Bomblets Away

A Chilean-Iraqi connection

The Boeing 747 cargo plane swept in out of the night sky over the Andes. In accordance with a procedure established in earlier visits, it was guided to the far side of an international airport near Santiago, where passengers boarding commercial flights would not be able to see it.

Trucks pulled up, and for the next six hours workers loaded the aircraft's secret cargo. Then, at first light, the plane departed as discreetly as it had come. Thus did Iraq secure the fifth of 18 deliveries of Chilean-manufactured cluster bombs for potential use against Iran.

Radical Iraq's long reach to a conservative military regime in the Southern Hemisphere illustrates how far nations will go, literally, to buy arms. An equally fascinating aspect is that Chile, despite the fact that it has to import most of its own weapons, has now become an exporter of war materiel.

The development of a Chilean weapons industry is an indirect result of the arms embargo that the U.S. imposed on the South American nation in 1976. That was the same year that Chilean secret-police agents in Washington, D.C., murdered Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean Defense Minister whom the government of Dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte disliked for his criticism of its human rights violations. When Chile almost went to war with Argentina in 1978 over ownership of three islands in the Beagle Channel, near the continent's southern tip, the Chilean government urged private industry to become involved in defense contracting. One firm that responded was Explosives Industrials Cardoen, a small company that was then producing explosives for use in mining. After developing an armored personnel carrier based on the 24.5-ton Swiss-made Mowag, Cardoen started building a 500-lb. cluster bomb. Before reaching the ground, it releases up to 300 bomblets that can cover an area the size of ten football fields.

Cardoen, which exports around $70 million worth of arms a year, won out as Iraq's cluster-bomb supplier against stiff competition from U.S., British and French companies.

Iraqi military experts explain that they want the cluster bombs to defend themselves against the kind of human-wave assaults that Iran has tried in the past. They could also do considerable damage to the pipelines and loading equipment at Kharg Island and other Iranian oil terminals. The Chilean cluster bombs represent only a fraction of Iraq's huge arsenal, which consists mostly of weapons bought from the Soviet Union and France. But for Chile's budding arms industry the deal offers visibility, and perhaps field testing, in one of the bloodiest wars now under way.