The CCM, however, is a tough document in its demands and obligations. It bans outright the use, manufacture, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions. Additionally, party states are required to destroy their stockpiles within eight years, clear contaminated areas within ten, and provide assistance to victims and affected communities within their borders.

There are several good reasons to ban cluster munitions, but the CCM takes the interesting position of prioritizing humanitarian concerns above military goals. That might seem obvious to most people, but it's a counterintuitive approach in the field of international relations, where states are assumed to act purely in self-interest. Demanding that governments give up a weapon system not because it's in their immediate interest but because too many innocent people are harmed by its use is, to say the least, not standard practice. The United Nations' CCW amendment, meanwhile, sticks to a traditional framework in which military needs ultimately outweigh humanitarian concerns. The CCM assumes that there is no legitimate use for cluster munitions; the CCW assumes there is, but sets limits on what type of cluster munitions can be used.

The United States has repeatedly said that it will not sign the CCM, claiming that its "national security interests cannot be fully ensured consistent with the terms of the CCM." In a leaked cable from 2008, the U.S. outlined its views on the CCM more fully, arguing that cluster munitions provide a "vital military capability" -- that being the ability to attack troop or tank formations that are too widely spread out for a single bomb, as the U.S. did in Iraq in 2003. The cable continued, "No other weapon offers an equivalent combination of range, destructive power, and responsiveness as cluster munitions. Moreover, there are no easy substitutes for these area-effect weapons, and alternatives (e.g., carpet bombing, massed artillery barrages) have very pronounced and potentially more adverse humanitarian consequences." Instead, the U.S. has pushed hard for a CCW amendment that aligns with current U.S. policy and that would require states that want to use cluster munitions to upgrade to more reliable versions. That mostly means requiring they include submunitions that explode at least 99 percent of the time, leaving fewer behind to explode later. This sounds good in theory, but is somewhat misleading; the failure-to-explode rate is generally determined through controlled tests. Actually using them in non-lab environments, such as deserts or mountains, can result in a higher rate of unexploded ordinance.

Advocacy groups have done little to shift the geopolitics -- at least on the surface. The Cluster Munition Coalition, a non-profit that supports banning the weapons, has been emphasizing the incredible damage cluster munitions do, often to civilians, and the number of states that have signed on to stop them. Needless to say, peer pressure and pictures of limbless children have not convinced the biggest stockpilers and the most frequent users of cluster munitions -- the United States, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan among them -- to agree to a blanket ban. Nevertheless, the moral weight that the CCM carries, combined with increasing public awareness of the civilians injured and killed by unexploded submunitions, has made the use of cluster munitions less palatable. International condemnation of their use in recent years, such as Qaddafi's use in Libya, has been swift.