I don’t disagree. I think the US should have signed Ottawa as well.
The funny thing is the US position on both cluster munitions and anti-personnel mines has been that US munitions are ‘safer’ because they are designed to self-destruct after a specified period of time elapses. This was the position of the US with regards to AP land mines during Ottawa and why the US wouldn’t sign it, and I pointed out the large number of duds from DPICM used in Desert Storm in 1991 and US GOA studies on them as the problem with that position. If a munition duds, it isn’t going to self-destruct like it is supposed to, and just because it was a dud does not mean that it is remotely safe. Add to that the problem inherent in the very name of the artillery system used to deploy mines, FASCAM, Family of Scatterable Mines. One couldn’t claim to be abiding by existing laws and customs on the use of land mines pre-Ottawa which required the location and positions of landmines to be recorded to aid in their future removal if they were delivered by scattering them, built in self-destruct timer or not.