Lord Garden: My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on securing this debate at such an appropriate moment. After the progress at the Oslo conference, we now have the opportunity to take a significant step forward in Lima next week. It is telling that all noble Lords across the House have spoken in support of a ban. In December, at the Second Reading of the Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, we discussed the tragedy of unexploded bomblets, which last so long in many parts of the world, and we heard much more on that from many noble Lords today.
We can send a strong message from across the House to our UK government negotiators to press the case for an international ban. That has the strongest support from these Benches. We hope that it will follow the experience of the landmine ban. While it may be unrealistic to expect instant universal acceptance of such a ban, I share with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, the thought that that should not make us temper our approach to how we go for an outright ban. It is important that the climate of international opinion makes the use of these weapons much more difficult even for nations that insist on retaining them.
I join others in welcoming how the UK Government have moved towards the side of the angels in recent months. It seems not long ago that we had an impasse where the MoD was determined to hang on to all its stocks of cluster munitions, both bombs and artillery, despite growing problems over their usage in the operations we are now undertaking. Then we had the Statement of 21 March this year, which announced the banning of dumb cluster munitions with immediate effect and the withdrawal from service of the BL755 aerially delivered bomb and the M26 multiple-launch rocket system artillery munition. These are welcome announcements that allow the UK to take more of a lead in calling for an international ban. However, as we have heard from many noble Lords today, we are still left with one cluster munition in the army: the L20A1 155-millimetre artillery projectile, which uses in each projectile 49 M85 submunitions. Our current stockpile, as I understand it, although the Minister may correct me, is 59,364 of these submunitions. This specifically is one of the weapons—as we have heard today, particularly well from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew—that caused such problems in Lebanon when they were used by Israel last year. Other noble Lords have also spoken on that.
I will focus my remarks on that aspect of our United Kingdom policy, as others have, and on the definitions of “dumb” and “smart” munitions, if there is a distinction to be made. In the Written Statement of 21 March the Government highlighted their concern that dumb munitions disperse submunitions over an area. Many noble Lords have described that in graphic terms, such as numbers of football pitches. The Statement continued:
As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, that is a specious argument.
In answer to an Oral Question on 17 April, the noble Baroness the Leader of the House stated that the UK has its own definitions of “dumb” and “smart” bombs, but she did not think the House would want to hear her explanation. I trust that the Minister will take this opportunity to tell your Lordships the difference in some detail.
At Second Reading of the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in December, I went into considerable detail about the technical aspects and lack of effectiveness of cluster submunitions. I shall not repeat that today. I can say all I need to on the military aspects of the issue by saying I agree with every word the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has said today. I support his military analysis of the lack of military utility of cluster munitions in the post Cold War world
Bomblets are scattered over a wide area and, as such, lack discrimination. If the target set is a mix of enemy and civilian, they cannot discriminate. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Archer of Sandwell, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester reminded us, that poses a real problem for most of the operations that our Armed Forces are currently undertaking. There is the instant humanitarian problem that you kill civilians as you kill your enemy. There is also perhaps the legal problem that has been highlighted by some noble Lords. Is the increased risk of collateral damage because of the dispersed pattern proportionate to what you are trying to achieve, or is it more likely to be counterproductive in any campaign that seeks to nurture the support of the indigenous population? All noble Lords have come to the conclusion that it is more likely to be counterproductive.
The second problem, which attracts more attention, is the question of unexploded ordnance and long-term consequences—what might be called the sowing of unintentional minefields. I also had a letter with similar wording from the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, about what NATO has done to inform Serbia, as it is required to do, about the cluster munitions that were dropped in 1999. I could not believe what I read. Eight years later we are still thinking about how to deal with this complex problem. We are not even meeting our responsibilities to tell nations where we have dropped these weapons.
We have had a fair amount of discussion about what failure rates are appropriate. Again, in December I went into some detail about the effect of real conditions against trial conditions. The general failure rate quoted for dumb cluster munitions is 5 per cent. The manufacturer says that some smart weapons can have a rate of less than 1 per cent. However, data from the Gulf War showed that instead of the 5 per cent failure rate you tended to get about 23 per cent when using the weapons for real—four or five times the brochure rate. Various official sources have been quoted for the M85, with failure rates ranging from very low to about the same as our other cluster bombs. The latest one I could find was a trial showing it to be between 1.3 per cent and 2.3 per cent, but the noble Lord, Lord Elton, told us of much higher figures in Lebanon. We do not know, and that is one of the problems. So I fully support the cry of the noble Lord, Lord Low, for more facts about the real failure rates in real conditions. Perhaps it will be impossible to find out, but experience tends to suggest that manufacturers are being much too optimistic. Indeed, when I look at military handbook tables of cluster munitions, I find it interesting that the M85 is normally put in the same column as the BL755—it is seen as a weapon of the same sort of intelligence, if I can put it that way.
In a 2002 briefing, Human Rights Watch compiled a list of these various submunitions, stating which appeared to be more advanced than others. It certainly did not classify the M85 as advanced. It talked about a future generation of submunitions which would be quite different; they would be primarily set up to sense and destroy armour and, if they did not find the target, they would neutralise themselves. But because they are so complicated, we would end up with a cluster munition that has only two submunitions—the most they are likely to get is about nine. That is quite a different weapon. Those are what most of the military community thinks of as smart new future-generation weapons. That may be of only passing interest to your Lordships, but it suggests that there is a debate to be had about where one draws the line between smart and dumb. The M85 would certainly not be allowed to fall on the smart side of the line.
I am afraid that we have moved only halfway. We have all congratulated the Government, and have personally congratulated the Minister on his work on this. It is pretty good, but we can imagine the fight between the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, where the Ministry of Defence says, “We have 50,000 of these submunitions. They are pretty new. Leave us those and we will let you have the other two”. It is not good enough. If we want to take the moral high ground in these negotiations, we have to take it now. I hope that, as a result of this debate, the Minister will bring pressure back on the MoD to take those munitions out of service. Then the negotiators can go to Lima and negotiate from a position of moral strength. The military case must be entirely satisfactory for the sort of campaigns we find ourselves involved in.
We have a real opportunity to advance the international ban on these terrible and counter-productive weapons. I trust that we will brief the negotiators with everything we can to make sure that they advance the cause.