By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Washington Post
Textron, the last U.S. company to build cluster bombs, announced in a securities filing Tuesday that one of its subsidiaries would no longer produce the controversial and internationally derided munition, citing dwindling demand.
The Rhode Island-based company’s decision comes after the Obama administration halted a shipment of approximately 400 of their cluster weapons — called CBU-105s — to Saudi Arabia in May, following reports that the Saudis were using the weapons indiscriminately during their air campaign over Yemen.
Cluster munitions is a blanket term for a variety of weapons that distribute submunitions or bomblets over an area, often to destroy concentrations of troops and equipment or damage infrastructure such as roads and airfields. The United States first started widely using them during the Korean War and has used them in every major conflict since. The reason that many countries have banned their use is that…
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