"Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon," writes Robert Fulghum in my favorite of his musings. "And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air--explode softly--and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air," depositing boxes of crayons "with the sharpener built right in.... And people would smile and get a funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination."

Earlier this week, writer and social justice activist Leonard Fein spoke at Harvard Hillel. He described the combined-effects munitions, more commonly known as cluster bombs, and their hundreds of brightly-colored bomblets that spread out over a target, and I was reminded of Fulghum's words. Yet with a cluster bomb, the child's idyll world is horribly transformed.

It all starts well enough: "The bomb carrier starts to descend and it comes apart and small little bomblets come out and when they hit the ground they will destruct," an Air Force spokesperson at the Pentagon told me.

"The area where you are dropping [cluster bombs] is usually a combat area," he explained to me. Since there are many types of weapons to choose from, "the Air Force or any [Department of Defense] operation takes a very serious look at a particular weapon or any sort of munition to be used; it is not a random decision and it is made looking for a particular effect."

In the case of the cluster bomb, it is their ability to pierce armored vehicles, blow up personnel and otherwise alter the battle plans of an enemy brigade on the move that has made them a vital part of American campaigns in Iraq and more recently in Kosovo.

The weapon is of course not perfect: "It's not a precision munition," the Air Force spokesperson added. "There are 5 percent [of the bomblets] that will not explode on impact They just sit there. You don't want to pick it up or go play there because you don't know what caused them not to go off."

But this can also be part of how they are intended to work. "If they are run over or inappropriately handled, they are certainly dangerous," the Air Force spokesperson said, noting that in a combat zone this adds to their overall effectiveness.

However, when a country tries to regain peace, the unexploded bomblets, or "duds," retard the process. They stay and do not know tank from child, peace from violence. These bitter presents of war, perhaps hiding under a tree branch, brightly colored and coded, are dangerously inviting.