Is it morally right to give cluster bombs to Ukraine?

The ethical math is complicated.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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A man pushes his wife’s bike yesterday after she was killed by a cluster bomb in Donetsk. (Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

As someone who grew up in the age of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — otherwise known as the “Star Wars” program, I think a lot about the use of weapons. Space-based and full of cutting-edge laser battle stations, the Star Wars plan was meant to stop intercontinental ballistic missiles launched by Russia, even as it was laughed at by much of the public. The system never came together, and, in 1993, President Bill Clinton scrapped it.

But here we are, again arming ourselves — via Ukraine, of course — against Russia. The latest in the parade of weaponry donated to Ukraine? Cluster bombs from the U.S. stockpile. It’s a supply that most countries in the world do not have. More than 120 nations are signatories to a 2008 treaty that outlaws these bombs’ production and distribution. Known as the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the U.S. has never ratified it. Neither has Russia or Ukraine.

On Friday, the same day that President Biden announced his decision to give these bombs to Ukraine, he also said that the U.S. has destroyed the last of its chemical weapons.

The destruction has been a long time coming. In 1989, the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed to destroy their stockpiles in the following 10 years. It’s taken a lot longer than that, which has been an affront to humanity.

The effects of the use of chlorine gas dropped by the Germans in World War I were so devastating — men were blinded, their lungs and skin burned — that the Geneva Conventions banned them in 1925. In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared: “Use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind.”

But, Roosevelt added, the U.S. would “under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies.” (Emphasis mine.)

This argument is the proverbial slippery slope, one we are sliding down in Ukraine at this very moment: Russia has used cluster bombs in its war on Ukraine. Does this justify their use by the Ukrainians? (FYI, there is evidence that Ukraine has used them already against the Russians.)