Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams waged a successful war against landmines. Now she has turned her sights on deadly cluster bombs. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams waged a successful war against landmines. Now she has turned her sights on deadly cluster bombs. Photo / Brett Phibbs

The longer Jody Williams talks, the harder she thumps the table. Not at me or her audience, but to make her point. She takes after her grandfather on her mother's side. "He didn't give a **** about what anybody thought [of him] And I don't either," she says. "I don't view my life as a popularity contest. I figured that out when I was 13." (She knew she was not cut out for babies by then too.)

As she says, "It's hard to have clarity if you don't know who you are" and Williams, now 57, knows exactly who she is. She is the straight-talking woman whose campaign to ban landmines was so successful they awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 - the 10th woman to receive the honour.

And what did she do then? She mounted a new campaign to ban cluster bombs.

Aren't landmines and cluster bombs the same thing? Haven't we been here before?

No, says Williams, while cluster bombs may have the same effects - kill people, rip off arms, legs and bits of body - they are different. Landmines are laid like booby traps.

Cluster bombs come out of planes as regular big bombs, which then open, disgorging millions of minibombs or "sub-munitions".

"In theory the air pressure is meant to explode them," she explains. "In practice there's a 25 per cent failure rate. So out of the 4 million dropped on South Lebanon by Israel over three days, there were a million duds that didn't go off."

So there they lie, filled with shrapnel and worse, waiting to kill. They have bright plastic casings and shapes that children (especially dirt-poor kids) must itch to pick up. "Round ones like tennis balls with wings, others no bigger than matchboxes with nifty little straps that get caught in trees - or like this one," says Williams holding up her trademark drink bottle. It is bright orange, with a strap holding the stopper on: and "an exact replica of a Blu97 cluster bomb".

The most cluster bomb-contaminated areas are Southern Lebanon - where Israel's million undetonated bombs are waiting, and Iraq "where the US dropped a minimum of two million on Baghdad" and there are those Britain dropped in Basra.

Just finding and detonating landmines and bombs is not enough. The work is difficult and dangerous "mostly on your hands and knees digging in the ground". The only answer is to stop them before they are dropped.

Which is why Williams is here. Her real work is in Wellington and the Conference on Cluster Munitions. While she has flown to the Auckland War Memorial Museum to address a sell-out Oxfam breakfast, her colleagues from all over the world, including her husband, Steve Goose, are in Wellington ironing out the finer points around what constitutes a cluster bomb, "struggling with diplomats who want to weaken the treaty". Goose is probably with Phil Goff whom Williams rates highly: "an incredibly quick study and a very, very, good speaker. If you can't speak well and get people inspired you'll find it difficult to wind up your troops."