Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world. That harm is at the hands of the U.S. military, which from 1964 to 1973, secretly dropped hundreds of millions of cluster munitions on Laos as part of their campaign to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
This number is impossible to fully comprehend, but according to Legacies Library it amounts to a planeload of bombs, every 8 minutes, for almost 10 years, in a country the size of Utah. While most of the bomblets detonated in the initial bombing, around 30% of the cluster munitions deployed failed to detonate, leaving tens of millions of dangerous explosive remnants throughout Laos, many of which remain today.
Cluster munitions are weapons that scatter small, explosive submunitions across a wide area. Because of both their indiscriminate nature and widespread submunition failure, these weapons are infamous for causing civilian harm both during and after their use. In 2025, 87% of all casualties caused by cluster munitions were civilians.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) is an international treaty that bans parties from manufacturing, stockpiling, transfering, and using cluster munitions. The CCM was created in 2008, sparked by the extensive and gruesome use of cluster munitions by the Israeli military in Lebanon in 2006. Sixteen years after its creation, the 3rd Review Conference for the CCM commenced in the Laotian capital of Vientiane last month, and I joined colleagues across the globe to take an opportunity to both review the convention and look toward the future. Beyond the singular weapon that it bans, the CCM holds much deeper importance. It is proof positive that states can choose to abandon certain weapons simply because the harm done by those weapons is too great for people to bear.
While there is a global majority — 112 party states — to the CCM, as an American advocate, I found myself in slim company. The United States is not a party to the treaty, and there were no U.S. diplomats present as observers. Despite the physical absence, the omnipresence of U.S. foreign policy lay just under the surface of the conference, weaving through many important moments during the week.
In Laos, survivors hold the power
The first step to rejecting harm is to bear witness to it, and the conference’s location allowed delegates to witness first-hand the human harm that cluster munitions cause.
The day before the conference began, the organizing committee took participants on a field trip to Luang Prabang, in northern Laos. Red tape and a triangular sign displaying a skull marked the agriculture field we came up on as contaminated by unexploded ordnance. Within sight were houses, roads, and people – there was a community surrounding us. Members of the organization UXO Laos took us to witness the detonation and clearance of cluster munitions ordnance. They detonated eight BLU-26 bomblets: U.S.-made, U.S.-dropped cluster submunitions. The BLU-26 explosions were powerful, despite being small, about the size and shape of a baseball. Their small spherical shape looks like a toy, making them particularly attractive to children. Over half of all explosive ordnance casualties in Laos are children. I could see children living and playing in the community immediately surrounding where these BLU-26’s were found.
On the following day, to open the conference, Umarbek Pulodov of the Cluster Munition Coalition gave powerful remarks as a survivor of a cluster munition attack in Tajikistan.
“The submunition explosion killed my brother, two of our relatives, and injured everyone else in the room. It took my eye, and with it, many of the dreams I had. It didn’t just injure my body, it changed the course of my life, and that of my family and friends,” he said.
Novar Lee from Phak Beuak village in Laos described his story as a survivor of U.S. cluster munition ordnance, with a translation visible on screen as he spoke.
“In an instant, I became a disabled man, unable to care for myself or support my family. The physical pain and emotional distress took a heavy toll: my body withered, my weight plummeted, and my hair fell out until I was nearly bald.”
Every decision to use a weapon has real, unthinkable human consequences — consequences impossible to see from our comfortable seats on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, or the Situation Room, yet undeniable when listening to survivors speak.
As we reckoned with the pain, we were encouraged by the promise of the future, including one of the most encouraging events of the week: the commitment by the government of Timor-Leste to accede to the CCM and hopefully soon become the 113th state party. Just two years after the American Secret War in Laos, the U.S. government encouraged Indonesia’s brutal invasion of East Timor, in which 200,000 people were ultimately killed. The United States not only provided $1 billion of arms to support the occupation, it also consistently blocked United Nations resolutions of condemnation. For Timor-Leste, the shared experience of U.S. violence motivated their move to accede to the CCM. Timor-Leste representative to Laos, João Freitas de Câmara, who was an advocate against Indonesian occupation, noted: “We were active during the resistance for Timor Leste’s self-determination. We live with a little bit of this, in our skin we still feel this. So we don’t want other people to have the same suffering.”
The U.S. is absent, but problematic U.S. rhetoric is not
U.S. manufacture, use, and trade of cluster munitions have long posed challenges for the CCM. At this year’s conference, despite the lack of U.S. diplomats in the room, U.S. government rhetoric justifying cluster munition use was also heard loud and clear.
On the first day, the government of Thailand announced that it used Dual-Purpose Improvised Conventional Munitions (DPCIMs), artillery-delivered cluster munitions, in its border dispute with Cambodia in 2025. Reporting has shown the submunitions were the same type that the U.S. transferred to Thailand in 2002 after the U.S. dissolved a stockpile in the region. Thailand is not a party to the CCM, and was attending the conference as an observer. Even so, it is unprecedented for a state to openly announce cluster munition use at the high-level segment of a Review Conference for the convention that seeks to ban it. Instead of denying use, or arguing that the weapons used do not qualify as cluster munitions, which is more typical, Thailand listed a series of justifications for using DPICMs. Among them were claims that the use was proportional to Cambodia’s attack and only used against military targets — both typical attempts to show compliance with International Humanitarian Law.
One argument, however, stood out to me as particularly notable and frustratingly familiar: “[DPICMs] are not anti-personnel landmines and leave no long-term residual effects.” This is right out of the U.S. government’s playbook.
The United States consistently uses low failure rates to separate new, post-Cold War generations of cluster munitions from the bad reputation of landmines and other Vietnam War-era predecessors. When the United States transferred stockpiled DPICMs to Ukraine in 2023, the Biden administration justified the transfer by claiming that DPICMs have a significantly lower failure rate (dud rate) than Russian cluster munitions, and would therefore cause less harm to people because they leave less ordnance after the war is over. In 2025, the United States moved to buy a new generation of weapon, the XM1208, another artillery-delivered cluster munition like the DPICM, which claims an even lower failure rate of less than 1%.
There is no evidence that the claimed failure rate of cluster munitions matches reality. Cluster munition use in the field consistently shows higher failure rates than reported during manufacturing. Cluster munitions are inherently used in mass, meaning that they are indiscriminate during their use, not only after the war is over. This also means that even a 1% failure rate results in thousands of unexploded bomblets left after use. Rather than starting from the position any bomblet can cause incalculable harm, especially to children, U.S. rhetoric about low failure rates instead suggests there is a responsible failure rate for an unacceptable weapon.
The 1% failure rate, which now reads as permissive, was originally part of a scaling back of the existing U.S. Cluster munitions stockpile. As Mina Nur Basmaci and John Ramming Chappell wrote for the International Policy Journal, “A 2008 Department of Defense directive phased out the use and transfer of cluster munitions with high failure rates. And a longstanding U.S. law restricts the export of cluster munitions with a failure rate above one percent and requires specification that the cluster munitions will not be used against civilians, subject to only an override by the President in exceptional circumstances.”
In 2017, the Trump administration adopted a new policy that permits the use of cluster munitions with a higher dud rate, and removed the requirement to rid U.S. stockpiles of higher dud-rate cluster munitions. The Biden administration kept Trump’s 2017 policy in place, and waived the Congressional restrictions at least seven times to transfer arms to Ukraine.
Rather than relying on the discretion of executives, Congress should codify the 2008 directive into law, and go further. Dud rates should act as the starting point for a larger conversation on civilian harm, not the end-point.
Funding mine action is a vital start, but U.S. policy must also address the root cause
Mine action — the clearance of ordnance, financial assistance for victims, survivors, and their families, and risk education — is the way to make the world safe from weapons already used, and advocates see it as linked with the ban on cluster munitions. The CCM itself states that any state party in the financial position to do so must contribute to mine action in state parties affected by cluster munition ordnance. A central theme of the week was a push to sustain and increase funding for mine action in Laos and other affected countries.
To its credit, the U.S. government remains a strong partner in global demining efforts. In fact, despite devastating cuts to U.S. foreign aid generally by the second Trump administration, U.S. funding for demining has remained steady. In 2024, the United States accounted for over $23 million of mine action funding in Laos, 73% of total funding. This is thanks to bipartisan support, particularly from veterans in Congress who know the effects of explosive weapons first-hand. In Laos, U.S. funding has gone an unbelievably long way. From 2021-2023 alone, U.S. funding cleared over 108 million square meters of land in Laos.
Yet mine action can only go so far as the United States simultaneously refuses to join the CCM and continues to justify, stockpile, procure, and produce cluster munitions. The U.S. remains simultaneously committed to cleaning up past minefields, while insisting on the right to create new ones.
I could see this tension within U.S. policy throughout the conference. Many of the groups that rely on U.S. funding to clear ordnance and assist survivors in Laos and other countries are left in an incredibly tough position: to continue saving lives tomorrow, they must be in good standing with the country that both caused the harm 60 years ago and is the biggest barrier to preventing harm today.
For the U.S. to truly honor its commitments to past, present, and future victims of cluster munitions, it will need to do more than just offer to tend the scars of old wars. Aligning with, and ultimately joining, the Convention on Cluster Munitions would be a promise of a future where no child’s life, in Laos or elsewhere, is diminished by the legacy of U.S. weapons.
Allie Hansen is a Scoville Fellow at Win Without War Education Fund, and the Security Assistance Monitor Research Fellow at the Center for International Policy
Published by Center for International Policy
