War & Responsibility: Owning Up To Duds. (A Christmas Eve Wish)

Saturday, December 24 2011

War & Responsibility: Owning Up To Duds. (A Christmas Eve Wish)

Who should worry about a 500-pound dud? Etienne de Malglaive, the photographer whose work in Libya was described here earlier this week in relation to his find of unexploded NATO ordnance in Zawiyah, dug through his digital archive and sent along another photograph of the item in question. It’s above. It helps move us to explore in slightly more detail some of the questions surrounding NATO’s UXO, and what might best be done to account for it and clean it all up.

Etienne kept a bit of distance from this bomb, but his photograph, very crisp and clear, manages to be quite useful. So let’s zoom in.

What you see appears to be a MK82 low-drag general-purpose bomb, one of the more common American-made air-to-ground weapons of our lives. Fitted with a guidance system, this is, in simple terms, the 500-pound high-explosive pop at the center (literally and figuratively) of a so-called precision-guided munition known as the Paveway II GBU-12. You can’t see the guidance system here because the guidance system has been stripped away by the last seconds of this bomb’s journey, as it smashed into this building, banged around inside and came to rest, a dud.

Etienne’s image is sharp enough, so let’s zoom in closer still, this time on the item protruding from the bomb’s forward fuze well. What you see there appears to be a M904 mechanical impact nose fuze. The fuze’s name hints at what function it serves, but a few more details might help you. Once the bomb clears the releasing aircraft by a safe time and distance, this nose fuze becomes armed by means of a vane that spins in the air stream as the bomb falls. Then, upon impact with a solid object — the earth, a tank, a building, etc. — the fuze sets off the bomb’s main charge. You know the rest. Any number of air-war promo videos, the sort that the alliance releases when it wants to show how accurate its munitions are, show the sort of explosion and mushroom cloud that follow.

All of this sounds simple enough. But in a surprising number of cases, bomb-fuze combinations do not work as designed. Bombs strike the earth and fail to explode. Sometimes they burrow deep into the soil. Other times they burrow, travel along roughly parallel to the surface and then porpoise back into view, coming to rest most anywhere. Sometimes they skip along like a crazy stone, acting more like a 500-pound wrecking ball than a piece of high-explosive ordnance — smashing through ceilings and walls, totaling cars, cutting scars over the ground. The MK82 that Etienne found would seem to fit this last category. As near as he could tell, it entered a large office building facing Zawiyah’s central square, did not explode, and caromed around in the building, at last stopping in this corridor.

What you see here is hardly unique, even if it is outside your day-to-day experience. Unexploded MK82s have been turning up on or in the ground for decades, pretty much wherever the United States (or a nation it has provided these weapons to) have used them. People still find them in Laos, from back when they were dropped as so-called dumb bombs.

Once upon a time, in an age before GPS, guided munitions and targeting pods, air crews that released MK82s might not know exactly where they ended up. They might not even know when they did not explode. These days, with targeting pods that guide the bomb to its target, and the capacities of modern optics and video, the air crews do know when they have a dud — and where it hit. Reporting where a dud struck would seem a fundamental step in accountability, which is one reason Eric Schmitt and I raised the issue with NATO.

MK82’s are not the most volatile of duds. They are designed to withstand thermal extremes and temperature cycling, a characteristic they need to be of practical use in the ordinary environmental conditions associated with being attached to an aircraft that one minute might be at near sea level in a blazing desert and a few minutes later might be in the brutal chill of 30,000 feet. And a weapon that has fallen from, say, 18,000 or 20,000 feet, and struck earth at several hundred miles an hour and not exploded, is not necessarily something that cannot withstand a slight disturbance. But who can really say what it might take for that fuze to set off the MK82’s main charge?

Duds are frightening things. In the age of modern air war, they also should be one of a post-conflict environment’s more manageable problems. The world is not a free-fire zone, no matter an air force’s mandate. If air forces would share their data on duds, people living in areas that have been subjected to bombing campaigns would be more safe, and the air forces would earn points for demonstrating that they can hold themselves to a higher standard than what we have seen to date.