Is it poor build quality or are they not designed to explode on impact?
In: 1717
For each bomb you make there is a small chance that something goes wrong (including the impact itself) and it wouldn’t explode. It’s small but it’s there. Cluster bomb = 100x more bombs per bomb. So, 100x more unexploded bombs with the same build quality.
Figure a cluster bomb as basically a farmer tossing seeds onto his fields. A lot of those seeds land correctly… but a fair number don’t, and so won’t be in the right conditions to germinate.
Cluster bombs are a big handful of bomblets attached to a delivery device. When the device releases the bomblets, they spread out like that farmer’s tossed handful of seeds. Many will impact the type of surface that cause them to detonate, but many might not, hitting something soft, or not hitting at the correct angle, or caroming partially off an obstacle. So they’re still intact and active, and perhaps buried under some rubble or partially embedded in a wall or something.
And when that wall gets knocked down by civilian heavy equipment later… boom.
From my understanding the most sensitive and likely to fail part of the bomb is the triggering mechanism. When the bombs are set off in real world situations they don’t land like they are designed to, or it’s hotter than it’s supposed to be or any weird situation can make the trigger not click.
Ya know when you light a pack of firecrackers and sometimes there’s a few left because they were blown away from the bundle but not ignited. Like that.
They leave a *lot* of bomblets, so the law of large numbers catches up. If a regular munition has a 2% chance of failing to explode, then it’s probably going to work fine. If a cluster bomb with 100 bomblets has a 2% failure chance, then you’re expecting two of them not to explode.
The other reason for their notoriety is their size. Bomblets are small. A regular 155mm artillery round weighs over 90 pounds and is very large. If it doesn’t explode you will see it on the ground, and if you somehow don’t and hit it then it has enough mass where you won’t be able to trip an internal mechanism. A bomblet will fit in your hand and is easier to set off by accident.
Part of it is that we don’t really consider how high dud rates are with our explosives. Fun little thought exercise: Where is Hammas getting rockets?
If a bomb or rocket being used to commit genocide has a 10% chance of not going off, but it’s the size of a car, it’s relatively easy to find and disarm after the genocide is done. And since the bombs are big, you only need a few.
But now imagine instead of that bomb, you have 10000 little grenades in an easter egg. That Easter egg pops above the target, and your 10000 bombs carpet a giant swathe of land. And 10% of those haven’t gone off yet. And you drop a couple hundred of those. You essentially create a minefield with zero markings or record of the mine locations. And those stick around even after the genocidal invaders are beaten back.
I’d say it’s a pretty Laos-y way to conduct war.
Along with duds, the weapon serves as area denial. So sure, I cluster bomb your city and do big damage to infrastructure, but now every step you take, every ruin you demo to get.back usable land, every truck that rumble along the road on the way to the factory is a random and spontaneous explosion.
A problem has a solution, but a dilemma requires a choice between two options, both bad. So your enemy can either run the risk of civilian casualties, a disruption of logistics, and abandoning a position, or they can task soldiers and specialists to clear the area meaning they aren’t out on the battlefield keeping your troops safe.
So when it comes to manufacturing tolerances, even allowing a 20% dud rate like Russia carries with it a certain level of ROI. My 160 bombs destroy alot, the city is wrecked, the enemy is removed, and now they have 40 questions. Maybe all 40 are inert, maybe only 10 are, but you have to spend time and resources to figure out which is which at great cost if you guess wrong.
The indiscriminate killing is the ethical problem though
First, all ammunitions have a chance of not exploding. This is known as the dud rate. Artillery shells for example, have a dud rate of between 4 and 6% (or over 20% for Russian ordinances). This is not unexpected due to manufacturing defects, and the way the munition impacts the ground. However, because a cluster bomb is filled with so many submunitions, known as bomblets, there will be more that don’t explode, even though the dud rate is lower (2%). It is worth nothing that unexploded bomblets are not like land mines, they will generally not explode when you walk over then, but they are still dangerous.
A little of both. Some just don’t go off that were supposed to explode. Sometime they are DESIGNED to not explode on impact and instead explode when messed with.
This makes these “area denial” weapons. You can set some of these off and the whole area is filled with explosives that you have to either avoid the whole area, or take the time to clear the area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty
All US landmines now self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours. While the self-destruct mechanism has never failed in more than 65,000 random tests, if self-destruct were to fail the mine will self-deactivate because its battery will run down in two weeks or less. That compares with persistent anti-vehicle mines which remain lethal for about 30 years and are legal under the Ottawa Convention.[107][108]”
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