Foreign Affairs committee  That may be a long-term saving, because if we don't act now we may well see these weapons proliferate further than they have. I saw Hezbollah using cluster munitions in southern Lebanon just last year. They had been sold by the Chinese to Iran, and Iran had supplied them to Hezbollah.

Foreign Affairs committee  If I could look at the U.K. very briefly, we are in essence moving away from the use of cluster munitions. Our air-dropped submunitions, which spread 147 of these over an area the size of about two to four football pitches, are being replaced with something called Brimstone, which is a targeted unitary warhead.

Foreign Affairs committee  In this case, these are individually targeted, so they're not clustered. This is an issue for a definition that will come out during the process. If you want to go down that way, it is possible to exclude certain types of smart munitions from the definition itself.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm not an advocate for the purchase of new weapons systems. That's not what I'm here for. In general, though, I think weapons systems should be smart and discriminatory, by which I mean guided. If there is a weapons system that can identify and lock onto a particular military vehicle due to some kind of algorithm and due to, let's say, the heat signature or whatever else, if that does not cause unacceptable humanitarian harm—and the big issues are whether or not it causes unacceptable humanitarian harm and whether or not you can use it in such a way that you protect civilians—then I don't have a problem with that.

Foreign Affairs committee  We've heard arguments about how they will blow up if you put in self-destruct cluster munitions, and that you don't have a problem with clearance afterwards. What we've found in southern Lebanon is huge numbers of cluster bombs with self-destructs on them that didn't work. Technical fixes, the kinds of actions you can take to try to improve these munitions, are very problematic.

Foreign Affairs committee  The simple answer to that is funding, really. To be honest, the training is there. We know how to clear cluster munitions. It's problematic and it's dangerous, but with sufficient funding.... There is a lot of money going in there from a number of different countries, so I think they can be cleared.

Foreign Affairs committee  Kosovo had probably the single-largest humanitarian intervention immediately after the conflict. Something like $30 million U.S. has been spent on clearance predominantly of cluster munitions. They are still clearing cluster munitions in Kosovo today. They're finding them where they were buried underground.

Foreign Affairs committee  Probably the smallest cluster bombs we find are artillery shells that might contain, on average, somewhere between about 40 and 60 individual explosive submunitions.

Foreign Affairs committee  If you imagine the pea in the pod, the pod is the container. That might be a shell or a rocket or an aircraft bomb. That breaks open and lots of peas fall out. Each of those peas is a submunition, an explosive item in its own right, with its own shrapnel sheath and its own explosive and fuse.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll finish up now. My key argument is that the nature of warfare has changed, and we fight something else now. We fight something called war amongst the people, and the weapons systems that we choose should reflect that. They need to be more discriminatory. They need to be smarter.

Foreign Affairs committee  I thought I would start with a quote from January of this year, from Afghanistan. A NATO spokesman, a British military officer, Brigadier Richard Nugee, said, “The single thing that we have done wrong and we are striving extremely hard to improve on [in 2007] is killing innocent civilians.”