Duds may be deadly legacy

WASHINGTON -- In war, there are smart bombs, dumb bombs and duds -- ones that land with a thud, then lay silently until picked up by a curious child or disturbed by a farmer's hoe.

The war has been winding down in Afghanistan in recent weeks, but a new generation of unexploded ordnance will be its deadly legacy, killing and maiming civilians in a nation where amputees already are a common sight.

The nearly three months of U.S.-led coalition strikes have only compounded the job of clearing unexploded remnants of two decades of conflict.

The Pentagon has not disclosed the number of bombs raining down on Afghanistan, but experts on unexploded ordnance estimate that besides the array of dumb bombs and bunker-busters, coalition forces have dropped 600 cluster bombs.

About the size of a garbage can, each cluster bomb contains 202 bomblets designed to pierce light-armored vehicles, start fires and send shrapnel flying in all directions. Some are duds.

"If you're a child in a country like this where there are no toys around, you're going to throw rocks at one of these to see if it goes BANG!" said Paul Heslop, an expert on unexploded ordnance with The Halo Trust, a nonprofit mine-clearing organization in Afghanistan.

Some bomblets fail to explode because the arming mechanism malfunctions in flight. A soft landing in the mud, snow or sand also could prevent detonation.

"It depends on what they land on," explained Caleb Rossiter, defense analyst for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. "These bomblets are light like Coke cans and so at the last minute, a stiff wind could blow them sideways. The nose won't hit the ground, and it's the impact of the nose that makes it go off."

The foundation and other groups argue that they should be equipped with a backup feature that causes boomlets to detonate even if they don't explode on impact.

The backup fuse is being discussed this week at the U.N. Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva.