The Daily - Many Countries Banned Cluster Munitions. The U.S. Is Sending Them to Ukraine Anyway.

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

For months, President Biden has been wrestling with one of the most vexing questions in the war in Ukraine: whether to risk letting Ukrainian forces run out of the artillery rounds they desperately need to fight Russia, or agree to ship them cluster munitions — widely banned weapons known to cause grievous injury to civilians, especially children. On Friday, the Biden administration announced that it would send the weapons, which have been outlawed by many of Washington's closest allies.David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, tells the story behind the president’s contentious decision.Guest: David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: With Ukraine burning through stockpiles of conventional artillery, Mr. Biden concluded that he had little choice but to provide the weapons.Read The New York Times Editorial Board’s piece on “the flawed moral logic of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine.”For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. On Friday, the Biden administration quietly announced a major escalation in the kinds of weapons that it was giving to Ukraine, sending a type of bomb so devastating that it's been banned by over 100 countries. Today, my colleague David Sanger tells me the story behind the president's controversial decision on cluster bombs. It's Tuesday, July 11th. David, nice to see you. Great to see you, Sabrina.

Where are we catching you this morning? I'm in Vilnius, Lithuania, for the start of the NATO summit. President Biden is arriving here imminently and has two days of meetings with all of the leaders of NATO. Okay, so you're in Vilnius at the NATO summit waiting for Biden to arrive. I'm assuming he'll be facing some questions about what his administration announced last week. News that, honestly, I found pretty astonishing when it broke on Friday. At the very end of the day, which course, is usually a sign that they don't want it to get a lot of attention. Explain the Biden administration's announcement. Tell me about it.

Well, it got a lot of attention, Sabrina, no matter how they timed it. And the announcement was that the United States is sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. cluster bombs to Ukraine. These are weapons that are banned by treaty by more than 100 countries, including many of our closest allies, Britain, France, Germany. And you know, Sabrina, I think this was Joe Biden's biggest moral struggle of his presidency, certainly of the 500 days since the war in Ukraine broke out with the Russian invasion. And exactly because it was such a big moral struggle, many of his advisors tried to put this day off and put it off and put it off again until they hit the point where they had no choice. Okay, so David, I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the Biden decision. But before we do that, let's discuss the weapons themselves. What are

they and how did they come to be seen as so beyond the pale by such a large part of the world? Sabrina, a cluster bomb is really a series of bombs all packed together. Think of it as a single bomb that's full of individual hand grenades. These bombs literally have bomblets in them. And as it comes down, instead of landing in a single place the way a conventional artillery round might, it shoots these bomblets over this area that could be three or four football fields. Huge. Huge area. And then they go off and send essentially shrapnel all over the place. Or stop a run of armored personnel carriers or tanks over a wide area of the battlefield in a very short period of time.

Like birdshot from a shotgun, except all the individual pellets themselves explode. That's absolutely right. So, David, tell me the history of these weapons. When were they first used? Their history really goes back to World War II. It was the Soviets who first used to airdrop these cluster munitions. At the time, they called them butterfly bombs. But their really big use came during the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon had manufactured thousands and thousands of these and used them in Vietnam, in the secret war in Cambodia, and use them in Laos. And the problem is, for as long as there have been cluster bombs,

there have been duds. That is to say, a bomblet that doesn't explode and lands somewhere and just sits there. Then it goes off, maybe years after the conflict is over. The International Committee of the Red Cross has estimated that in Laos alone there are 9 to 27 million unexploded bomblets. Wow. And that they killed or maimed 11,000 people.

And many of those, of course, were children. Right. These mini grenades can lie around and a kid can pick them up and start playing with them and lose his hands. Or far worse. And that is the tragic thing about cluster bombs, right? It's something that I saw in Lebanon in 2006.

The Israelis were using them extensively in that conflict. And I remember being at hospitals and seeing mothers looking at their children who'd lost legs, who'd lost arms, who'd lost eyes by picking these things up thinking that they were toys. That's right. And it's incredibly tragic. But you know what? Militaries kept using them, and they kept using them because they were incredibly effective at what they did. And so they were used not only in Lebanon, you know, where you were, Sabrina, but the U.S. used them in Iraq, used them in Kosovo, and then many other smaller powers began making them themselves. They're not especially difficult to manufacture. So they've been used in small conflicts around the world with increasing frequency. So, David, when do Western militaries stop using them?

When does a movement to ban them kind of gather force? Well, the movement gathered force after Vietnam, but it really accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union when it no longer seemed to make sense even for big powers like the United States, to be keeping these because they had been central to the planning in Europe about how you would stop a Soviet invasion of Europe, that you would use these cluster bombs against forces that were coming through the Fulda Gap in Germany and use them to protect Europe. But once the Cold War seemed to be over,

everybody thought, no one really needs these anymore. Right. So by 2008, there was a UN-organized convention on cluster munitions that countries began to sign. And many of America's closest allies signed it on the first day. Now, among those that held out were the United States, Russia, and China. And remind us, David, why the U.S. did not sign. For the same reason, Sabrina, that they didn't sign another treaty back in the 1990s, the much better known Landmine Treaty.

in the 1990s, the much better known Landmine Treaty. That treaty was meant to ban the use of landmines because farmers, children, lots of people step on old landmines. And the United States didn't sign it because the Pentagon concluded that they were vital in one part of the world, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where landmines were then and still today are in the main defense from having the North Koreans come over and invade the South. So on the cluster bomb, Sabrina, the Pentagon had a very similar argument. They said, hey, we're the policemen of the world. There may be a situation in which you call upon us to defend a nation or some region, and we need the cluster bombs in order to stop an incoming invading army. So what happened over time is that the countries that had signed the Cluster Munitions Convention ended up destroying their stockpiles of these, including most of the NATO countries. piles of these, including most of the NATO countries. But we ended up sitting on this huge stockpile of cluster munitions that the Pentagon knew that it probably wouldn't be allowed to go

use except under the most exceptional circumstances. But there was something of a compromise for each Sabrina, which was legislation that did pass that said that the United States cannot export these cluster munitions to any other country until the dud rate, that is, the unexploded bomblets that later get picked up by kids and others. The stuff that's actually so lethal. That's right. Until that rate goes down to 1% or below. And there's no country that has ever met that standard, including the United States. So do cluster bombs stop being used by default then? Like if the U.S. has such strict rules for using them and many, many countries have signed that ban? Well, they were used episodically in smaller conflicts, but the big use came once the war in Ukraine began in earnest in February of 2022. And from the early days of the war, the Russians began to use cluster munitions. And there was such an uproar in the opening days of the war.

There are reports of illegal cluster bombs being used by the Russians. That when Jen Psaki, who was then still President Biden's press secretary, was asked about it. Is there a red line for how much violence

will be tolerated against civilians in this manner that's illegal and potentially a war crime? It is. It would be. I don't have any confirmation of that. We have seen the reports. If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime.

So certainly we would look to that to be a part of that conversation. She said that, yes, we had heard the reports about this variety of weapons and needed to look at it to see whether or not there were war crimes being committed. War crimes? War crimes. And you know, Psaki used to be the State Department spokeswoman. I've known her for a long time. She knew what she was talking about. This wasn't just a quick off-the-cuff line. Right. It's very strong language. It is. Now, let's also remember that the Ukrainians themselves had a small stockpile of them, and they too used them in the opening days of the war against the Russians. And they were using them,

they argued, on their own territory to prevent the Russians from invading. And they said, that's a very different thing than using them in an invasion on someone else's territory. Okay, so the Ukrainians have been using this weapon, so have the Russians. And now the U.S. is planning to pump a whole fresh new supply into this war zone. And I guess my question is, David, why? Like, why would the U.S. resort to this? Well, the grim answer to that is that the U.S. feels now that it has no other choice. The Ukrainians have reached a really desperate point where they believe that they need these weapons in ways that we couldn't have imagined 500 days ago.

We'll be right back. So, David, walk us through the Biden administration's decision to send these weapons to Ukraine. I mean, what's changed that makes them now feel like they really don't have another choice? Well, Sabrina, at the beginning of the war, this issue really didn't come up because there wasn't really a condition under which you would use cluster weapons. At the beginning, the war was mostly in urban areas. But then the war began to move down to the south and the east,

where the Russians had dug in these lines after lines of trenches. I mean, this is like right out of World War I. The second thing that changed was that we discovered that we didn't have anywhere near the number of rounds of ammunition that the Ukrainians needed to keep up a war at this pace. Here in eastern Ukraine, spring is in the air, and so is heavy artillery. Now, the Ukrainians have been firing off some days

5,000, 6,000, 7,000 artillery rounds. And for context, that's a lot, right? That is a lot. 11,000 rounds now roll off this line each month, and yet it's not nearly matching what Ukraine's army is using. The United States' production levels have gone way down. Ukraine is shooting as many rounds per month as the entire European arms industry makes in a year.

As had the rest of Europe's, because who thought there'd ever be a land war in Europe again? Already, the U.S. has sent from its stockpiles more than $32 billion worth of weapons, including more than a million 155-millimeter shells. So the U.S. started hunting around for our own stockpiles of ammunition, which are all around the world.

But then came along the counteroffensive. And of course, the counteroffensive is going pretty slowly. The Ukrainians are burning through their conventional munitions at this very fast clip. And if you just did the hard, cold math, it was clear that they were going to run out of ammunition. And meanwhile, the Pentagon kept making the point that they were sitting on a huge stockpile of cluster munitions that had been built up over many, many years and that could solve the supply problem almost overnight. And David, what are the Ukrainians saying meanwhile? Well, increasingly, Sabrina, the Ukrainians are saying, please give us anything you've got that we can shoot at the Russians. And so in the past couple of weeks, you've heard President Zelensky, both publicly and privately, making his way around Europe in conversations with the United States, saying, I want these cluster munitions. Now, of course, the Ukrainians know what cluster munitions are all about.

They had a small stockpile of their own, and they used them. And they're aware of the risks to Ukrainian kids. and they use them, and they're aware of the risk to Ukrainian kids. But Zelensky's argument is, our only choice at this moment is to win this war. And that while there is a risk out here of Ukrainian kids picking up these duds, the leftovers that get shot off here, we can't really worry about that right now because our bigger fear is we're going to be living under russian domination and that's really going to make life miserable not only for kids but for the entire population so the big issue for zelensky is he just needs anything anything at all that we've got that he can shoot at the Russians,

because otherwise he loses the war. So how does that affect Biden's calculation? Zelensky's basically begging for this stuff. I think it had a big impact. You know, war is full of ugly choices. And this was one of the ugliest. And basically, he had to weigh the risk that Ukrainian kids in the future will be picking these up and that he's adding to the supply on the ground that the Ukrainians and the Russians and others have left versus the risk that Russia will be successful, take over Ukraine, and perhaps threaten other parts of Europe. So on Friday, he actually took the big step in this direction. He signed a waiver that allows the military to send these weapons, even though the rate of duds,

those leftover weapons on the ground, is greater than what Congress had mandated. So for him, the potential for these weapons to help lift the counteroffensive in the favor of Ukrainians was worth any trade-offs involving future civilian deaths. Yeah, that's right. future civilian deaths. Yeah, that's right. David, I'm mindful that you're, of course, in Vilnius, where the NATO summit is about to begin.

What are the Allies saying about this? They're not saying much, Sabrina. You know, they're not comfortable with it, but they also know that these are desperate times, and so they've been very quiet about it. In fact, Sabrina, they've been quieter about this decision than many in Biden's own party, including some on the progressive side of his party who have been quite critical of the decision. David, you talked about how war is full of ugly choices. You know, that seems particularly true in this war in Ukraine. And the Biden administration has talked about the lines it wouldn't cross over the course of the last year. And here we are

on the other side of yet another line. What does that tell us about where we are right now? I think the main thing it tells you, Sabrina, is we're at a pretty desperate point in the war. Because if Zelensky can't make this counteroffensive work, he can't get to the next phase, which is a negotiated settlement to the war, which is how all wars end sooner or later. And that's why he's so desperate that he's willing to go take this risk.

Now, the Biden administration has come up with all kinds of justifications, some of them pretty logical, for making a choice they didn't want to make. They say this is just a bridge until we can build up enough of those conventional munitions that can feed their artillery. In other words, we don't plan to be giving them these cluster munitions forever. They've said there's a difference between giving them to a country that's trying to defend its own territory and that makes the choice to go use them

than to use them in an offensive way, the way the Russians are. And finally, they make the ultimate justification, which is the bigger moral problem here would be letting Vladimir Putin win. And that, in the end, was the choice that Joe Biden had to make. This was about a last chance to let the Ukrainians score a battlefield victory. David, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Monday. Thank you. flooding across western New England and parts of New York State. Water wiped out roads and bridges,

leaving people stranded in their homes and vehicles. You only need to walk through the streets and see the pain in people's eyes as they describe to me their loss, their fear, their anxiety. Officials said that about 20 people had been rescued by boat, with another two dozen evacuated from their homes. At least one person has died. My friends, this is the new normal.

Governor Kathy Hochul of New York spoke to the extraordinary nature of the flooding, saying that it was made worse by the effects of climate change. And Turkey agreed to clear the way for Sweden to join NATO, a major victory for the United States and its Western allies, which had been pressing Turkey, a NATO member, to let Sweden in. Turkey had blocked Sweden's application for months, and what experts said was a bid to extract concessions for itself. The move was a surprise, as just hours before, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

said that European countries should first advance his country's bid to join the EU before he would back Sweden's request. Finally, in a surprising twist, the Kremlin revealed that Vladimir Putin held a lengthy meeting with Evgeny Prigozhin just five days after he led a rebellion that posed a potential challenge to Putin's regime. The three-hour meeting on June 29th was a startling revelation, and it suggested that Putin, for all of his bluster, sees a continued use for Prigozhin and his mercenary group, Wagner. Today's episode was produced by Will Reed and Mary Wilson, with help from Summer Tamad.

It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, and Alicia Baitu, And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.