US to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs for first time

[Xolodno]

14. Battlefields can also be farms and bombed out cities.

And it costs a fortune to clear them out, the area will be a no mans land for years if not a decade. And there is still no guarantee you will get them all, so a farmer or some kids playing could still stumble on them. With mines, they mark the GPS coordinates for the areas you placed them, so you don't go blowing your self up should the tide of battle change. With cluster munitions, you can't do that, well at least not very well.

But wait, there's more! Areas you hit can kill your own soldiers as they don't know where these things landed either. Nail some Russian troops in a forest, bombed out town, etc. go in to take it when they retreat and boom. I believe its one of the reasons they stopped using them in Iraq and Afghanistan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/magazine/cluster-munitions-history.html

For service members outside the bomb-disposal community, finding information on how to identify unexploded submunitions and details about the particular risks they pose has become a tedious scavenger hunt, if they even know to look for that information in the first place.

As for Crick, he returned to the United States after the war. The BLU-97s’ detonation in a ring of soldiers was among the most lethal battlefield incidents for Americans in the Persian Gulf war, and he dwelled on it upon arriving home. Former members of his unit recall that Crick had a history of heavy drinking, and by 1992 his marriage had unraveled, he was facing reprimand from his command for threatening his wife and he was probably going to be denied re-enlistment. In March 1992, dressed in a pressed uniform and polished boots, he shot himself in the basement of his Michigan home. He was 29, silenced by his own hand. His log book from As Salman, the first wartime record of the BLU-97’s lethal flaws, lives on.