Leading the condemnation was the charity set up to commemorate the late Princess Diana, who lent her name to the campaign against landmines.

"It's appalling that, despite the well-documented problems with cluster weapons, the US and UK are dropping them on Iraq," said Andrew Purkis, chief executive of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

Cluster bombs frequently killed civilians, added Richard Lloyd, director of British group Landmine Action, pointing to a US attack on the central Iraqi town of Hilla which reportedly killed up to 33 civilians on Tuesday.

On Thursday, British commanders in the Gulf denied using artillery-fired cluster weapons against the southern city of Basra, but confirmed they were being used against Iraqi forces.

Cluster munitions, which can either be dropped from aircraft or fired as shells, split up into a series of smaller "bomblets" which spread out over a wide areas and are devastatingly effective against tanks, artillery and troops.

However, often some bomblets do not explode on impact -- the usual failure rate is at least 10 percent, experts say -- and the half-buried explosives remain a serious danger to local people long after the conflict is over.

Campaigners against the weapons say they contravene the Geneva Conventions on conduct during warfare because they cause "unnecessary harm", although the view is disputed.

In a report released just before the current conflict began, the New York-based Human Rights Watch group said that cluster munitions dropped in the 1991 Gulf War were to blame for the deaths or injuries of more than 4,000 civilians after fighting ended.

However military experts say that cluster munitions are such an integral part of modern warfare that US and British forces have no intention of giving them up, although they are trying to make them more reliable.

"From the military standpoint they are extremely effective, because they can cover a very big area," said Rupert Pengelley, technical editor of the Jane's Information Group in London.

With one shell able to destroy tanks or artillery within a 250-metre (830-foot) diameter, they proved devastating during 1991 Gulf War, he said.

"The Iraqi troops then called them 'steel rain'," Pengelley said.

But serious problems remained.

"They can be intensely costly, both to your own troops and to your image," he said.

"It is a very tactical weapons because you cannot yourself then go through areas you have plastered" with the bomblets, he added.

The danger was shown at the weekend when two US Marines were killed after stepping on unexploded cluster bomb munitions in southern Iraq.

With this in mind, arms companies are developing supposedly safer forms of the bombs.

On Wednesday, the US military's Central Command in the Gulf said it had used for the first time a new kind of cluster bomb, the CBU-105 Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser, which releases 40 mini-charges designed to pierce armour plate on impact.

According to US-based manufacturer Textron Systems, each bomblet self-destructs if it fails to hit a target, or else becomes deactivated if this function fails.

However Pengelley said that in the main, US forces were using older cluster weapons without such systems.

Giving up the weapons altogether was not an option, he added.

"They would have to take all of them out of service and fall back on what would effectively be World War II era shells, tonnes of which would have to be shipped in. The logistics would be terrible."

For now, he said, the "ghastly trade-off" of military success versus civilian and military deaths remained stacked in favour of cluster bombs.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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