Evils of War: Time to Ban Cluster Bombs

Welcome to Cluster's last stand - the final fight of a weapon that has shredded a hundred thousand legs and arms and eyes since it was lovingly created by the Nazis in the 1940s.

This week, the Austrian government has banned cluster bombs and begun to dismantle its stockpile of 10,000. Official delegates from 138 countries, representing two-thirds of humanity, are now on their way back from the turning-point conference in Vienna to prepare for a treaty in 2008 that will ban them outright. But a handful of superpowers - most notably Russia, the US and China - are clinging to their right to shred civilians, and the British government is dancing awkwardly between the two camps.

Cluster munitions are bombs that, as they fall, separate into dozens of smaller, bright yellow "bomblets", each about the size of a can of Coke. Every one carries flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They fall as "steel rain" over an entire kilometre, and they cut up anything they hit.

These weapons are wildly indiscriminate. You can't aim them, any more than you can aim your handbag when you empty it out on to the floor. When the British dropped 2,000 cluster bombs on Basra in 2003, they landed on the roofs of schools and civilian homes as much as on Saddam's men. Worse still, many of the submunitions do not explode when they hit the ground; instead they stay there for year after year, waiting for someone - anyone - to stumble across them.

Children are particularly fond of picking them up, since they look like brightly-colored toys. That's what happened recently to four-year-old Aya Zayoun. She found one of the 4 million bomblets dropped on Lebanon by the Israelis in the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, and she thought it was a toy bell.

Aya excitedly toddled into her living room to show it to her parents and big sister and brother - where it blew up, the steel ripping through all their flesh. They were lucky: they lost only limbs, not their lives. Some 255 Lebanese civilians have not been so fortunate. Last month, there was a hailstorm for the first time since the war, and the hills of Lebanon echoed to the sound of hundreds of submunitions exploding.

They can wait patiently for decades. A few weeks ago, 17-year-old Choen Ha and two of his friends in Vietnam stumbled across four steel balls in the jungle. They took turns tossing them to each other, and then began to play marbles with them. Finally, one of them detonated. Choen was only saved by his family spending their entire life savings on his treatment; his best friend was shredded in front of him. The UN estimates that at the current clear-up rate, explosions like this will continue in Vietnam every week for another century. These bombs were dropped before I was born. They will still be killing after I am dead.

War is sometimes justified, to save life - but not if it needlessly slaughters as it goes, and leaves a legacy of death for generations. So how soon can we get a ban on these lingering people-shredders? Pessimists should remember that when a ban on landmines was first mooted in the 1980s, it was mocked as a utopian fantasy. Today, only the leper state of Burma is laying them anew.

There are two potential tracks to end cluster-bombs. One is the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CWW), which almost every country is signed up to. The pro-cluster bomb states are adopting a "go slow, aim low" approach to these talks, obstructing any progress. Frustrated with this failure, last year Norway broke away and set up a rival Oslo Process, as they did with landmines. It now looks like they will get most of the world, but not the very worst offenders, to sign up to a ban next year.

The British government is the most high-profile cluster-bombing state to take part in the Oslo Process. At first, it looked like they wouldn't show - but at the last minute they did. Gordon Brown pledged to ban "cluster bombs that cause unacceptable civilian casualties". It looks like a heartening pledge, but it contains a whopping loophole - what is "unacceptable harm"?