This may not be the right place to ask the question, but I'm confused about the UN claim that there are 650,000 Isreali bomlets from cluster bombs littering Lebanon thought you might be able to help. See this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/world/middleeast/06cluster.html
How is that possible?
Do the math. It's claimed else where that most of the bomblets were delivered by Israeli using 155 howitzer shells and most of those in the last three days of the war.
I read that there are 63 bomblets in the larger of the two 155 shells Israel uses. Even there was a 100% failure rate on the shells, it would take over 10,000 delivered over three days to produce 650,000 bomblets. At the worst failure rate anyone predicts, 14% (versus 3-5% expected - or pick a number the results are similar), they'd have to have delivered over 73,000 shells.
Even if someone claimed that instead of artillery shells, Israel shifted to rockets (say those ones they asked for and hadn't received from the US by the end of the war) it would take over 7,00 rockets (Israel asked for 1,300) to deliver that many failed bomblets, ignoring the fact that rockets have a lower failure rate than artillery.
Over the last three days of the war.
So why does this bother me? One historian I read said that the Red Army only delivered 5,000 artillery shells a day toward the end of WWII, and that was all artillery, including mortars and multiple launch rockets.
How did Israel even come close that amount of shelling in this small a war? Why isn't all of south Lebanon totally destroyed if they did? |