As a graphic designer and illustrator this year at the age of 20, Worley is one of the lucky kids who escaped the bleak fate of a bombshell. And while the bombings happened long before Worley was born, he speaks of their present-day consequences without concern or feeling unusual, as if dealing with the influences of history. That darkness is a natural and even everyday part of Maltese life.
Stories like Worley’s are very common. A popular podcast, My favorite murdereven recently aired an episode in which the hosts read a letter from an adult audience who, as a child, threw rocks at and picked up an unexploded fragment of a small bomb from a beach out of concern for the safety of “beloved sea creatures. ”
In history, 98 percent According to a 2011 study by foreign policy and counter-terrorism expert Beau Grosscup, cluster munitions victims are civilians, due to the way bombs were dropped on an area in the past – or sometimes even without. send troops. It was a tactic that the Nazis would use to liberate the land they wanted, and ironically they used it a lot against Russia. After a so-called “saturation raid” opened up a Russian forest, as Leatherwood detailed in his book on the subject, one German general said, “German ground forces able to enter … without encountering any resistance – the forest is indeed dead.”
Modern Russian PTAB-1M bomber, shown in a recent video Ukrainian forces collect hundreds of pods, which have evolved since the days of the SD-2 to be able to penetrate tanks and they can affect areas with a radius of hundreds of meters. However, both old and modern bombers may not explode.
The calculated percentage of cluster munitions varies from 5 to 40 percent, which, when multiplied by the total number of cluster munitions normally dropped to produce a “saturation” effect, produces a terrifying amount of landmines. left over.
Of the 1,818 American bombs the United States admits dropped over the Shomali Valley in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, 17.4% failed to explode, leaving more than 300 deadly weapons lying in wait in the valley alone. that, according to a 2003 study published year Military. About a third of them are on the ground, meaning they are invisible and could easily fall at the feet of an innocent pedestrian. By 2003, at least three children had been injured because they thought American ball bombs found in the Shomali Valley were toys.
A Ukrainian soldier shows off his overcoat and the shell of a captured Russian cluster-bomb missile as Ukrainian troops advance into trench positions to continue to repel Russian attacks, east of the war port city Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on March 10, 2022.
Photo: Scott Peterson / Getty Images
