The confrontation is immediate—ia hundred cluster bombs suspended from the ceiling on fishing wire.
This deadly mobile of “bombies”, as the locals call them, symbolises the lethal legacy of Laos’s Vietnam War experience.
It is the display that greets visitors to the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise (COPE) centre in Vientiane.
Between 1964 and 1973, more than 580,000 US bombing missions made the once-tranquil country the most heavily-bombed nation, per capita, in history.
The rate of bombing was the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine years.And the dormant devices are still claiming fifty lives a year.