Decades-Old Bombs Still a Threat to Laos

Posted on Sep 24, 2011

U.S. Army / Bradley C. Church

Village workers help U.S. Air Force members clear trees and brush from a Vietnam War-era crash site in the Boualapha province of Laos in 2007.

Last week, delegates from dozens of countries traveled to Beirut to talk about Laos, where decades after the Vietnam War there are still an estimated 80 million unexploded bombs scattered across fields and forests.

Each year, the live remnants of U.S. cluster bombs kill or injure 300 Laotians, many of them children. And the bombs are of particular danger to farmers, who risk their lives every time they plow a new plot.

The delegates convened to try to persuade other nations to join a year-old international treaty to rid the world of stockpile cluster munitions. But the U.S., the nation that rained cluster bombs on Laos so many years ago and, according to some authorities, the largest producer of the deadly devices, did not join the conference in Lebanon and has declined to sign the treaty. —BF