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Cluster bombs, which the Biden Administration has decided to supply to Ukraine, are neither new nor novel. The United States used them during the Vietnam War and at the start of the war in Afghanistan; and both Ukraine and, to a much larger extent, Russia have reportedly used them since fighting between the nations began in 2014. By design, their lethality is indiscriminate; the “bomblets” that make up the cluster often go undetonated, retaining the potential to explode well into the future, much the way unexploded land mines do. (The Administration has said that the weapons supplied to Ukraine have a much lower “dud rate,” a claim that has been questioned.) That’s why their use is so problematic, and why they’ve been condemned by more than a hundred and twenty nations (though not the United States, Russia, or Ukraine) and why people, including the Democratic congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan, of Pennsylvania, who is an Air Force veteran and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the decision was “blurring the lines of moral high ground.” And it’s why, in February of 2022, when Russia, despite denying it, was widely reported to have deployed the bombs again, President Joe Biden’s then spokesperson Jen Psaki said that, if true, “it would potentially be a war crime.”
The decision to supply the weapons, which Ukraine has begun firing at Russian forces in occupied territories, apparently came because, as Biden put it, “the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.” It’s not clear why that shortage made cluster munitions the ammunition of choice, and it’s far from certain that they’ll have much effect on the fighting. But they’ll certainly ratchet up the suffering in a war that, in its cruelty and grinding slowness, continues to make more of Ukraine uninhabitable. And Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, has promised to take “reciprocal” action. Ukraine’s counter-offensive, which began in June, is also a reminder that the longer this seventeen-month war continues, the greater the risk of escalation and miscalculation. Biden’s decision not to send Ukraine advanced drone technology—long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS (known as “attack ’ems”)—recognized the delicate line between supplying short-term aid and providing cutting-edge weaponry that increases the danger of turning an undeclared proxy war into an unambiguous American war.
What happens next is a continuing dilemma for the United States, Ukraine, and NATO: it’s understood, and widely agreed, that Russia cannot be permitted to “win” the war in Ukraine. But it’s also understood that Putin, as long as he remains in power, will not permit Russia to “lose” and suffer a national humiliation. And it’s evidently understood, by Biden and his advisers, that an immediate invitation to join NATO for Ukraine, which shares a twelve-hundred-mile border with Russia, would have been tantamount to a declaration of war. Instead, earlier this month, NATO members agreed, with appropriate vagueness, that such an invitation would be extended “when allies agree and conditions are met.” That decision was not sufficient for Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, who wanted a definite timeline, but it did demonstrate the diplomatic value of creative mealymouth-ism.
On July 12th, in Vilnius, Lithuania, Biden invoked the Cold War with Russia, which began in the nineteen-forties, lasted until the Gorbachevian interregnum, and seems to be re-starting, after thirty years. He said “we will not waver” no matter how long the Ukraine war lasts, that “Putin still wrongly believes that he can outlast Ukraine,” and that Putin, if he “still doubts our staying power,” is “making a bad bet.” But, though Zelensky was assured by Biden of “unwavering” support, he surely knows that this support will not allow him to determine the foreign-policy priorities of the United States, and that a war between Russian and Ukraine, for all its horror, is immensely different, in scope and its potential for a cataclysmic outcome, than a war between Russia and the United States.
But wars end, and someday this war will end. It may end with compromises, with some sort of “off-ramp” for Putin’s Russia, and with an essential push from the United States and its NATO allies. It is to be hoped that it will avoid the terrifying possibility of an attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. It must end without the use of nuclear weapons, a threat that has hovered over the war from the start, when Putin said that, if anyone “tries to stand in our way or . . . create threats for our country and our people,” they must know that “Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”
In the postwar years, there’s been no shortage of such threats and provocations, among them the accusation, late last year, from some Russian officials, that Ukraine was conspiring to set off a “dirty bomb”—a dispersal of radioactive material—an unfounded charge that awakened the suspicion that Russia wanted a pretext for deploying so-called tactical nuclear weapons. Those periodic hints that Russia might, just might, use a tactical weapon sounded unnervingly like what was said by some Americans, in the late fall of 1950, when the stalemated war in Korea took an ominous turn—when North Korea was joined by hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops. Gordon Dean, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote in his diary that “we cannot forever have a stalemate” and that what was needed were ways of “so effectively dealing with the Chinese troops that they can be virtually destroyed . . . by an intelligently planned atomic attack.” When he spoke to students at the University of Southern California, in October, 1951, he used the occasion to say that tactical atomic firepower could halt “these endless nibbling aggressions” and would “cancel out any numerical advantage” that an invader “might enjoy.” Though Dean wasn’t speaking for the government, his speech, not surprisingly, was seen as an announcement that the United States might use tactical weapons in Korea. The flaw in Dean’s plan, which never reached President Harry Truman’s desk, was that tactical nuclear weapons were still on the atomic drawing board.
Like most postwar American Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower worried about nuclear war and once confessed to the playwright and politician Clare Boothe Luce, “I cannot sleep at night . . . I think of nothing else.” Last October, Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan, a policy analyst, wrote about the Ukraine conflict in one of her periodic, and valuable, blogs and worried that “government officials at the critical levels” were not losing enough sleep—that they should, as she put it, “be feverishly working to manage a situation that could become considerably worse than it is right now.” With that advice in mind, the decision to introduce cluster munitions to the Ukrainian battlefield looks like an unsteady step in the wrong direction. ♦
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