Some 100 countries will ban the use of such weapons when their delegates sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions on Wednesday in Oslo but major producers like the United States, China and Russia are shunning the pact.

"Although we share the humanitarian concerns of states signing the CCM, we will not be joining them," the State Department said in a statement when asked for its views on the Oslo gathering.

"The CCM constitutes a ban on most types of cluster munitions; such a general ban on cluster munitions will put the lives of our military men and women, and those of our coalition partners, at risk," it added.

The treaty, agreed upon in Dublin in May, outlaws the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions that primarily kill civilians.

Dropped from planes or fired from artillery, cluster bombs explode in mid-air to randomly scatter hundreds of bomblets, which can be three inches (eight centimeters) in size.

Many cluster bomblets can fail to explode, often leaving poverty-stricken areas trying to recover from war littered with countless de-facto landmines.

The State Department said the US government has already tried to tackle the problem caused by cluster bombs.

It said Defense Secretary Robert Gates in June signed the Policy on Cluster Munitions and Unintended Harm to Civilians and the government has contributed more than "1.4 billion dollars since 1993 to clean up landmines and all other explosive remnants of war, including unexploded cluster munitions."

Activists hope that the election of Barack Obama as president may however bring about a change in the US position.

In 2006, Obama voted in the US Senate to ban the use of cluster munitions in heavily populated areas, but in the end the motion was rejected.

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