On the recordMarch 14, 2011
on March 10, my friend from California, Senator Feinstein, and I introduced S. 558, the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act of 2011. It is identical to the bill she and I introduced last year and similar to those in prior years. Cluster munitions, like any weapon, have some military utility. But anyone who has seen the indiscriminate devastation cluster munitions cause over a wide area understands the unacceptable threat they pose to civilians. These are not the laser-guided weapons the Pentagon showed destroying their targets during the invasion of Baghdad. There is the horrific problem of cluster munitions that fail to explode as designed and remain as active duds, like landmines, until they are triggered by whoever comes into contact with them. Often it is an unsuspecting child or a farmer. In Laos today, people are still being killed and maimed by millions of U.S. cluster munitions left from the Vietnam war. That legacy, resulting from years of secret bombing of a peaceful, agrarian people who posed no threat to the United States, contaminated more than a third of Laos' agricultural land and cost countless innocent lives. It is shameful that we have contributed less money in the past 35 years to clean up these deadly remnants of war than we spent in a few days of bombing. Current law prohibits U.S. sales, exports, and transfers of cluster munitions that have a failure rate exceeding 1 percent.
