BLU-26/B, BLU-62/B.

Bom bi quả ổi BLU-26/B (Guava Bombs BLU-26/B)

Bom chùm (Cluster Bombs) 

Developed by the US for the war in Vietnam, BLU-26B are known locally as Guava Bombs. Filled with tiny ball bearings, these bomblets were designed for low specificity with maximum bodily injury.

The BLU-63B was developed in 1966 to reduce the cost of BLU-26B. The ball bearings were replaced with a scored internal layer that would itself would become the shrapnel on detonation. 

Following the end of the War in Vietnam, these cluster bombs were diverted for the South of Lebanon wars in 1978, 1982, 2006 and reportedly today. 

Although US production of these bombs was stopped in 2008, more than 51 countries hold stockpiles and continue to use cluster bombs in places including Kosovo, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza.

It is estimated that 40-70% of cluster bombs fail to detonate, remaining as unexploded ordinances, and becoming embedded in the landscape. Even after 50 years after war, unexploded bombs in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos remain a significant road block to economic recovery and food production. 

NB: this work in process seeks to regularly paint and record the guava fruit to learn about its naural form. the artist is currently experimenting with making glass guava bombs filled with tektite cores from Australia and he IndoPacific. As countries with the most bomb cratters; Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, are also the geologic site for the last major meteor impact event on earth which happened 760,000 years ago. The meteor had dispersed and rained down melted glass throughout the Pacific (called the Austronesian Strewnfield) from Vietnam all the way to the south of Australia. Scorching a third of the earths surface, the impact site has never been actually found. What has been found instead, is that in the aftermath of meteor fires, early neolithic human stone tools have been excavated along the border of Northern Vietnam and China. This implies that these early human ancestors had survived, and perhaps even thrived after the catastrophic meteor impact. These deep histories of bombs and meteors point to both the injury and forms of deep persistence embedded in the geology and landscape of the Indo-Pacific.