ANOTHER SMALL, but nonetheless important step. In joining 28 other countries, including Ireland, by ratifying the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) Burkina Faso and Moldova have allowed it to become binding in international law for participating states.
Along with the 1997 ban on anti-personnel mines, the convention represents a significant conventional arms building block in the slow-moving construction of an international architecture of arms control. As it passes this ratification milestone, talks are continuing between Russia and the US on major cuts in offensive nuclear missiles, a successor agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) which expired in December. There is hope of a deal within weeks which could be an important scene-setter for the wider, difficult 189-state Non-Proliferation Treay talks due to begin in May.
And if the Start deadlock is disposed of, Moscow and Washington are set to launch even more complex discussions: in addition to further reducing deployed strategic warheads, they will try to agree cuts in reserve warheads and also in the thousands of tactical nuclear bombs, smaller battlefield nukes, that are most vulnerable to proliferation or theft, some still sited in Europe.
Dropped from aircraft or fired from the ground, cluster bombs open in mid-air and scatter bomblets over a wide area. They can be used indiscriminately and with devastating effect in conventional battlefields with massed concentrations of troops. But many of the bomblets fail to explode and, like landmines, represent a deadly continuing threat to civilians. The CCM deal, in which Ireland played a major part and which was finally struck in Dublin in 2008, was an important recognition of both the inhumanity of such weapons and also their limited strategic value in the unconventional battlefields of the 21st century. The CCM prohibits their use, production, and transfer, provides strict deadlines for clearing affected areas and destroying stockpiles, and requires assistance to victims of the weapons.
A total of 104 states have signed the convention and it is crucial that pressure on them to ratify is maintained – within the EU, perhaps the new foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton, could apply the whip to laggards like Britain, Italy and most of “new Europe”. And it is important that former users of the weapons – such as the US, Russia, and Israel – be asked to re-examine their opposition to the convention and their questionable claims of military necessity.