As Ukraine uses cluster munitions, a 50-year-old lesson it must remember | Russia-Ukraine war

On a very clear day, 12 years after the United States war was over, the Khmer Rouge had been deposed and the “killing fields” murders had ended, I flew in a small plane over eastern Cambodia.

One, two, three… 10, 11, 12… I kept counting. I lost count of the number of water-filled B-52 bomb craters I could see.

Fifty years ago, on August 15, after pressure from the US Congress, then-President Richard Nixon agreed to end all bombing of Cambodia. The bombardment of neighbouring Laos had ended a few months earlier.

In October 2006, a macabre competition developed. Scholars at Yale University reviewing wartime US Air Force archives revealed that Cambodia had been attacked even more extensively than originally thought. From bases in Thailand and Guam, B-52 Stratofortress’s as well as smaller aircraft flew more than 230,000 sorties dropping 2,756,941 tonnes of deadly explosives on…