Ukraine has been requesting a controversial weapon to add to its arsenal in the fight against Russia: cluster munitions.
Cluster munitions have been banned by over 100 nations for their dispersal of explosive ordnance over a wide area. They also have a nasty tendency to leave behind unexploded bomblets that detonate later.
Ukraine argues, with truth, that Russia has used these weapons against military and civilian targets in their illegal invasion. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his advisers contend that such weapons will give them the upper hand against exhausted Russian forces.
According to CNN, the Biden administration has received such requests from Zelenskyy for months. They have yet to reject it, and the U.S. is now running low on excess munitions stockpiles.
CNN further reports:
Top US officials have publicly stated that they plan to give the Ukrainians as much support as they need to give them an upper hand at the negotiating table with Russia, should it come to that. But western military equipment is not infinite, and as stockpiles of warheads dwindle, the Ukrainians have made plain to the US that it could use the cluster munitions currently gathering dust in storage.
For Ukraine, cluster munitions could address two major issues: the need for more ammunition for the artillery and rocket systems the US and others have provided, and a way of closing Russia's numerical superiority in artillery.
The Biden administration has not taken the option off the table as a last resort, if stockpiles begin to run dangerously low. But sources say the proposal has not yet received significant consideration in large part due to the statutory restrictions that Congress has put on the US' ability to transfer cluster munitions.
Those restrictions apply to munitions with a greater than one percent unexploded ordnance rate, which raises the prospect that they will pose a risk to civilians. President Joe Biden could override that restriction, but the administration has indicated to the Ukrainians that that is unlikely in the near term.
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No, they should not. Russia has been playing us fora while now. This will do nothing but expand the war which is what Biden is goading us into. He WANTS war with Russia and by the spring he will have it. Support conventionally, diplomatically, and humanitarian, but that’s it.
Proved its value in Vietnam & other I say Yes
Duh .. do you call Vietnam, a war the US lost, a success? How dumb are you?
Providing a banned weapon would give other nations fuel against the US, and rightly so, not to mention the danger to the Ukrainian people.. it’s a foolish notion, no matter what Putin uses, or not, or how much Zelenskyy begs, wheedles, or demands.
So here we are on our tiny planet in the midst of a dark, cold, and extremely hostile universe, and all we can do is wantonly overpopulate our extremely limited space, pollute and destroy our environment beyond repair, and continually think up and create more new, more effective, and more dangerous ways to kill each other.
Could it be that our species is either the first and only one of its kind or the last since we have some psychological mechanism in us that causes us to ultimately self destruct?
Was also subject in a Miami Vice episode too from 80s
cluster bombs is what some bioweapon satanists want to use to release their bioweapons