Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [27]
Much as I enjoy being the center of attention (I am, after all, a male), given the choice, I’d be willing to settle for a lot less attention were it given to me in the form of cash or foodstuffs, rather than bombs. No, thank you, I’d say politely, I don’t really want a bomb, nor even a “bomblet,” not even one as cool as a BLU-26 Sadeye, although I might be able to use a few of the hundreds of razor-sharp projectiles to cut some things around the house. Instead, a cow would be nice. And some chickens. And some native trees. You could buy all of that for me in one day. And then tomorrow we could talk about a bicycle, and then the day after that we could start thinking about a new well. Truth be told I wouldn’t even know what to do with eighteen hundred dollars every day, or its equivalent in the Afghan community. I’d probably give most of it away. But I still think I’d rather have a cow and some chickens than a bomb.
On further reflection, do you know what I’d like even more? To simply be left alone.
The United States has historically spent about $70 million per year on humanitarian aid for Afghanistan (about four dollars per person per year, the equivalent of about a hundred and eighty dollars if it were given in the United States),51 which is about how much the United States spent per Afghan on the bombing campaign every hour and forty minutes.
If United States citizens have paid four dollars a piece per day to support this war effort, the Afghan people have paid rather more. The bombs—such a nice, short word to describe inventions that have as their purpose destruction—include, fairly typically, the two-thousand pound MK-84, which was developed in the 1950s and has served its masters well in the time since. About twelve thousand were dropped on Iraq during the First Gulf War.52 If the bomb detonates on contact with the ground, it creates a crater fifty feet in diameter, and thirty-six feet deep (Sorry, guys, this is not precisely what I had in mind when I asked for a new well). If it explodes above ground, it disperses shrapnel to a lethal radius of four hundred yards.53
A more commonly used incendiary device—incendiary device being even more abstract language than bomb—are cluster bombs. Instead of causing a single explosion, cluster bombs (or CBUs: Cluster Bomb Units, if we don’t mind getting yet more abstract) contain dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of bomblets called BLUs (bomb live units). Each BLU then splits into hundreds of pieces of shrapnel. For example, the bomb called the CBU-75 may contain eighteen hundred BLU-26 Sadeyes. Each Sadeye contains six hundred sharp steel shards. A single CBU-75 will shoot these shards across an area of around 9.25 million square feet, which is about 212 acres, or more than 150 football fields, or nearly a third of a square mile. A single B-52 strategic bomber can carry forty of these cluster bombs, which could then blanket almost fourteen square miles at an average density of one shard every ten square feet. In just one day in the First Gulf War, twenty-eight B-52s dropped about four hundred and seventy tons of explosives on Iraq, enough to devastate approximately sixteen hundred square miles, an area about one-third the size of Connecticut.54
The United States military uses another type of bomb, this one “a terrific weapon” with “tremendous destructive power,” according to U.S. General Wesley Clark.55 It is the BLU-82, also known as the “Daisy Cutter.” This fifteen-thousand-pound bomb, filled with an aqueous mixture of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene soap, is so large it can only be launched by rolling it out the rear door of a cargo aircraft, the MC-130 Hercules. The slowness of the cargo plane means Daisy