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I have taken a close interest for a number of years in the question of the appropriateness of weapons that depend on cluster munitions for their effect. As noble Lords have shown as they have thrown the various statistics around, we have, sadly, been gaining much more data about their effect, particularly in many of the conflicts over the past 15 years. As the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, said, Kosovo in 1999 was effectively an air campaign with the widespread use of cluster bombs. In Afghanistan in 2001, in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and in Lebanon in 2006, a large number of unexploded submunitions have caused injury and death to civilians long after the battle has finished.
I take very seriously the words of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. He is, after all, among your Lordships today the person with the most recent experience of the battlefield. He said, rightly, that there is no such thing as a nice weapon. By their nature, weapons are not nice. However, I assume that, just like other members of the British military, of which I was once a member, he accepts that there are certain classes of weapons that are appropriately prohibited from warfare, whatever their military utility. The right reverend Prelates the Bishops of Salisbury and of Coventry reminded us of that moral dimension and the need to align what is legal with what is right. We have accepted that in the international community. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Archer of Sandwell, said, we have done that for 140 years, since the St Petersburg international military convention of 1868 laid down that,
Since then, we have banned many types of weapons, despite the fact that they are probably very useful to have. We do not use them because their effects are both inhumane and disproportionate. Thus, there are bans on biological and chemical weapons, which we all accept. Perhaps we forget the much older ban on exploding bullets in 1868, the ban on expanding dum-dum bullets just before the turn of the century, the prohibition on weapons that contain shrapnel that is undetectable by X-rays, the prohibition of laser blinding weapons and, in 1997,
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We also need to keep in mind that we are making the argument to ban cluster bombs for two different reasons, which we need to put together. There is the question of the direct effect of the weapon: is it disproportionate in the way that it acts and does it cause too much collateral damage? There are also the longer-term consequences of the weapon, which is a separate problem. One can combine those issues in considering whether these are inappropriate weapons.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, reminded us that many of the weapons that we are talking about were conceived in the days of the Cold War, when he and I used to look at weapons in a different way from perhaps how they are looked at in the post-Cold War era. Then, we were thinking of an anti-armour weapon, such as the BL755 against mile after mile of Red Army tanks that may have progressed forward. That weapon was, effectively, a 1,000 pound bomb with 147 fragmentation armour-piercing bomblets. Once deployed, the bomblets would disperse and, because the bomb would be going forward, the bomblets would go forwards and land in an elliptical pattern. The size and the shape of that pattern were difficult to predict, because they depended on the speed and the angle of the aircraft dropping the canister, the height at which the canister opened and the effects of wind. There were lots of uncertainties. The higher you were when you launched the weapon, the bigger the pattern. It is normally at least several hundred metres long, however—a big area in which 147 fragmentation armour-piercing bomblets are randomly dispersed. Whatever else they may be, cluster bombs are area weapons.
We have heard from many noble Lords that not all the bomblets will detonate on landing. That is understandable: sometimes they are too low to arm before they hit the ground; some of the parachutes get caught in trees; some strike the soft ground, as we have heard; and some just fail because, on occasion, military equipment does just fail.
From a military perspective, there is also the problem that, because you have lots of little bombs in a big canister like an ordinary bomb, none of them can be that powerful. They are smaller than if you were dropping a 1,000 pound bomb. You have a random spread, which means that you must have your targets close together to have much hope of achieving a good military effect. Most of the bomblets tend to miss the target, which is another reason why they are scattered around. There is also the problem of the unexploded ones. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, cited the Kosovo assessment of the 530 UK cluster bombs dropped producing 78,000 little bomblets. These assessments are generally made with the most optimistic of assumptions. The weapons might have disabled up to 30 pieces of military equipment—not tanks or armour, but what are called “pieces of
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These weapons are much more use against soft-skinned vehicles or troop concentrations—that is one argument that is made. We have also heard from many noble Lords that they should not be used in urban areas, yet most of the operations in which we now find ourselves have an urban dimension. As the world becomes more urbanised, that problem gets worse. Because this is an area weapon, if it is used in urban areas, where there are lots of civilians, it is bound to cause disproportionate direct civilian casualties. If you were to make a case merely on the direct effect, you would have to be absolutely confident that you were able to control targeting policies so that the weapons were used only against military targets and not places with possible concentrations of civilians. As we have seen, this is impossible to police.
On direct effects, the military utility is not terribly high and there is the difficulty of controlling these weapons so as to not cause disproportionate damage to civilians. I have no problem with saying that one could make a case just on the basis of direct military effect that it is time for these weapons to go. As most noble Lords have said, however, the real problem is the consequential long-term effects of unexploded munitions, which potentially lie around for years. That case for a ban is much stronger.
In the past, the Government have made the case—I think that they have now stopped—that although they are sowing what amount to anti-personnel mines, that was not the intention when the bomb was dropped and is therefore different from setting deliberate anti-personnel mines. That case cannot be sustained. We know that there will be a percentage of unexploded munitions and we must accept responsibility for them. We know that the victims are likely to be civilians and we know that children are particularly vulnerable, as many noble Lords have said. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, reminded us, however, one of the big problems is not just for the civilians, but for our own troops. As they go through what are effectively unplotted minefields or are de-mining—it is difficult to clear these sorts of submunitions—they get damaged. We lose our own troops as well as civilians and children.
Unexploded ordnance is not a new problem. We must remember that there are failure rates, whatever weapon we are talking about. We still find live bombs left over from World War II, but we are now talking about a different scale of problem. The odd bomb that did not explode was one bomb for every bomb dropped; in this case, we are talking about hundreds of bomblets for every bomb dropped.
The question is whether we should treat weapons with submunitions differently. It is a question of scale and risk. Noble Lords have been throwing around a lot of statistics on the percentage rate of failure and unexploded ordnance. For what we now call “dumb” cluster munitions, Governments and manufacturers tend to claim a failure rate of 5 per cent. The sales brochure figure appears over-optimistic compared to the data in reality. That is understandable; the sales brochure figures are compiled under carefully controlled test circumstances. When you are dropping
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Lord Elton: My Lords, could the noble Lord help us on a technical point? I understood that the 5 per cent figure related to the Lebanon, where the munitions used were M85s. I understood that that was intended to be a smart weapon. Am I wrong about that?
Lord Garden: My Lords, I shall come to the smart weapon in a moment. The general rate quoted by manufacturers for the dumb weapons is 5 per cent; for smart weapons, some manufacturers claim a rate of 1 per cent. Data from the first Gulf War, where the 5 per cent figure was claimed by manufacturers, have given us an actual figure of about 23 per cent. That is not an unusual difference between the two. As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, reminded us, large numbers of bombs—in Laos, for example—have an extraordinary long-term effect, like minefields. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped 6 million to 7 million cluster bombs. By the end of 1996, 10,000 people had become casualties to the bomblets left behind, of which nearly 2,500 were amputees. One-third of those casualties were children.
After the Iraq intervention of 2003, the UN reported that 1,000 children were injured by unexploded ordnance—predominantly bomblets—in the three months after the original intervention. The Government position, which your Lordships have spoken about a lot, on whether we should phase out the so-called dumb munitions—those without target discrimination capability and without self-destruct, self-neutralisation or self-deactivation capability—is now at least that these weapons do not need to be kept for ever. The dates—2010 for BL755 and 2015 for the M26 MLRS—are, probably coincidentally, the dates at which these weapons were expected to go out of service anyway. That is not a respectable or responsible position to take.
We have not talked at all today about the JP233, of which the Air Force was very proud back in the Cold War days. It was an anti-airfield weapon that not only put holes in runways, but sowed a minefield to prevent the holes from being repaired. It was taken out of service seven years before its due date, once the landmine treaty came in. We have an example of how the Government can withdraw a weapons system from service early because it realises that it is no longer appropriate. That is what we must do in this case.
Whether non-dumb weapons—those with some self-destruct system, which obviously appeal greatly to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee—get us over that problem is easy to answer. The manufacturers’ aspirations—to bring the failure rate down to 1 per cent from 5 per cent—are to make it five times better. That sounds good. The 1,000 children injured in Iraq in three months in 2003 would only be 200 children maimed or killed by these new smart weapons. That does not seem to be an appealing prospect.
I am not convinced by the arguments in favour of some division. We all know that that would create a
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In July 2003, after the report on the children injured in Iraq, the then General Sir David Ramsbotham and I, who were not yet Members of your Lordships' House, wrote a joint letter to the Times. We wrote:
“The use of weapons, which by their nature kill and maim civilians long after a conflict is over, have no place in a civilised country's arsenal. We should now prohibit cluster munitions, whether dropped from the air or fired from the ground. The UK could set an example to the world by removing them from our inventory, just as we have done for landmines”.
Subsequent events, particularly in Lebanon, have reinforced me in that view. I strongly endorse the attempts of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, to get this Bill through. He will have the support of these Benches.
1.21 pm
Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, we welcome the opportunity to debate cluster munitions. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for giving the House the opportunity to do so, and I congratulate him on setting out his case so effectively. But we cannot support the overall effect of this Bill. I am sorry to disappoint my noble friend Lord Elton and all those other speakers who have supported the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, so eloquently today.
We understand and fully appreciate that problems are caused by the use of cluster bombs. We are sympathetic towards charities such as the Red Cross and Handicap International that campaign against these munitions. It is alarming that, according to their research, 98 per cent of casualties resulting from the use of cluster bombs are civilian and the numbers of those who have been killed or injured by them are striking. We have heard some eloquent speeches today on that point. Sadly, in many of the areas that these figures relate to, notably Iraq, Israel and Lebanon, the figures for civilian casualties and the percentage of civilian deaths caused by all types of munitions are often unpalatably high. However, an outright ban on all cluster munitions is not the right approach to take to address these problems. I do not believe that it would have the desired effect of greatly reducing international use. The United States, Russia and China have all recently reasserted that they would continue to oppose a ban on cluster munitions. That was done even in the context of other nations such as Australia, Belgium and Norway, which were mentioned this afternoon, imposing their own moratoria.
Many of the humanitarian problems that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, identified, are consequences of the use of so-called dumb cluster munitions. In this debate, the important distinction has been made by many speakers between smart and dumb munitions, the latter not having the technology to self-destruct or deactivate themselves. Dumb munitions which fail to explode on impact become a humanitarian threat and we share the noble Lord's concerns about these and support the Government’s commitments to withdraw them by, as the noble Lord, Lord Garden, said,
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Cluster munitions are weapons of war that are currently legitimised by international law. They fulfil an operational role that cannot be performed by other means or munitions. That is true against large military targets or over an extensive area. The use of cluster bombs is necessary in those many cases where such targets become a serious threat to our own troops. I have said many times before in this House that we must always ensure that our service personnel have access to all the equipment and strategic options they need to do their job effectively. Minimising the risk to our own Armed Forces should always be a fundamental priority. By prohibiting the use of all cluster munitions in all circumstances, we would be exposing our military to the inadequacy of other options.
Lord Berkeley: My Lords, the noble Lord said that 98 per cent of the people killed by cluster bombs were civilians. Does that mean that killing about 50 civilians is worth it to save one member of the British armed services? That seems an interesting consequence of his statement.
Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I am not saying that. Perhaps if the noble Lord listens I can develop the theme a little more as I go on.
We cannot anticipate what threats our troops will face in the future. They may be forced to use these weapons but, as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, said, they would do so professionally and legally. It is important to restate the legality of these weapons. We would be doing our Armed Forces a huge disservice to deny them legal munitions that could perfectly legally be used against them.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry mentioned morality. Having spoken last Thursday at a seminar laid on by the Army on the ethical, moral and legal justification for using force, I can assure him that the Armed Forces take the issue of morality very seriously. The problem is that their enemies often do not. We have a thinking military. I have no doubt that the Armed Forces will be debating very carefully the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, so eloquently set out. Any change of use will doubtless be passed on to Ministers. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jay—that the military effectiveness of cluster bombs is beginning to be outweighed by the humanitarian cost—will be high on their agenda.
We must pay close attention to the circumstances in which these munitions are deployed. The scenarios where cluster bombs may be used should be kept as limited as possible. It is important to maintain that these weapons must be fired only within the remit of international law. When deciding to use cluster bombs, as with all operations, an appropriate compromise must be found between the military objective and the humanitarian imperative to prevent unnecessary civilian suffering and casualties.
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It is absolutely right to assert that we should not use cluster bombs in civilian areas, but it would also be quite wrong to impose a universal ban on our Armed Forces using cluster munitions for the wrong reasons. We must not use the right argument to reach the wrong conclusions. The reported use of cluster bombs by Israel in civilian areas in Lebanon was alarming. Even the Israeli army has itself launched an inquiry. However, any alleged irresponsible act by Israel or any other nation should not be used as an argument against our Armed Forces. Equally, the undoubted wrongness of applying the bombs in civilian areas should not be used as an argument to deny our troops their most effective means of destroying a hostile airfield.
Our Armed Forces currently face major campaigns in different parts of the world. The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, will have grown tired of my repeatedly urging them to give our Armed Forces the best possible equipment and all military options necessary for ensuring their safety. We must continue to provide our troops with the most suitable weaponry for achieving their objectives and for doing so with as little personal risk as possible. If we do not do this, we will be failing in our duty. In some operations, that will inevitably require the use of cluster bombs. My noble friend Lord Attlee rightly said that we cannot send our troops to war with one hand tied behind their backs. He made an important point about unexploded submunitions and I look forward to the Minister’s response to his suggestions.
Although we would do well to heed some of the lessons that we heard in the House today, it would be quite wrong to deny our Armed Forces an essential part of their armoury. This Bill would prohibit ownership of any cluster bombs when what is surely required is regulation of use. We might have some sympathy with unilateral international arrangements regarding cluster munitions but this Bill would prevent our Armed Forces legitimately employing bombs in combat areas, notwithstanding the fact that other nations would continue to use them.
Lord Elton: My Lords, could my noble friend take the opportunity to give a little gleam of hope to supporters of this Bill? If the Bill were to permit the use of what he would describe as smart cluster bombs—I think that they are all dumb, myself—which distinguish targets and destroy themselves if they do not go off, would he not be able to support that? He did twice say that the use of all cluster bombs of all sorts could not be denied. If I am right in detecting from that that he would approve a specific ban only on dumb munitions, that is already in the Bill—in “Definitions” under Clause 4(4)(b).
Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I assure my noble friend that we will look very carefully into the point that he has raised. My starting point is that until the Armed Forces tell me anything different we will continue to support them by giving them the equipment that they need to do their job properly.
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1.32 pm
Baroness Crawley: My Lords, this has been a sombre, moving and highly informed debate, and I shall of course relay to the ministry the level of concern expressed in your Lordships' House today. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Dubs on obtaining time for this important debate and for his tenacity and commitment to this issue—and, indeed, the tenacity and commitment of many noble Lords who have spoken today, who have not used today’s debate to raise this matter for the first time but have pressured myself and my noble friends for many months and years on this.
While our Armed Forces operate as a force for good wherever they are in the world, they also have to be capable of succeeding in the mission we ask of them. They need the means, in terms of personnel—as the noble Lord, Lord Astor, said—as well as equipment, training and support, to undertake the mission. This includes having the necessary weapons with which to deliver the intended effect against the enemy whom they face. The noble Lord, Lord Astor, recognised that in stating his party’s problems with the Bill. We have to recognise, too, that war is brutal, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said, and that the use of any weapon will have consequences.
Our over-riding objective when we deploy our Armed Forces is to ensure that the military means used to achieve the mission are consistent with international humanitarian law. This applies whatever the weapons we are using. Clearly, in using any weapon we must take all feasible precautions with a view to avoiding and in any event minimising civilian casualties and damage, and recognising the importance of protecting our servicepeople, whom we ask to act in our name. As a nation, we adhere to the highest standard of compliance with our international and humanitarian obligations. It is in that context I address four key issues regarding this Bill. I shall then make a valiant attempt to answer as many questions as possible in the time available.
First, I turn to the United Kingdom’s policy on cluster munitions. I should state from the outset that we fully share the concern over the humanitarian impact of unexploded ordnance. We believe that this concern is best addressed in the conference on the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, because it brings together the main producers and users of cluster munitions. The importance of conventions was raised by my noble and learned friend Lord Archer of Sandwell. The United Kingdom will phase out of service dumb cluster munitions by the middle of the next decade, a point that was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme.
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