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Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill [Lords]

This has been a wide-ranging and well informed debate. I, too, wish to place on record my support for and belief in the work of many aid organisations dealing with mines and with the aftermath of mines and cluster munitions, and that of our own mine clearance personnel in the British armed forces. It was a business that had declined in the '70s and '80s to a narrow profession dealing on the whole with specific kinds of munitions in the internal conflict in Northern Ireland, but it has grown like Topsy because of Iraq and Afghanistan. My hon. Friend the Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin), like other colleagues with military service and experience, put his finger on it when he asked what was the original purpose of the munitions in question. It was to enable the side that was weaker on the whole, whether on a tactical or operational level, to block off large areas of a battlefield against a superior enemy, and at least divert him or hold him up. As many of us know who lived through the cold war—the balance between NATO and the Warsaw pact—they were developed because it was assumed that there would be an overwhelming Soviet and Warsaw pact attack on NATO, and that if we were not immediately to use nuclear weapons, the next worst thing was conventional weapons such as these. We then tried to distinguish between the use of cluster munitions in what I would still call "conventional warfare", which could somehow be regarded as good use—although God alone knows what West Germany would have looked like in the midst of it all—and bad use in unconventional warfare, which would involve the death of large numbers of civilians and be indiscriminate, however we define that word. I do not want to become an old military historian bore, but—