Hot New Bombshells: Cluster Munitions’ Humanitarian Legacy and Impact

Human Rights Research Center
Aug 22
10 min read

August 22, 2025

View of a collection of defused cluster bombs and grenades used by an international bomb disposal group for training in Savannakhet, Laos, on May 2, 2006. [Image credit: Jerry Redfern/LightRocket via Getty Images]

What are cluster munitions?

Cluster munitions, alternatively called cluster bombs, were first developed and used during World War II by both German and Soviet forces on the Eastern front. The ability of cluster munitions to open mid-air and to then disperse smaller submunitions, or “bomblets,” into an area meant that they were of high military value, as one munition has the potential to kill or destroy multiple targets. However, this imprecision is what makes this weapon a danger to civilians. Despite international humanitarian attempts to ban cluster munitions, they continue to be used in armed conflicts and, unless use is universally forbidden, they will continue altering the lives of citizens caught in the crossfire for generations to come.

Cluster munitions have the highest failure rate among all classes of weapons, meaning that the released submunitions often fail to detonate on impact. Most manufacturers claim a submunition failure rate of as low as 2%, but mine clearance specialists frequently report rates up to 30%. Ecological factors as variable as air temperature, whether the munitions land in soft or muddy ground, or whether the munitions land in an area with heavy vegetation cover, can impact whether or not the submunition detonates. The unexploded ordnance (UXO) then becomes a landmine that could detonate years down the line if stumbled upon by an unsuspecting civilian— more often than not, the victims of UXO detonation are children, unable to tell the difference between a brightly colored bomblet and a toy.

It is very difficult to estimate how many casualties these weapons have produced from their inception, but starting with the United States’ extensive use of cluster bombs in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, organizations such as the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor have made it their mission to track and publish such data. By the end of 2023, the global estimate of cluster munition casualties is estimated to be as high as 56,800 individuals in 37 different countries. In 2023, 219 people were killed or injured by cluster munitions; 93% of casualties being civilians and 47% being children. Despite advances in both technology and international law, civilians across the globe are still being endangered. There is no justifiable use for cluster munitions, and the international community should strive to eradicate these weapons from use.

Laos: A Case Study

One of the clearest examples of the civilian dangers posed by cluster munitions is the case of Laos. A small Southeast Asian country with a population of around seven million, Laos remains the most bombed country per capita in the history of the world. As part of Vietnam War efforts, a combination of CIA-funded local mercenaries and United States Air Force (USAF) pilots bombarded the country with cluster munitions in efforts to intercept the Communist Northern Vietnamese troops traveling by the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos into South Vietnam, as well as to crush the indigenous Pathet Lao Communist force. The scale of this bombing operation was enormous. From 1964 to 1973, there were 580,000 bombing runs over Laos, equating to one planeload every eight minutes for nearly a decade. 50,000 civilians were killed as a result of cluster bombs, and out of the 80 million submunitions dropped over the small country, over 30% failed to detonate.

Now, over 50 years later, Laotian people are still suffering the consequences of this “secret war”. Less than 1% of the UXOs littered across the country have been cleared, affecting an area two-and-a-half times the size of New York City. Since the end of the war, 20,000 civilians have been killed by delayed explosions, half of them children. In 2016, President Barack Obama pledged $90 million to Laos to aid UXO clearance, but experts say at the rate the project is going, it will take a century to complete. The scale of this problem far exceeds the resources provided to address it. Clearance requires locating the UXOs and safely removing and destroying the bomblet, all of which takes specialized, costly equipment and trained personnel.

The threat of dormant cluster munitions is woven into the everyday life of Laotian people, serving as an impediment to both social and economic development. UXOs restrict land-use, especially in the hardest hit areas of Xieng Khouang Province and the southern border with Vietnam, which remain the most economically stunted in the nation. In Savannakhet Province, where Ho Chi Minh Trail routes attracted heavy bombing, 70% of the population lives below the poverty line. Even for children born two decades after the Vietnam War, the average exposure to UXOs reduces educational attainment by 1.3 years, creating a continual educational gap between contaminated and not-contaminated villages. Not only did the bombings impede the educational pursuits of the war-time cohort, but the contamination of agricultural land reduced farming efficiency, causing children to drop out of school to support their families in the fields. When the land is contaminated by UXO’s, even growing rice, which most families depend on, becomes a life-threatening activity. Exposure to UXO’s inhibits the development of human capital for generations, creating a cycle of poverty that will be difficult to break until clearance projects have been completed.

Besides the Vietnam War, there have been numerous other world conflicts in which cluster munitions have been deployed, all with disastrous civilian consequences. In the 1991 Gulf War, American forces dropped 24.5 million submunitions on Iraq and Kuwait over the course of just 37 days, leaving over a million UXOs. In 1999, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces dropped approximately 295,000 submunitions over former Yugoslavia and Kosovo, killing approximately 500 civilians. Israel used over four million cluster munitions with a failure rate of up to 70% in Lebanon during their 2006 conflict with Hezbollah, contaminating 26% of southern Lebanon’s arable land. The ability of these weapons to negatively impact the lives of innocent civilians for decades after a conflict makes the use of cluster munitions by any nation morally reprehensible and indefensible.

Cluster Munitions in International Law

Despite the disastrous civilian ramifications of cluster munition use during the Vietnam War, the humanitarian push for an international ban did not pick up steam until the early 2000s. Previous attempts to regulate cluster munitions within the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) largely failed due to pushback from major military powers such as the United States and Russia. In the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on countries to ban cluster bombs and destroy their stockpiles. Subsequently, at the 2006 Geneva Convention review of the CCW, Norway declared it would organize an international conference in Oslo to start drafting an international cluster munition ban. In 2007, 46 states (including cluster-munition-impacted states such as Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Lebanon) adopted the Oslo Declaration, committing to finishing an international treaty banning the weapons by the end of 2008.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) was adopted in Dublin, Ireland on May 30, 2008 by 107 states and entered into force on August 1, 2010. As of August 2024, the CCM has 112 state parties and 12 signatories. As a legally binding international instrument, the treaty prohibits “the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.” State parties are obliged to destroy stockpiled munitions, clear contaminated land, conduct risk education, provide assistance to victims, engage in transparency measures, provide technical, material, & financial assistance to other state parties, and enact legal & administrative measures to implement the Convention. Since the treaty’s creation, nearly 1.5 million cluster munitions and 179 million submunitions have been destroyed by state parties. UXO removal in state parties has been a slow-moving process; only 83.91 square kilometers were cleared in 2023, a decrease from the 93.49 square kilometers cleared in 2022.

48 out of the 73 non-signatory states possess cluster munition stockpiles — China, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States to name a few. While the majority of states outside of the CCM have never used cluster munitions, being a non-signatory means that they could choose to draw upon their stockpiles or purchase cluster munitions at their discretion.

What’s more, in July of 2024, Lithuania's parliament voted to become the first state party to leave the CCM. This decision came as a surprise, as the country has never produced, stockpiled, used, or transferred cluster munitions. Lithuanian defense officials argued this was a necessary national security move in the face of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine, fearing they could be next. Norway’s foreign affairs minister, Espen Barth Eide, called this decision “regrettable,” arguing that state parties should, “maintain international rules, norms and obligations for warfare, also when the security landscape changes.” While state parties are prohibited from withdrawing while actively engaged in armed conflict, deciding to re-arm could create a dangerous race-to-the-bottom. At the same time, militarily aggressive states such as Russia and the United States who have caused/are actively causing civilian harm through cluster munitions should face increased scorn and pressure from the international community to become a CCM state party and destroy their stockpiles.

Ukraine, the United States, and Cluster Munitions

In 2023, Ukraine reported the highest number of cluster munition casualties worldwide, over 1,000, for the second consecutive year due to its ongoing war with Russia. One of the deadliest cluster munition attacks of the war thus far took place on April 8, 2022 at a train station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, where at least 58 civilians were killed and 100 were injured. A more recent attack, in Odesa, Ukraine on April 29, 2024, killed 7 civilians and injured dozens more. Russian missiles and drones regularly target Odesa’s port infrastructure; however, this particular strike was eight kilometers away from the port and nowhere near any known military buildings or supply storehouses. This represents a clear lack of interest in military strategy and instead reveals the Russian military’s blatant attempt to disrupt civilian infrastructure and to cause direct harm to Ukrainian civilians.

Ukraine has also started to conduct cluster munition strikes of its own, particularly in and around the Russian-controlled city of Izyum. While Ukraine initially denied the use of cluster munitions, in 2023 they began asking for artillery from other countries, namely the United States. Since 2008, the United States’ stance on cluster munitions has been to reduce the failure rate to 1% or less by 2018, and to not export or produce the weapons unless that goal has been reached. In 2017, the Trump Administration’s Department of Defense reversed this policy, permitting the weapons to be used in extreme situations, even if they exceed the 1% fail rate. Currently, the reported UXO rate of standard US-made cluster bombs is 2.35%. While this is certainly improved from the 30% rate of the past, environmental and delivery factors could still produce a higher dud rate in practice. At the end of the day, anything above 0% is unacceptable, because it means that civilians will be placed in harm’s way.

The United States’ decision to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine garnered scrutiny from the international community. The Foreign Minister of Laos was a staunch advocate against this deal, arguably due to the loss of life that he has witnessed in his own nation due to cluster munitions. He warned the international community that these “heinous weapons” continue to pose “serious threats to the lives and livelihoods of our people.” The Biden Administration cited a lack of alternatives and staunch support of the Ukrainian cause as the reasons for ultimately sending over 2 million artillery shells in 7 transfers from July 2023 to October 2024. While neither Ukraine, Russia, nor the United States are state parties of the CCM, the transfer raises humanitarian concerns that civilians will continue to be indiscriminately harmed and killed by these imprecise weapons.

Cluster munitions have been demonstrated to be a danger to civilians, especially children, time and time again. This topic highlights the pitfalls of international laws; when there is no power that can force states to agree to abide by international norms, powerful states can get away with warmongering in the name of national security or global hegemony. In the case of the United States, which has never ratified the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court, there is no way to hold the country accountable for the war crimes committed by these indiscriminate weapons. For every country dropping bomblets on another and corporation earning profit from manufacturing cluster bombs, there are hundreds of children whose survival will depend on learning the difference between a child’s toy and a deadly weapon.

Glossary

CIA: a civilian foreign intelligence agency of the United States’ government
Communist: a person who believes or supports the principles of communism - a political and economic system that seeks to create a classless society where the major means of production are owned by the working class
Cluster munitions: weapons consisting of a container that opens in the air and scatters explosive submunitions or “bomblets” over a wide area
Hegemony: leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others
Hezbollah: an Iran-backed Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group
Human capital: the skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by an individual or population, viewed in terms of their value or cost to an organization or country
Indigenous: originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native
International Criminal Court: an independent global judicial body with the power to bring prosecutions for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes
Landmine: an explosive mine laid on or just under the surface of the ground
NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization; a political and military alliance of 32 member countries, primarily from Europe and North America
Ordnance: military supplies including weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles, and maintenance tools and equipment
Signatory: A state that is in political support of the treaty and willing to continue its engagement with the treaty process
State party: Member states who have ratified or acceded to the protocol, giving explicit consent to be bound by the treaty
Submunitions: a small weapon that is part of a larger warhead and separates from it prior to impact
Treaty: a formally concluded and ratified agreement between countries
Warmongering: encouragement or advocacy of aggression towards other groups or nations

Sources

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Hot New Bombshells: Cluster Munitions’ Humanitarian Legacy and Impact

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