08:47:45 PDT 1999


Doug Henwood wrote:


> [A few more figures to work into the morbidity & mortality balance sheet.]
>
> Los Angeles Times - April 28, 1999
>
>
> Unexploded bombs litter more of Yugoslavia with each day that its war with
> NATO drags on. Adding to the concern is the possibility that armor-piercing
> shells, controversial weapons that some critics argue can release dangerous
> levels of radioactive waste, will be widely used by the alliance in Kosovo.

About those unexploded bombs. The natural assumption is that they are duds, part of whose mechanism failed to work. Probably not so. Their failure to explode was probably intentional.

When my daughter was in Cuba in 1971 she met a young woman from Hanoi who was the only surviving member of a team of six which had worked with unexploded bombs in Hanoi. These bombs were deliberately set not to explode on impact, and contained various mechanisms by which they would explode at some future time, either timed or linked to any effort to defuse them. Such bombs are an integral part of the strategy of Air Warfare (i.e. terrorism) followed by the U.S. (I believe Doug posted an article earlier giving a history of the development of this strategy in the U.S., going back to Billy Mitchell.)

The presence of numerous unexploded bombs would then be rather conclusive evidence that the current war is directed primarily against the population and total culture (civil society) of both Serbia and Kosovo. They would lend support to the suggestion that the entire U.S. strategy in Eastern Europe since the collapse of the FSU has been (as Mark Jones suggested in a long post some two years or so ago) to "Africanize" the area (to totally disrupt it as European incursions disrupted Africa in the 19th century). If someone on lbo has that post still in their mailbox it would be useful to fwd it to the list.

Carrol



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