[Chewbacca]

Perhaps you have touched on the very morality of modern warfare itself in your question. Isn't the wonton killing of infantry with stupid devices like cluster bombs just as irrehensible as dropping nuke on them. Aren't both equally bad? Sure you kill more at once with a nuke, and those that dont die right away will suffer from radiation and burns. But I'd rather die by being vaporized instantaneously than by 100's of tiny hot shards of metal penetrating all over my body simultaneously. Bombing just sucks.

And some conventional bombs have lasting effest as well. The country of Laos estimates around 18,000 people have died and many more injured and maimed from the end of the Vietnam war to 2000 because of cluster bombs dropped by the United States during its "Secret" war there. Many of the causualties are children, who are naturally curious about the baseball sized "Bombies" that litter 80% of the country. These Bombies are like small grenades, and a full cluster bomb releases several hundred of them. The estimated number of Bombies still littering Laos is in the 10's of millions. Public television aired a 2hr special on the long going crisis in Laos. One of the saddest facts they revealed is that the U.S. goverment has never publicly taken responsibilty or offered reparations to Loas, even now almost 30 years after the end of the war.