Martin Bell: The UK has no ethical foreign policy if it battles to keep these munitions

This is make-up-your-mind time on cluster munitions. Right to the eve of the Dublin conference, the British Government is arguing with itself. Either it takes the lead, with other and mostly smaller nations, against these engines of death, and consigns them to the outlaw list as it did with anti-personnel mines 10 years ago. Or it continues to hold them in its arsenals. It cannot do both. And if it chooses to keep them, it can bid farewell to the vaunted ethical dimension of its foreign policy.

The killer fact – and for once the phrase is appropriate – is that the cluster bomb is a child killer. I have seen its effects in Kosovo, Iraq and elsewhere. It continues to claim regular casualties in southern Lebanon, where the Israelis rained down supposedly "smart" M85 bomblets in the last three days of the war in 2006. Many did not self-destruct. Yet the M85 remains one of two types still held by the British military. The other is the M73 rocket, fired from Apache helicopters or Harrier jets. The M73 contains nine bomblets. The Ministry of Defence is trying to redefine cluster munitions as weapons delivering 10 or more bomblets. How very convenient. How very cynical.

Related articles

• Britain obstructs global ban on use of cluster bombs
• Search the news archive for more stories

Most senior military figures I know have no time for cluster munitions, on military as well as humanitarian grounds. A former adjutant general, Lord Ramsbotham, told the House of Lords: "I can find no justification for the deployment of these weapons in any activity the British arms has been involved in since the end of the Cold War."

They are weapons of territory denial which substitute for infantry, but end up endangering the soldiers they are designed to protect. The UK's intervention in Kosovo was casualty-free in military terms, except for the soldiers who risked their lives – and in some cases lost them – trying to clear the unexploded ordnance.

Those deaths were exceptional. In all recent recorded cases of cluster bomb casualties, 98 per cent of the victims were civilians. Two groups are especially at risk: farmers trying to reclaim their fields after a conflict, and children, whose energy and curiosity put them in harm's way. The bomblets' toy-like appearance and bright yellow colour makes them fatally attractive to the young. Boys are extremely vulnerable. Statistics for the war in Iraq are (perhaps deliberately) hard to come by, but cluster munitions were widely used by the British, especially in the initial bombardment in March and April 2003.

When it was over, the 930,000 items of unexploded ordnance in the British sector included 5,800 bomblets, suggesting a high rate of failure.

Cluster munitions are not new. I grew up among them in the Second World War, when they were known as the "butterfly bombs" dropped by the Germans over my native Suffolk. They were weapons of terror then. They are weapons of terror now. They contravene the Geneva Conventions. They are neither more nor less than aerially sown anti-personnel mines. And the world should stigmatise themin exactly the same way.

The Truth That Sticks by Martin Bell is published by Icon, £8.99