2023-07-09 07:46:05
by Lorenzo Cremonesi
The most famous is the “daisy cutter”, released against Bin Laden. Story of a gun that has been banned
FROM OUR REPORTER
TORETSK – Probably the most powerful cluster bomb that journalists of our generation have been able to see exploded live during a war was what Americans call in slang Daisy Cutter, the daisy cutter. A cylinder weighing almost 7,000 kilos launched at high altitude by large bombers, with a parachute that opens a few hundred meters above the ground (depending on the intensity of the wind), slows down, then explodes in the sky to intensify the devastating effect on of a territory as vast as possible and finally releases thousands of minor bomblets, which partly explode in turn and partly remain potentially lethal to pollute the territory for years and years, in some cases (especially in deserts or dry areas ) For centuries.
We watched it fall in November 2001 towards Al Qaeda positions high in the woods and moraines of the Tora Bora mountains in eastern Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had taken refuge with a handful of loyalists before fleeing to Pakistan. We were perhaps five kilometers away as the crow flies, but the effect of the heat and the vacuum was terrifying, as the reddish flames of the explosions rose high into the sky. Still in the summer of 2021 we were told in Jalalabad, the city closest to what remains of Tora Bora, that every now and then a shepherd or a farmer loses his legs, or dies, due to charges hidden in the vegetation. Because, as the Afghans, the Vietnamese, the Chechens, the Libyans, the Kurds, the Lebanese, the Iraqis and all the populations who have had to deal with mines and cluster bombs say: explosive charges are as if they were walking , are moved for kilometers and kilometers by snow and rain, even by the wind, especially if they are light; once dispersed throughout the territory they have a life of their own and it becomes extremely difficult to defuse them.
Precisely their lethal efficiency saw them become one of the most important and widespread weapons of all armies since the Second World War. The military industries of at least 34 countries, including European countries (including Italy), the United States, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, China, Russia, the two Koreas, mass-produced them, especially from the 1960s to the end of the last century. Initially they were thought to also have chemical or biological agents; some models were programmed to quickly undermine entire regions: each bomb could contain up to 2,000 charges of variable power, from the tiny anti-personnel «leaf» charges weighing a few grams to the heavier ones capable of putting armored vehicles out of commission.
After the wars in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of the new millennium, attempts were made to ban them. It began in Oslo in February 2007 and reached the Dublin agreements in May 2008 with the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which wanted to totally ban cluster bombs. About 120 countries joined. But not the US, Russia or Ukraine.
In the Ukrainian scenario, cluster bombs have been used above all by Russia, which does not hesitate to fire them massively on civilians. Moreover, both the Wagner mercenary militia and the expeditionary corps of the regular Russian army, especially in all the wars wanted by Putin from Chechnya, to Syria to the interventions in Africa, have regularly resorted to this type of ammunition.
Today the cluster bombs that the United States will send to Ukraine should mostly be standard 155-millimeter NATO projectiles with a range just under forty kilometers, with 72 charges each destined to explode on impact. According to Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor of the White House, their “failure rate” would be less than 2.5 percent, against the Russian ones which would have it of 30 or 40 percent. Which would mean that the American ones would have less impact on the territory in the long run.
July 9, 2023 (change July 9, 2023 | 08:47)
© Time.News
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