Ukraine and the Orwellian language of war: "Bomblets" and "dud rates".

When the great actor Alan Arkin died last week we decided to watch some of his great past work.

Our first watch was the anti-war classic, Catch 22, based on a novel by Joseph Heller.

Like the movie and TV series, MASH, Catch 22 exposes the absurdities of war.

But Catch 22 is so much more bitter a movie and Arkin as Yossarian, the bomber in an aircraft whose required number of dangerous bombing runs keeps being raised by self-serving officers, is both comic and tragic.

Heller’s novel and Arkin’s film both reveal the cynicism of the language of war.

As the story of President Biden’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine broke, I thought of how the language of war is used to conceal the horrors of it.

Cluster bombs kill indiscriminately. Civilians are killed by them.

Children are killed by them.

The cluster bomb does not care who it kills.

A cluster bomb, when dropped, breaks up into smaller bombs and disperses over large areas.

They call these submunitions “bomblets” as if they are not real bombs.

They are worse.

As many as 40% of cluster bombs do not explode right away. They lay on the ground waiting for someone - a child perhaps - to find it and have it explode upon touching or stepping on it.

The number of unexploded cluster bombs is called the “dud rate” as if it were the number of re-called automobiles.

In Laos and Vietnam, some of the tens of millions of unexploded U.S. cluster munitions deployed more than 50 years ago continue to maim and kill civilians.

Both the Ukraine military and the Russians have already been using them in this proxy war.

Earlier in the war President Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal when the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on whether Russian forces have been using cluster bombs in populated areas in Ukraine.

Over 110 nations have signed an agreement not to use the weapon. But Ukraine, Russia and the United States are not signatories to the international treaty banning cluster bombs.

“It’s willing to criticize other peoples’ use but insists on the right to use them itself,” Stephen Goose director of Human Rights Watch’s Arms Division said of the U.S.

The Ukraine army is running out of cluster bombs.

President Biden has agreed to send them more from our stockpile of them.