Dispatch: The invisible killer haunting Laos 50 years after the Vietnam War
... At this site just outside the tiny village of Sop Hun, decontamination technicians are meticulously clearing up the legacy of a “secret war” so intense it earned Laos – then home to fewer than three million people – the grim status of the world’s most bombed nation per capita.
Between 1964 and 1973, as the US attempted to suppress communism in southeast Asia and cut off North Vietnam’s supply lines, American pilots unleashed more than two million tonnes of ordnance on this landlocked county in 580,000 attack sorties. On average, a planeload of bombs was dropped on Laos every eight minutes for almost a decade.
... Since the Paris Peace Accords were signed 50 years ago at least 25,000 people, half of them children, have been killed or injured by unexploded bombs – including 63 in 2021 alone.
Many of these accidents have involved cluster munitions, a controversial weapon now banned in more than 120 countries yet – to Laos’ disbelief – deployed by both sides in Ukraine.
These bombs are indiscriminate; they break apart mid-air and scatter hundreds of smaller submunitions, known here as “bombies”, across a wide area. And while they’re meant to detonate on impact, the “dud rate” is high: up to 30 per cent of the 270 million dropped on Laos never exploded.
... “I would like to bring to the power countries and leaders: think of the impacts of war, especially the impacts of cluster munitions. I don’t want to see this happen again. Please, see Laos as a case study and stop.”
... It’s hard to know how many of these cluster munitions remain scattered across Laos, though estimates suggest just 10 per cent of some 80 million left when the war finished have been cleared. In 2019, the US Congressional Research Service said it could take at least another 100 years to decontaminate the country....
“I don’t know if the people who dropped them realised the impact would last to the next generation? But they should know now. People in power, people who create war, I would encourage them to look and see that bombies kill people, kill villages, for a long time.”
This sentiment is widespread across Laos; almost everyone The Telegraph spoke to said they struggle to comprehend why cluster munitions, which have caused so much harm here for so long, are still being deployed elsewhere.
In recent decades, Laos has been increasingly vocal about this issue on the international stage, and played a major role in the creation of the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2008.
More than 120 countries have since joined this international treaty, including the UK, but there are notable absences – including Russia, Ukraine and the US. As the fighting continues in Europe, all three have been involved in their use.
“As the world’s largest victim of cluster munitions… [Laos] expresses its profound concern over the announcement and possible use of cluster munitions,” the foreign ministry said in July, when reports that America would send several shipments to Ukraine first emerged.
“[Laos] calls upon any state or actor to refrain from all use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions as prescribed in the Convention on Cluster Munitions, so that no one in the world would be victimised by such [a] heinous weapon.”
... “I’m really trying to inspire my country, the USA, to adopt a more humane policy,” says Ms Koulabdara. “The reason we’re so against it is obvious, we need to learn from history, learn from our last use in Laos.
“But we also know that these weapons will eventually harm Ukrainian men women and children, potentially for decades … Because of their indiscriminate nature, these weapons should be treated in the same way as chemical weapons.”
For Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, the US transfer demonstrates the importance of destroying stockpiles – “if countries have them, they’ll use them”. And because many of the cluster munitions being sent are relatively old, it’s not clear what the “dud rate” will be.
“The US transfer does also bring into question the emerging norm, stigmatising any use by any actor under any circumstance,” she says. “The US is basically saying this is a special case and nothing else will work … that chips away at the norm everybody’s been trying so hard to put in place over the last 15 years.”
... Still, aid to clean up the UXOs pales in comparison to the cost of the bombardment – in 2023 dollars, the US spent $16 million every day bombing Laos for nine years. According to Legacies of War, funding to decontaminate now stands at just $45 million per year.
“The bombs that were dropped on Laos … are American bombs,” says Ms Koulabdara. “So from my perspective, this should be a top priority and funding should be guaranteed until we get the job done.”
But as the decontamination team refill their glasses and tuck into plates of sticky rice and larb salad, they admit they’re unsure if Laos can ever truly be free.
“I think we have to try for the next generation, but I don’t know, there are so many…” says Ket, shaking her head instead of finishing the sentence. “It’s just a very big task.”
Feed the Pentagon and merchants of death, nothing else matters. Eat shit and die, Okinawans, 
We suck.
Terrible enough at the time with the tragedy compounded by the fact that we knew that the munitions would be killing people decades later and didn't care, not to mention our 2023 delivery of cluster bombs and shells to Ukraine 
Potatotown = LOSER
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Riiight, those word sure say woke, America-killing, globalist illegals to me 
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