A cluster bomb severely injured Salima Barakt after the middle-aged woman picked up a broom and started sweeping the steps of her home in southern Lebanon last year.

Another anti-personnel device fatally wounded her countryman, Ahmad Mokaled, who was playing in a park on his fifth birthday, in 1999.

Also that year, Sulikhan Asukhanova, a young girl who had been selling food at a market, lost her right arm during a cluster munitions strike in Chechnya.

The lopsidedly civilian cluster bomb toll has mounted steadily since the United States began widespread use of the weapons in the mid-1960s.

Lancaster resident Titus Peachey has worked for years to try to stop the carnage.

Now, says Peachey, who returned earlier this month from a cluster bomb conference in Austria, the world might be getting somewhere.

Some 575 people from more than 130 countries came to the table in Vienna, according to Peachey, who represented the Mennonite Central Committee.

The four-year-old Cluster Munition Coalition has scheduled upcoming conferences in Wellington, New Zealand, and Dublin, Ireland, with the goal of adopting a treaty by the end of 2008.

Peachey said the ban aims to put international pressure on nations that do not support it.

The idea gained traction last year after Israeli forces carpeted southern Lebanon with some 3.5 million cluster bombs after the announcement of a cease-fire.

While munitions makers claim that new-generation heat and shape sensing fuzes detonate bombs as designed 99 percent of the time, opponents contend that the dud rate remains much higher in the field.

Key cluster bomb users and stockpilers such as the United States, Russia, China and the United Kingdom oppose an overall ban.

Cluster bombs can blow up decades after they're sown, said Peachey, who became involved in programs to clear unexploded ordnance and assist victims in southeast Asia more than two decades ago.

"I've walked past and around many, many of these things in Laos," he added, recalling villagers who too often handle them nonchalantly.

"They kill long after they're dropped. There are still a lot of them in the ground."

Deadly duds
The opposition movement grew out of an earlier campaign that culminated in a landmine ban in 1997.

Today, said Peachey, the MCC director of peace education, stockpiles of mines are falling. Even nations that did not sign the treaty, such as the United States, have largely refrained from deploying new mines.

But cluster bombs remain a key military strategy. The multi-billion dollar cluster munitions industry is going strong.

Millions of unexploded bomblets still lie scattered across Southeast Asia, Africa, Southeast Europe, Russia and the Middle East.

Some of the projectiles can pierce armor. Opponents say they're deadlier overall than mines.

Cluster bomblets are typically packed by the hundreds into cannisters designed to fly apart in midair. The resulting spinning motion arms the bomblets on the way down and prepares them to detonate on impact.

But much can go wrong, Peachey said.

Fuzes can malfunction. Bomblets hang up in trees or brush and then explode when someone cuts the vegetation.

While some of the duds are nearly impossible to activate, others remain on a hair trigger. Pick them up or nudge them with a spade or a plow and they go off.

According to "Fatal Footprint," a report published last year by Handicap International, 98 percent of known cluster bomb victims are civilians.

The British-based organization estimated that the bombs have killed or injured more than 100,000 people worldwide.

Roughly 200 Laotians die by cluster bomb every year, according to Peachey, who said about 80 million bomblets still litter the country. "In southern Lebanon, they think roughly 30 percent did not blow up."

At MCC headquarters in Akron, Peachey fingered a jagged metal shard about 3 inches long. "This is a piece of shrapnel from a cluster bomb I found in Iraq," he said. "If it was flying at you ... ooooh."

Shrapnel did cut down Branislav Kapetanovic in 2000 as he was trying to disarm a cluster bomb at an airport in Serbia. He addressed the Vienna conference from his wheelchair.

"He has two stumps for arms and he has no legs," Peachey said.

Also attending was Raed Mokaled, the father of the 5-year-old boy who died after he picked up a cluster bomb in Nabatieh, Lebanon.

Peachey said a disproportionate percentage of cluster bomb victims are young boys, who are apt to play with the artifacts they find.

"There were a lot of sad stories," he said.

Long active in public advocacy and education about cluster bombs, MCC recently sponsored a local tour of cluster bomb speakers, including two people each from Laos and Lebanon.

In Vienna, the group joined Human Rights Watch and other civil society organizations in urging the world to stop making, selling, stockpiling and transporting cluster bombs.

Norway and Belgium have banned investments in banks that finance bomb makers.

Belgium was the first country to adopt a comprehensive ban on cluster bombs, in 2006.

If enough countries sign, Peachey said, "then there's a very negative stigma attached to using [cluster bombs]. Manufacturers pay attention to these international meetings."

Brian Grace, a spokesman for Alliant Techsystems Inc., said in an e-mail that his company does not make any weapons covered by the proposed treaty.

Cluster bomb opponents claim that the Minnesota-based company is one of more than a dozen arms merchants that produce, or have produced, key cluster bomb components.

Last week, meanwhile, Congress adopted an omnibus appropriations package that would limit American cluster bomb sales.

Provisions from a bill by Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., would prohibit the export of munitions that do not meet the 1-percent "dud rate" threshold, according to McGovern spokesman Michael Mershon.

Peachey said much of the success of the worldwide anti-cluster bomb effort hinges on how broadly the proposed treaty defines the weapons. An unqualified ban remains a distant goal.

Until then, the cleanup of the explosives continues the old-fashioned way, with metal detectors and probes.

The work is slow and risky, said Peachey, who added that many people in cluster bomb zones must cultivate their land whether it has been cleared or not.

"The world has become more and more horrified" by the spectacle," Peachey said.

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Jon Rutter is a staff writer for the Sunday News. His e-mail address is jrutter@lnpnews.com.