Friend of the blog Patrick Clarkin has published a brilliant and indepth discussion on a Lao National Regulatory Authority report on unexploded ordnance (UXO) in the country. The report puts plainly the long term danger of UXOs:
What is particularly significant from the LNRA report is that 40% of recorded casualties actually occurred after 1973, the year that bombing ceased. The nature of the bombing campaign, in particular the near indiscriminate use of cluster bombs, meant that it was inevitable that massive amounts of ordnance would remain in Laos for decades. Khamvongsa and Russell (2009) note that between 1996- 2006, removal teams had cleared approximately 144 km2 of land, or just 1% of high-risk areas and only .04% of total contaminated land. In a 2009 AlertNet article by Thin Lei Win, Boddington stated that “after 15 years of official clearance operations, we have managed to clear about 400,000 (of an estimated 80 million cluster bombs still in Laos). If you do the sums, you’ll find that in order to clear all of the bombs in this country, it will take 3,000 years.” Think about that. Meanwhile, the number of UXO casualties remains around 250 people per year into the present, 37 years after the bombing campaign officially ended.
In an era of aging cold-war cluster munition stockpiles, there is a serious lesson to learned from a country tragically well experienced in the perils of UXOs. The lesson should be particularly pertinent to Israel. One IDF commander claimed Israeli forces “fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets” during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, of which a significant proportion did not detonate on impact.
Christopher R. Albon is a political science Ph.D. specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.
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