President Joe Biden’s decision to send cluster bombs to waste more lives in Ukraine is despicable and morally indefensible.

His military advisers would be hard-pressed to find an example of how deployment of U.S. cluster munitions has had a positive impact on the conduct of any war. Certainly not in Laos, which the United States chose to make the most heavily bombed country in history.

For nine years beginning in 1964, America dispatched more than half a million bombing runs over Laos in a civil war that also seemed, to Americans, to be a defining contest between democracy and autocracy. It wasn’t.

In an utterly inhumane and ultimately futile attempt to defend democracy, Americans showered 2 million tons of bombs on the Lao people. America’s largesse included more than 270 million “bombies” — baseball-sized bombs that turn meadows into minefields.

A cluster munition is designed to release hundreds or thousands of explosive submunitions over a land area the size of several football fields, sowing indiscriminate death and injury for whomever comes upon them.

It’s estimated that nearly a third of the bombies dropped on Laos — about 80 million — failed to detonate and remain in the ground to this day.

Landlocked Laos is larger than Florida but smaller than California. The nonprofit Legacies of War estimates that 30% of the country is contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO). Since the cessation of U.S. bombing in 1973, only 1% of the mined territory has been cleared.

Of the more than 50,000 Lao people killed and maimed by U.S. bombs, 98% were civilians. In the post-war period, more than 20,000 Lao have been killed or maimed, many of them children who mistook a half-buried bombie for a ball.

President Barack Obama visited Laos when I worked there in 2016, telling UXO victims and UXO workers that the United States has “a moral obligation to help Laos heal.” Obama announced the United States would double its $15 million a year support for UXO clearance in Laos, for three years. According to Legacies of War, at the height of the bombing campaign, the United States was spending $17 million a day dropping bombs on Laos.

Biden has now shamefully abandoned our country’s moral obligation to end cluster bombing forever. More than 120 other nations — including Germany and other NATO members — have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits their use.

Instead, Biden has thrown in his lot with military contingency and expediency, as did presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who eagerly bombed Laos to keep it free.

Biden began his career in the Senate in 1973, the year the bombing of Laos ended. In half a century of service in politics, has he learned nothing about shielding future generations from mistakes of the past? Democrats must replace him with a president who is both younger and wiser.

Kailua resident Stu Glauberman is a former journalist and the author of “Hustle the East, A Novel of Laos.”