Someone who knows about cluster bombs

 

 

By Bob Anderson

The Koohan Paik-Mander (from Hawaii) talk here was well received and we had about 30 people in attendance.  She was the first guest speaker at our reclaimed Peace Center.  There was a mixture of old and young. She spoke about the theme of war ongoing now on marine life by all these militaries with their war games was powerful.  People responded well to it.  David Barsamian had a local fellow tape it and he is going to put it out on Alternative Radio, we hope.  

[Koohan will speak in Brunswick, Maine on Sunday, August 13 from 4:00-6:00 pm at the public library.]

Zelinsky does not fully realize he is just a pawn on the superpower chessboard.  The world must be laughing at him tonight.

The activists here get enraged over cluster bombs but not nukes in NATO countries.  

 

As a side, when I was in the Air Force at Nellis AFB, Las Vegas, NV, the war profiteers were just developing cluster bombs and I was assigned to part of the testing program, as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Specialist.  What I learned was that we were rushing them into use in Vietnam so fast that the military did not know the dispersal pattern of these bomb-lets from various altitudes and speeds, etc.  

So we were on the desert range doing the tests to see when they would land.  In Vietnam they were hitting our own troops with them, not knowing the parameters.  

 

Bob Anderson shopping for cluster bombs in the Nevada desert

And there are many types of cluster bombs.  It was one of the things that made me wonder about all of what we were doing.  The cluster bombs were not designed originally to destroy tanks or anything but to create a large number of casualties of “walking wounded” to fill up the NVA hospital system.  The official message was that they were intended to be used on radar sites.  Later ones were more destructive, intended for tanks, etc.  Now there are many horrible models. 

 

The new feature on the old 750 iron bomb was a folding fin arrangement to allow the bomb to fall slowly and directly down from plane, the fin opens like an unbrella to slow the bomb allowing the pilot to pull up fast to get away from blast area.  For low level high speed bombing runs.  We are looking at drop patterns here again.  This is the area of Creech AFB where the drones were flown in recent years.  The live nuclear tests were done in the 50s-60s just over the mountain range in background.

 

Just a technical point on the testing too, dropping them on hard dry lake beds in the Nevada desert is not like the soft jungles and terrain of Indochina.  That means the ones that don’t explode immediately can lay around and if hit with a hard impact then detonate.  Some of them were designed with fuses to deliberately sit around for different lengths of time before detonating.  Really sinister thinking went into these weapons.

There is a great 2013 movie made in Laos about some of this called The Rocket.  Is is about 2 hrs and well done.

I will conclude that the peace movement is rightly concerned about Biden and the U.S. sending cluster bombs to Ukraine but not worried about the cluster of nuclear weapons we have placed around Russia and China.

~ Bob Anderson helps coordinate Stop the War Machine in Albuquerque, New Mexico