Vinoth Ramachandra

President Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine is dismaying. While they are not banned internationally, more than 120 countries, including most NATO members, have signed on to a convention prohibiting their use. The US, Ukraine and Russia are not party to that agreement.

The indiscriminate nature of these weapons makes them immoral. Each cluster bomb can contain hundreds of smaller explosives that spread across a targeted area, but not all of these bomblets detonate on impact. The unexploded bombs can remain embedded in the ground for years, posing a serious danger to non-combatants, most notably children.

Can artefacts/technologies be called “immoral”? Whenever the question of technology and ethics is raised, the typical answer relates to how we use it. Technology itself is considered politically and morally neutral. You know the refrain “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” that is bandied about. This is short-sighted. A hammer may indeed be used to either build a bookcase or bash someone’s head in. But, as the social critic Neil Postman famously observed, “To the man with a hammer, everything is a nail.”

How might carrying a gun in my pocket with me all the time shape the way I perceive the world? What feelings does a gun in hand induce in me? How does it affect relationships with strangers? The world is no longer a hospitable habitation, but a space that is fraught with constant threats. Hence the frequent killing of innocent suspects by armed police in the USA and, more recently, in Paris. Paranoia now reigns.

As self-centred human beings, it is easier to delight in the technical aspects of our craft than to face up to tough, challenging issues which may call for a spiritual maturity which as scientists and engineers we may lack. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project (the secret US project during the latter part of World War II to develop an atomic bomb), testifying before a commission of enquiry in 1954, admitted: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

Similarly, another physicist, Freeman Dyson comments: “Nuclear explosives have a glitter more seductive than gold to those who play with them. To command nature to release in a pint pot the energy that fuels the stars, to lift by pure thought a million tons of rock into the sky, these are exercises of the human will that produce an illusion of illimitable power.”

It is the same hubristic mind-set that lies behind the hi-tech corporate sectors relentless, and unaccountable, ambition to replace human beings with AI and robots. (The grim irony, of course, is that the AI data-sets are all catalogued, annotated and checked by human beings, often poorly paid, on crowdworker platforms).

Back to cluster munitions, less “technically sweet” than AI or nuclear bombs, but embodying the same moral blind-spots. Biden has basically told Putin, “We will follow you in sacrificing innocent lives for the sake of a military victory.”

And Zelensky, by not refusing such weapons, has impaired his own moral credibility which has hitherto won the admiration and sympathy of so many people around the world. Biden’s action has also served to undermine the criticism of nations such as India, South Africa and Brazil, for their cowardly “neutrality” towards the Russian invasion. Cynicism now reigns.

As the US approaches another election year, many of us shake our head in bemused wonder as to why that nation consistently fails to throw up leaders that are both competent and morally upright, despite having many of the finest educational institutions in the world. We are flooded with books and videos on “leadership” emanating from American colleges, corporations and churches. Yet there is not a single American political leader or church leader since the Rev. Martin Luther King- with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter- that the rest of us have the faintest desire to emulate.

Money dictates politics in the US to a degree more brazen than perhaps any other country. One needs to be wealthy, or court the wealthy, to be a president, governor, or senator.

Biden’s Democratic party abandoned long ago its historic base in the labour unions. It may not have become as degenerate as the Republican party today which still flirts with Donald Trump, opposes gun control, stokes irrational fears of immigrants, and is overtly racist (the antithesis of the Republican party of Lincoln’s day).

But when it comes to foreign policy, voting Democrat or Republican makes little difference. The prospect of Trump or Pence as President of the most powerful country in the world is frightening; but Biden too has strengthened the autocratic regimes in Israel, India and a host of other places despite all his rhetoric about human rights. As early as 2019 he was assuring his donors in the Democratic establishment that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected. To that promise he has remained true.