| November 5, 2007: This website is an archive of the former website, traprockpeace.org, which was created 10 years ago by Charles Jenks. It became one of the most populace sites in the US, and an important resource on the antiwar movement, student activism, 'depleted' uranium and other topics. Jenks authored virtually all of its web pages and multimedia content (photographs, audio, video, and pdf files. As the author and registered owner of that site, his purpose here is to preserve an important slice of the history of the grassroots peace movement in the US over the past decade. He is maintaining this historical archive as a service to the greater peace movement, and to the many friends of Traprock Peace Center. Blogs have been consolidated and the calendar has been archived for security reasons; all other links remain the same, and virtually all blog content remains intact. THIS SITE NO LONGER REFLECTS THE CURRENT AND ONGOING WORK OF TRAPROCK PEACE CENTER, which has reorganized its board and moved to Greenfield, Mass. To contact Traprock Peace Center, call 413-773-7427 or visit its site. Charles Jenks is posting new material to PeaceJournal.org, a multimedia blog and resource center.
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See also The
Striking Similarities Between Iraq and Afghanistan as Seen in Images
and also Widespread
Carnage of US/UK Bombing
Published June 5, 2003
© 2003 Marc W. Herold
'Steel Rain' Delivered by U.S-U.K.
Airplanes:
Cluster Bombs in Four
Recent Military Campaigns
by
Departments of Economics and Women's Studies
Whittemore School of Business & Economics
University of New Hampshir
June 4, 2003
Terrorized
Iraqi troops in 1991, called the exploding cluster bombs 'steel rain.'[1]
Such cluster munitions can be either dropped from aircraft or fired as
artillery shells. The 'parent' bomb breaks apart as it nears the ground,
spewing forth sub-munitions [or bomblets]. The widely-used CBU-87 1'000 lb.
cluster bomb leaves a footprint of 458 meters; its wind-corrected version, the
CBU-103, has a footprint of 183 meters. The footprint is measured by the area
covered by bomblets. Each bomblet [BLU-107] in the CBU-87 injures people in a
152 meters radius. The bomblets drift down to earth with a small parachute.
Most explode upon impact, though far from all. The reported 'dud rate' varies
from 8 - 22%. The CBU-105, a 1'000 lb. wind-corrected cluster bomb was first
used on April 2, 2003, when a B-52 dropped six of them on "an Iraqi tank
column heading south out of Baghdad.: The CBU-105 contains 40 'SADARM' bomblets
each with its own radar. Each bomblet leaves a footprint of 150x360 meters.
The
following Table presents a summary of cluster bombs used in four of the seven
military campaigns where the U.S. has employed this weapon---the omitted ones
include Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. What emerges is that in Kosovo, Afghanistan[2],
and the recent Iraq campaign, similar amounts of the deadly cluster bombs were
dropped, leaving about 30-35'000 unexploded bomblets in the fields and
neighborhoods of those three countries, as deadly legacies.