Military stockpiled over a billion aging cluster submunitions.

Evidence

The Pentagon continues to argue that it can produce smart-weapon solutions to the cluster bomb problem, in the belief that dud levels can be reduced to as little as 1 percent. (That’s far below the 14 to 22 percent failure rate of America’s ground-launched cluster munitions during the 2003 Iraq War.) However, the fine print in the Pentagon’s position remains chilling. It insists that in future wars American forces will continue to include in their weapons mix old cluster ordnance, what the Pentagon calls “legacy” munitions (as if they were irreplaceable heirlooms). Those “legacy” reserves are huge: the American military has stockpiled more than a billion cluster submunitions of extremely variable antiquity and inaccuracy, like the Rockeye cluster bombs developed during the 1950s and deployed in the Vietnam War and again in the 1991 Gulf War. In both Vietnam and the Gulf, Rockeyes continue to inflict long-deferred twenty-first-century deaths and injuries. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 699

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Cold War arsenals grew to planetary overkill capacity — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 569

Broader Connections

• Cold War arsenals grew to planetary overkill capacity #exemplifies (0.90) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 569