Johann Hari

The suicide-murder of Benazir Bhutto by her moral and intellectual inferiors seems to have made the world notice – just for a moment – the nuclear warning-light that has been flashing angrily all year.

Punctuating 2007 there has been a string of nuclear break-ins, accidents and screw-ups that should have us sweating. How many people know that Congo’s main nuclear scientist was arrested in March for flogging off enriched uranium to anyone who wanted it, in a kind of radioactive e-Bay? Or that this summer six bombs with more explosive power than Hiroshima were accidentally flown across the continental United States, and left unguarded on a landing strip in Louisiana for ten hours before anyone in the Air Force wondered where they’d gone? Or that this November, four unknown men managed to shoot their way into South Africa’s main nuclear facility, which has the material enough for 25 nuclear bombs – and could rummage through the enriched uranium storage vault for forty-five minutes before they escaped?

It has taken the groaning and potential collapse of a nuclear state for us to see, even flickeringly, the risks of having so much nuclear material scattered across the globe. We don’t currently know how many nukes Pakistan has: some estimates say fifty, others go as high as 120. The Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf assures us they are all securely locked-up and locked-down. Yet interviewing experts about the programme and poring through the major academic studies has led me to conclude this is not the case.

But first, the good news. Some worthwhile safety precautions have been put in place in Pakistan over the past five years. The country’s nukes are not kept on hair-trigger alert, ready to fire at any moment. Instead, the warhead cores are kept in different places from the weapon detonation components. To put them together and make a shootable nuke would take around three days – providing a long(ish) fuse in a crisis. Even if jihadis managed to seize one nuclear weapons site, they would still need to seize another one – and secure transportation between the two – to go nuclear.

Nothing else about this picture is reassuring. Professor Shaun Gregory of the Pakistan Security Research Unit has discovered that almost the entire nuclear arsenal is kept in the most fundamentalist part of Pakistan – the West. This is one of the main jihadi gathering-places, where the 7/7 bombers trained and Osama Bin Laden is almost certainly hiding out. They are stored there because it is the furthest possible point from Pakistan’s nuclear rival India, giving the country maximum warning time in a nuclear war or hypothetical invasion.

The big danger is that this part of the Pakistani state shatters into competing fragments, and control of the nukes becomes contested. Already, today, Musharraf finds it impossible to control great swathes of the country’s territory. It’s not hard to see this loosening yet further. Pakistan is a cobbling-together of conflicting linguistic and tribal groups, many of whom want to go it alone. If the military begins to fracture, the experts fear three potential scenarios – none of them probable, but all of them possible.

Nightmare One: a jihadi group manages to seize a nuclear weapon outright, by force, from the vacuum. Osama Bin Laden has, after all, told his fanatical followers it is an “Islamic duty” to acquire a “Muslim bomb” (presumably followed by Islamic radiation sickness and Islamic cancer). This scenario is highly unlikely. If the army breaks up, it will be a major prestige-prize to keep control of the weapons, establishing that you are the Top Dogs. They will not relinquish them without a hard fight, or lots of cash.

Nightmare Two: One of the broken shards of the Pakistani army that manages to hold onto some of the nukes turns out to be sympathetic to al Qaeda. This is more likely, because parts of the Pakistani army have already helped al Qaeda, repeatedly and enthusiastically. For example, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was about to be seized in Karachi a year after the attacks – until he was tipped off by friends within the Pakistani military establishment. He was passed from serving military officer to serving military officer, until he was captured in a military safe-house in Rawalpindi. The senior Pakistani nuclear scientist, Pervez Hoodboy, estimates today that ten percent of his colleagues are Talbianists, noting, “There is potential for dark things to happen.”

Nightmare Three: As Pakistan falls apart, the soldiers at the nuclear sites start to sell off the nukes to whoever will pay for them. Again, this is more likely – because it has already happened. A.Q. Khan, the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, effectively opened an international branch of Tesco for nuclear weapons. He merrily sold secrets and equipment to the tyrannies of North Korea, Libya and others. The former UN weapons inspector David Albright says: “As loyalties break down, they may look for an opportunity to make a quick buck. You may not be able to get a whole weapon, but you might get the core.”

So while the Bush administration has been chasing against two WMD programmes that long-since stopped – Iraq’s and Iran’s – a real WMD danger has been swelling unnoticed. What can be done now? Figures close to the Bush administration are mooting short-term ‘solutions’ that could actually make the problem even worse. Frederick Kagan – the architect of Bush’s surge policy in Iraq – has drawn up hellish plans to surround the Pakistani nuclear bunkers with tens of thousands of high-powered landmines and cluster munitions to prevent anyone getting in or out. (Intriguingly, one of Benazir Bhutto’s last acts was to promise to hand Khan over to international investigators – prompting a panicked squawk from Musharraf.) Scott Sagan, a US counterproliferation expert, warns: “If Pakistan fears they may be attacked, they have an incentive to take [the weapons] out of the [more secure] bunkers and put them out in the countryside,” where they are more vulnerable to being grabbed by fanatics.

Every time the US military has war-gamed sending in troops to seize the unknown number of weapons, it has ended in a horrific blood-bath – and the weapons still eluding their control. As Professor Gregory puts it: “Condoleezza Rice’s remarks about ‘contingency plans’ to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were really only a rhetorical exercise aimed at reassuring the American public. If the situation really did disintegrate to the point where Pakistani control of the weapons eroded there would be very little the US, or anyone else, could do.”

There is only one long-term solution, long-since left for dead by the dedicated followers of political fashion. We need to steadily reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world through determined multilateral negotiations. A fiercely proud Pakistan will not reduce its arsenal alone. But in lockstep with India and the rest of the nuclear powers, there is a chance. So far, on the international stage, only Barack Obama has mooted this. But the only alternative is to wait, and wait, until somewhere, one of these weapons is seized – and used.

Comments are welcome at johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read my recent column about the situation in Pakistan here.

You can read my other articles about nuclear weapons here.

You can join my Facebook group 'Let's hold a global 'I Survived George Bush' party on January 20th 2009' here.

[In the Indie we had a section picking various people to watch in 2008. I was asked to pick the political campaigner...]

I first saw Sian Berry when she was picketing Chelsea Football Ground dressed as a footballer’s wife in a platinum wig and mini-skirt, carrying a sign that said ‘Your Range Rover Is So Over’. I first spoke to her when she was sticking fake parking tickets onto SUVs clogging the streets of Kensington. ‘Your car has been ticketed for destabilising the planet’s climate,’ the tickets read. ‘Please stop.’

Today, in the urgent fight against the catastrophe of global warming, Berry stands at the meeting point between direct action and electoral politics. She made her name as a maestro of witty acts to alert people to the gambles we are taking with our environment. As a protest against nuclear power, she sent two Osama Bin Laden look-a-likes to Downing Street with a fake canister of nuclear waste and a card that said: ‘Dear Tony, Thank you very much for the present of nuclear power stations’.

The 33-year old Berry is now the Green Party’s principle female speaker, and their candidate to become mayor of London. As a normal, down-to-earth product of Middle England, she has the ability to explain how global warming is already endangering us in simple, plain language that relates to people’s lives. She has worked in call centres, as a taxi controller and as an IT consultant. ‘I am sure the Green Party was founded by two men with two large beards,” she says with a smile, “But it is an out-dated image now. We are just like everyone else’.

When she debates the dim-witted Petrol-Heads from ‘Top Gear’ – as she has many times – she floors them with sound science interspersed with withering gags. Sweaty male journalists tend to get distracted by her looks – one dubbed her “environmental Viagra” – but she smiles through it all. It’s easy to become depressed when you are disseminating information about the climate crisis, but Berry says firmly: “I’ve got a plan. Why get depressed? It just de-motivates you. We’ve got a little window to act now. But we haven’t got long. It’s time to get going.”

This year, Britain woke up to the fact it has fractured once again into jagged shards of privilege and poverty. Class – the oldest of British subjects – became inescapable, a hot-button issue even in middle class Middle England. At the top, people were partying like it was 1929, 1987 and 1999 all rolled into one – the biggest of big bangs. Every night at the shimmering London nightclub Movida, the merry denizens of London’s overclass spend £7000 on a single bottle of Cristal champagne without thinking, and – when they are in a good mood – splash £35,000 on a single cocktail, made out of rare cognacs and served in a crystal glass spruced up with a 11-carat white diamond. It is in places like that that the unprecedented £19 billion of City bonuses were toasted long into the night.

A short drive away, on the Ocean Estate in East London, the poorest families are living crammed ten-to-a-flat in damp council housing. Sarah Hussein shares a two bedroom flat with her husband and four growing kids. “My sons share one room, and me and my husband have our two daughters sleeping in with us,” she told me. “I’ve had to start taking sleeping pills because it’s impossible to crash out with three other people in the bed. It’s bad enough now, but how can we carry on like this when the kids get older? The council told us we will have to wait seven years to be rehoused, but the girls will be women by then. Where will they sleep?” Her kids are wheezing with asthma because the damp is so bad. Shelter has discovered that in this country in 2007, 268,000 children shared a bedroom with their parents, while 98,000 British children slept in kitchens and even bathrooms.

As the year drew to an end, it was proven that the difference between ending up in Movida or trapped on the Ocean Estate is not based on your intellect or ability or morality. It is based on the wealth of the womb you emerged from. A study conducted by the London School of Economics for the Sutton Trust found that a thick child from a rich family overtakes a clever child from a poor family by the time they are seven years old. The poor child never catches up again, in educational attainment or income. Social mobility – your odds of moving up based on talent – has stalled ever since Britain began to abandon social democracy for a low-tax, low-spend economy in 1970. It is now one of the worst rates in the Western world. So here, today, class is still destiny.

You could tell something had shifted in the public consciousness this year when even right-wing newspapers began to splash on their front pages with stories fuming at the super-rich. The rise of an international, untaxed overclass in the South-East has had effects that cascade down to every other group. Even the wealthier middle classes are enduring paroxysms of status anxiety as they find themselves priced out of London’s better restaurants, car showrooms and schools. No, it’s not even vaguely akin to raising your kids in a damp flat – but it is politically consequential, as we shall see in a moment.

The run on Northern Rock and the hints that property prices are about to lose their surreal sheen have increased this middle-class anxiety. This is why the stories that obsessed middle-brow Britain this year were tales of brittle class tensions. They ranged from the turgid film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement – with a ludicrous aristo-accent from Keira Knighley – to the BBC’s glorious chocolate box adaptation of Mary Gaitskell’s ‘Cranford’.

This chasm of inequality is beginning to warp British attitudes in ugly ways. Everywhere in the world, societies with vast income gaps and no mobility have a psychological need to demonise the people at the bottom, to ease their unconscious guilt. In South America or South Africa, the rich elites will tells you the poor masses are stupid and ugly and they smell. As we become more like them, snobbery has become mainstream again, with wealthy comedians suggesting on prime time BBC One that the residents of council estates should be sterilised, and books ridiculing the clothing and speech patterns of “chavs” becoming best-sellers. The abuse directed at Gerry and Kate McCann was vile enough, but can you imagine how much worse it would have been if a single parent, rather than middle class doctors, had left her child alone on holiday?

The year began with a strange self-congratulatory burst of this snobbery when Celebrity Big Bother descended into an “international incident”. The Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty was placed into the reality show compound with (amongst others) a handful of white working class girls, including BB’s own creation Jade Goody and the ‘beauty queen’ Danielle Lloyd. There was a culture clash: the working class girls bonded by talking about when they lost their virginity, but Shilpa – who asks her father’s permission when she goes on a date – interpreted their questions as an attack. The row got nastier and nastier until Jade and Danielle made racist comments – Lloyd was reluctant to eat Shilpa’s food because “you don’t know where their hands have been.” Rioters across India burned effigies of the girls in response.

The British public reacted rightly by punishing racism and voting Shilpa the winner. But many justified this in the ugliest terms: by saying how much they preferred immigrants like Shilpa to the “stupid” and “repulsive” poor represented by Goody and Lloyd. The girls were presented as typical of their kind – lazy and thick, compared to the hard-work and politeness of Shilpa. The Daily Express headline said it all: ‘Class vs. Trash.’ The facts were ignored: actually, working class women are statistically far more likely to actually have sex with ethnic minorities and have babies with them than any other group. Some racists.

But occasionally the poor Britain blasted forth too close to the rich Britain for their comfort. The year has seen a spate of slow-mo massacres of young black men by other young black men, with twenty-five stabbed or shot in London alone. Their average age? Just sixteen. The wealth gap is not matched by a geographical gap: these deaths happened in the pockets of poverty that circle and criss-cross rich areas. A few years ago, Ali G made us laugh with imagined gangs called ‘The Staines Massiv’. Now Britain really is rivven with gangs calling themselves ‘the Brick Lane Posse’, the ‘Paki Panthers’ and more. The competing explanations for this by politicians reveal how the political debate about inequality is going to play out.

Some critics blamed hip-hop and blood-soaked music. But hip-hop sales and downloads have been tanking even as gang violence ramps up: So Solid Crew are so 2005.

The Conservatives primarily blamed the moral failings of the poor. David Cameron said the shootings and gang violence were the result of the high level of single parenthood in these areas, and that the solution was to financially punish single parents by creating tax subsidies for the married. He pledged to introduce US-style plans to force single mothers to leave their kids at home and go out to work, and to pressure them to marry. This was part of a wider intellectual project, spurred by a series of reports issued by ex-Tory boss Ian Duncan Smith, saying the “underclass” now make up “a broken society”, due to their unmarried or divorced status.

But was this true? Under Gordon Brown, Labour opposed the Tory proposals, but seemed cautious and under-confident about offering a different explanation for what was happening in British society. His pro-poor policies like Family Credit continued on the quiet, and without them inequality would be even worse; but in public, his ministers even hinted at times they would adopt the Tory proposals themselves. This lumbering response meant that nobody in Westminster pointed out the gaping holes in the Tory argument. If single parenthood causes gang violence, how come the country with the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe, Denmark, has almost no indigenous problem with gangs at all? The real explanation – that low tax, low investment economies, like the US, always have high inequality and very poor social mobility – was not uttered.

And both political parties were reluctant to probe into the real reason for this gang violence eating away at Britain either. It is the predictable – and predicted – consequence of the ‘war on drugs’. Where the supply of drugs is handed over to criminals by drug prohibition, a niche and a need for armed criminal gangs is created. Under this system, the kids who join gangs will always be the swankiest and most enviable on their estates – and they will shoot each other to seize control of a particular patch and retain their prestige and income. That is what almost all of these shootings were about. For example, at the start of this year a number of the biggest drug dealers in South London were arrested. Warring posses of young men stepped in to take over their extremely profitable drug-patch – and one of them was 15 year-old weed dealer Billy Cox. He was shot by a rival dealer who wanted to establish his control of the area.

It seems bleakly appropriate that in this year of higher and hardened inequality, an Old Etonian child of extreme privilege has consistently made the national political weather. In September, Cameron proposed the near-abolition of inheritance tax, which was paid by only the richest six percent of Brits. Rather than fight back, the Labour government caved and copied the plans.

True, Cameron reacted to middle class anxieties about the super-rich by proposing an annual payment of £25,000 from the non-domiciled mega-rich like Roman Abramovitch. (They had been paying nothing at all, meaning Britain was officially classified as a tax haven by the International Monetary Fund.) The government followed again – but this is a preposterously small contribution to ask from the super-rich. Besides, the plans may well breach OECD rules, because they stipulate that you cannot pay a flat-fee in tax to escape having your tax affairs investigated. They insist you are either in the tax system like the rest of us, in which case you should pay taxes like the rest of us, or you aren’t. But in an age of soaring inequality, asking billionaires for a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the incomes in tax suddenly seemed radical.

Two statistics summarise the chasm between the two Britains that creaked a little wider in Britain in 2007. A coalition of charities including Save the Children and Barnardo’s calculated that it would have cost £3.7bn of pro-poor spending this year to keep on track with the government’s goal to end child poverty by 2020. The money was not forthcoming. Instead, British people spent more than twice as much – £11bn – on champagne.

Ah, Christmas time, mistletoe and wine… As we begin to drink ourselves into a gleeful Yuletide coma, our minds whiz through an array of reassuring festive customs – cheese-soaked Cliff Richard lyrics, mince pies (why? why?), and giving to charity. Some 40 percent of our charitable giving takes place in the month when the snow should fall and the turkeys should die. This week alone, millions of people will give money to help the poorest people alive – and from the barrios of Latin America to the mud-towns of sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve seen how this cash keeps people alive.

But as we give money to help the world’s poor onto their feet, this month the European Union – acting on demands from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – is kicking millions of them back to the ground. We are in the middle of a trade negotiation that is undoing our charity and setting great swathes of Africa up to fail.

The story of how this came to pass begins fifty years ago, as the European colonial powers were being forced to leave the African colonies they had pillaged and decimated. In a parting spasm of guilt, we Europeans gave our ex-colonies a handful of special trade deals. We agreed, for example, to let Kenya sell us its green beans without charging any tariffs or taxes. Over time, these niches collectively became some of the most thriving parts of Africa’s economy, employing hundreds of millions of people. These special deals continued uncontested until the year 2000 – when the WTO demanded they be axed forever, by the deadline of the 1st January 2008.

Why? The WTO was following a tightly-prescribed and blinkered ideology. Since the 1980s, it has enforced the market fundamentalist belief that all tariffs, all subsidies and all protections for poor countries are “market distortions” that need to be abolished. Never mind that every rich country protected its own industries while they were taking their baby-steps. Never mind that the electorates in poor countries democratically oppose this premature crow-barring open of their economies. The WTO – backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – demands they must go, for all but the impossibly weak.

The practical effects of forcing this ideology down the throats of poor countries has been plain for decades now. It kills. Look at Malawi’s recent experience. The country’s soil has been depleted and corroded by desperate overuse, so the government adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertilizer. The country’s desperately poor farmers were given sacks of fertilizer at a third of the real cost, because without it they couldn’t get their plants couldn’t grow. Then the market fundamentalists of the World Bank arrived, and announced this was a “market distortion” that had to stop if Malawi wanted to continue receiving loans and aid. So the subsidies were ended – and the crops began to fail in feeble soil, en masse, year after year. The country descended into famine. Mothers watched their children starve.

Then, two years ago, the Malawian government finally had enough. They told the World Bank and IMF and WTO to stick their conditions and their loans, and began to subsidize fertilizer once again. The result? Malawi is now the single biggest seller of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa, and so successful it is actually giving hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe. The nightmare of famine has been replaced by an embarrassment of plenty, showing once again that mixed social democratic economies work best.

We all know (rightly) about the famines caused by Communism – Stalin’s starvation of Ukraine, Mao’s thirty million murdered by collectivisation, and Mengitsu’s Ethiopian sequel to them both. But who knows about these, the famines of market fundamentalism?

And yet this month, the WTO has forced the EU to ram this failed ideology further into Africa. For hardline free traders, there is no difference between the poor world protecting its feeble industries and the rich world protecting its fattened lobbies. They demand there has to be parity between the two – as if they are competing as equals. So they have ruled that if the African countries are to be allowed to retain their protected access to European markets, they have to give something equally precious in return: they have to “liberalise” their economies by a whopping 80 percent, allowing EU goods in untariffed and untaxed. Only the very poorest are exempt.

This leaves African countries with a vicious dilemma. If (say) Kenya wants to save its green beans and flower-growing industries – whose protected export to Europe employs millions – it has to now allow European industrial goods to flood into their country in return. This will crush any attempt to develop an industrial base of its own, because there is no way fledgling Kenyan companies can compete with the swish products churned out cheap by Europe. This isn’t even a Hobson’s choice, it’s Sophie’s choice – which of your children do you condemn to economic death? The farmers, or the industrial workers?

As if that was not harsh enough, the victim-countries are also being forced to rapidly abolish their tariffs on incoming European goods. For Ghana and Cape Verde, this is 20 percent of their income – more than their entire health budget.

A few African countries are independent enough of Europe to resist. Nigeria has oil, so they can say no. South Africa has enough trade with other developed parts of the world to hold out. But most African countries have been forced – with the gun of being locked out of European markets after the January 1st deadline at their heads – to give in and sign. Tetteh Hormeku, one of Africa’s most distinguished trade campaigners, says: “The EU is a bandit in international negotiations. It is no different to the Americans. The Americans say, ‘Give me your beer, or I’ll shoot you.’ The Europeans say, ‘Give me your beer, it is for your own good.’”

The result will be more poverty and more hunger – and you will end up guiltily sending some cash to the victims in Christmases to come. But it makes no sense to give to charity this way and yet not campaign against the acts of economic mutilation by our own governments that make that charity necessary.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t give to charity – you absolutely should – but it’s not enough. We need a global movement, building on Make Poverty History, to replace this WTO-led market fundamentalism of free trade. The alternative is fair trade: an end to subsidies and tariff walls protecting the rich, but a careful extension of them to the poor, where their governments ask for it. Now that would make for a very merry Christmas present – instead of the stinking package Europe has left under Africa’s bare and battered tree.

You can read my other articles about global market fundamentalism here.

Welcome to Cluster's last stand – the final fight of a weapon that has shredded a hundred thousand legs and arms and eyes since it was lovingly created by the Nazis in the 1940s.

This week, the Austrian government has banned cluster bombs and begun to dismantle its stockpile of 10,000. Official delegates from 138 countries, representing two-thirds of humanity, are now on their way back from the turning-point conference in Vienna to prepare for a treaty in 2008 that will ban them outright. But a handful of superpowers – most notably Russia, the US and China – are clinging to their right to shred civilians, and the British government is dancing awkwardly between the two camps.

Cluster munitions are bombs that, as they fall, separate into dozens of smaller, bright yellow "bomblets", each about the size of a can of Coke. Every one carries flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They fall as "steel rain" over an entire kilometre, and they cut up anything they hit.

These weapons are wildly indiscriminate. You can't aim them, any more than you can aim your handbag when you empty it out on to the floor. When the British dropped 2,000 cluster bombs on Basra in 2003, they landed on the roofs of schools and civilian homes as much as on Saddam's men. Worse still, many of the submunitions do not explode when they hit the ground; instead they stay there for year after year, waiting for someone – anyone – to stumble across them.

Children are particularly fond of picking them up, since they look like brightly-coloured toys. That's what happened recently to four-year-old Aya Zayoun. She found one of the 4 million bomblets dropped on Lebanon by the Israelis in the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, and she thought it was a toy bell.

Aya excitedly toddled into her living room to show it to her parents and big sister and brother – where it blew up, the steel ripping through all their flesh. They were lucky: they lost only limbs, not their lives. Some 255 Leban-ese civilians have not been so fortunate. Last month, there was a hailstorm for the first time since the war, and the hills of Lebanon echoed to the sound of hundreds of submunitions exploding.

They can wait patiently for decades. A few weeks ago, 17-year-old Choen Ha and two of his friends in Vietnam stumbled across four steel balls in the jungle. They took turns tossing them to each other, and then began to play marbles with them. Finally, one of them detonated. Choen was only saved by his family spending their entire life savings on his treatment; his best friend was shredded in front of him. The UN estimates that at the current clear-up rate, explosions like this will continue in Vietnam every week for another century. These bombs were dropped before I was born. They will still be killing after I am dead.

War is sometimes justified, to save life – but not if it needlessly slaughters as it goes, and leaves a legacy of death for generations. So how soon can we get a ban on these lingering people-shredders? Pessimists should remember that when a ban on landmines was first mooted in the 1980s, it was mocked as a utopian fantasy. Today, only the leper state of Burma is laying them anew.

There are two potential tracks to end cluster-bombs. One is the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CWW), which almost every country is signed up to. The pro-cluster bomb states are adopting a "go slow, aim low" approach to these talks, obstructing any progress. Frustrated with this failure, last year Norway broke away and set up a rival Oslo Process, as they did with landmines. It now looks like they will get most of the world, but not the very worst offenders, to sign up to a ban next year.

The British government is the most high-profile cluster-bombing state to take part in the Oslo Process. At first, it looked like they wouldn't show – but at the last minute they did. Gordon Brown pledged to ban "cluster bombs that cause unacceptable civilian casualties". It looks like a heartening pledge, but it contains a whopping loophole – what is "unacceptable harm"?

Simon Conway, the former soldier who is now director of Landmine Action, says it seems like the British strategy "was made up on the back of a fag packet".

The British have started bargaining for a definition of cluster bombs that would simply exclude all the cluster bombs they happen to have left on the shelf. The army has a lot of cluster bombs with a self-destruct mechanism, where the bomblet supposedly disables itself after 15 seconds if it doesn't explode on impact. So the government proposed that cluster bombs with a "fail rate" of less than one per cent should be permitted. This definition has also been picked up by the Democrats in the US Congress, who are passing legislation with the same clause.

That still means a typical cluster-rocket strike would leave 40 landmine-style duds on the ground – and even that hasn't ever been achieved in practice. The cluster-bombs dropped on Leban-on were marketed by the Israelis as having a less than one per cent fail rate. The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and British Explosive Ordinance conducted a detailed study, and found that it actually topped 10 per cent.

The British have also tried a different get-out clause. They argued that if a cluster bomb releases fewer than 10 submunitions, then it shouldn't be called a cluster bomb. It turns out that each CRV7 rocket stockpiled by the British army has – surprise! – nine submunitions. But this redefinition would be pure sophistry. It is fired from a rocket pod that can shoot 19 rockets at a time – meaning it can dump 171 pieces of submunitions on an area. And you can fit four rocket pods into a helicopter at once – so in practice, using these bombs, you could still be indiscriminately dumping 684 submunitions on an area at once.

If we set the bar this low, the ban will be worthless. Privately, the British government excuses its behaviour by arguing that it is necessary to set a lower standard so they can coax the US and Russia to sign up.

We would never have banned any unacceptable weapons with this strategy. When a treaty was created to ban dum-dum bullets in 1899, only nine countries signed up – but gradually, other countries were pressured to join. Similarly, the US has never signed up to the landmine ban – but since it was agreed firmly by the rest of the world in 1997, they have been shamed into not using them. If we hadn't shown that commitment, if we had filled it with loopholes and sub-clauses, the US would have seen it as a green light to carry on laying landmines regardless.

Next year we need a cast-iron ban. But if the British government carries on with its wriggling and writhing, we may end up with nothing better than a cluster-bomb con.