Is it poor build quality or are they not designed to explode on impact?
In: 1717
Pretty much any manufactured product can potentially be defective due to imperfections in the materials or the manufacturing process. So you have to test the products as they’re being made in order to prevent defective ones from being shipped.
For something like a light bulb, that’s as simple as plugging it in and seeing if it lights up. The problem with munitions in general is, you can’t really “test” a bomb without blowing it up and you can’t blow up the same bomb twice. So the best we can do is test a few bombs from each batch, and if those are good we can reasonably assume the rest of the batch is good. But, a certain percentage of the bombs in that batch will likely still be defective and we have no way to determine exactly which ones are defective without blowing them all up.
The problem with cluster munitions specifically is that they have a lot of small bombs inside them (called bomblets). That means if you have a failure rate of just 1% then 1 in every 100 bomblets will fail to explode. If you have a cluster bomb that drops 200 such bomblets, and you drop 10 of them, then there’s probably around 20 bomblets that didn’t explode.
Now if you have a conventional bomb with a 1% failure rate, you would have to drop 100 of them before one of them fails. But you probably have the benefit of knowing which one failed and a pretty good idea of where it landed. With cluster bombs you won’t notice if 1 or 2 out of 200 bomblets didn’t detonate, and they’re spread out randomly over a wide area by design.
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