I had several thoughts while reading this article.
> Cambodia is contaminated with millions of unexploded ordnances dropped as cluster bombs by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. In addition, millions of land mines were buried throughout the country during a series of civil wars from the 1970s–1990s.
Millions. I can't process numbers that large. I know what a million is, but I struggle to imagine what a million land mines would look like. What happened to Southeast Asia during the 20th century was so sad and tragic.
> Rats have been so successful that the rodents are now seen as competition for the more traditionally used military dogs for mine clearance.
I didn't know dogs were used to clear mines. I would have thought they would be too heavy to walk on mines, considering that mines can kill children, and military working dogs have a weight comparable to children.
Lastly, I wondered whether it would be both possible, economical, and militarily sensible to create mines that expire after a certain time, due to an engineered deterioration process for the detonator or for the explosive charge. A form of planned obsolescence. Few conflicts last more than a few years. Is a five year old mine really that useful militarily? Fresh mines can be dropped from aircraft now if a sudden need arised. The Korean Demilitarized Zone is the most obvious example I can think of where old mines might still serve a future purpose.
Some modern mines have a programmed self destruct time. An additional safety is an electrical detonator system that is powered by a battery with a limited capacity: once the battery runs out, it can no longer fire the detonator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATOR_mine_system
A mine with a discharged battery is not exactly safe, but without the detonator it requires extreme conditions or decades of aging to explode.
There should be international laws where after wartime, governments are responsible for clearing out any leftover ordinances and must perform ecological cleanup. One would think the U.S. government would be in support of this because it would make wars too cost prohibitive for other nations, and the contracts would be an excellent profitmaking opportunity for the military industrial complex.
That only makes any sense if the government that laid the mines still exists after the conflict and wasn’t entirely insane in the first place.
Read about the Khmer Rouge.
Arms need to come from someplace. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, those landmines were made by the chinese government 1. Sanctions could therefore land on china for not accounting for mines they created. For the case of governments that truly have no responisble parties remaining afterwards, say the land is littered with IEDs, then the UN should have funds set aside to go towards these efforts, just like how they have funds going to other humanitarian efforts. But when its possible its best to charge the offending governments if they are still around than to have the world subsidize them.
How exactly do you enforce such a law? If the victor refuses to follow the law, invade their country, set up a new puppet government, and put them on trial?
With your approach there's always the risk that your sanctions are worse for the population than the consequences of the mines, particularly because economic damage is compounding.
You can sanction the individual oligarchs versus the country wholecloth perhaps. Ban the oligarchs from travel, deny their private jets over allied airspace, deny their boats a right to port, offer a bounty for their boats in international waters. Seize their foreign assets. Ban them from participating in your markets. Make participating in the fun of the global high society annoying to impossible, and force them to be on house arrest in their own country. Do the same for their extended families living abroad and their close friends. Kick their children out of foreign private schools. Jail the kids. Do the same for the oligarchs in any country who doesn't want to align with the UN on this issue.
There's plenty of things that could be done beyond what has been done typically.
They've done all that stuff and more (including seizing their boats) for Russian oligarchs and it hasn't changed anything. In fact, a bunch of those oligarchs have committed suicide as a result, frequently by shooting themselves in the backs of their heads and then jumping out of windwos.
In theory, it’s irrational to give into threats in iterated games, or in one-shot games where your opponent can look at your code. (“We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”) So threatening sanctions shouldn’t work.
But in practice, when everyone knows you have a bazooka, you might not ever have to fire it.
> I didn't know dogs were used to clear mines. I would have thought they would be too heavy to walk on mines, considering that mines can kill children, and military working dogs have a weight comparable to children.
Remember that a dog almost always has two of its paws on the ground. Forgiving for dynamics, if a 50lb child is walking, it could place all 50lbs on a trigger. A 50lb dog should only be able to place 25lbs.
I would think they just use smaller dogs. And maybe some do still blown up, we wouldn’t have any idea.
Even a light dog can put a surprising amount of pressure through its feet if it wants to. Tiny paws mean it's all concentrated in a small area. My 10kg dog feels like he weighs a ton when he puts his front paws on me and leans into it.
I've no idea what it takes to trigger a mine, and I don't know if it would be enough, but a dog can press down harder than you'd expect.
I know what you mean, when they stand on you wrong it's surprisingly heavy. But it's point loaded. A dog doesn't do that while walking around on even-ish ground. The point is it would take unusual scenarios for a dog to get 100% of their weight on one foot, but any toddler does it every step.
I would think this works both ways though. Yes, smaller surface area is bad, but also reduces the chance the dog presses down on a trigger. But then again... they have four feet, but then they a narrower track, but then they probably take more steps. It's complicated I suppose!
If you want to learn more about the mines in Camobida I highly recommend the low-budget documentary Until They're Gone[0], which features a small human-based mine removal effort promoted by Landmine Relief Fund[1]. I read an article in the Economist a couple years about the lingering impacts of mines and ordinance in Cambodia, and it struck me heavily and I looked up more information and came across those. It's horrible that all these ordinances are still maiming people decades after a war that their country was hardly even involved in, but there's also a lot of exciting work and progress being made. A mine-free Cambodia really is possible, and in not that many years!
These treaties are largely useless because certain large powers refuse to sign them. Sure, it's nice if Switzerland or Norway signs such a treaty, but that doesn't exactly change anything.
Antipersonnel mines absolutely should have an expiry date after which they are no longer triggered by the depression of their sensor. Issue is, these things are mass manufactured and probably have some defect rate which increases with time after deployment. So they couldn’t be trusted to be ‘safe’ after expiring anyway. But still would save lives & limbs to have a mechanism like that built in.
Any detonator explosive to set of a main charge must be reliable for dozens of good reasons. Over time an as a required condition. Asking for something decays or approaches an unreliable state after time is a non-starter.
Another user pointed to a basically failed electronic program, but even then, you have to detonate the mines, you can’t just disarm them and make the highly efficient explosives ready for other uses. You wouldn’t ever give your enemy deliveries of repackagable charges.
From a strategic perspective, obsolescent mines make total sense. I wonder why it is not the norm.
Country usually don't wage war just to destroy (Seeing Ukraine, not so sure anymore). But to own and use the land. This allow to keep the territory futureproof. While for the defender it's even more logic.
Long live mines are only useful around long term places: military base, korean border, ...
So in your post to incorrect others on 'thats not how explosives work' you got absolutely everything wrong about how explosives work. Typical HN.
> You wouldn’t ever give your enemy deliveries of repackagable charges.
Where did you get this preposterous idea? Do you imagine a major military will send out it's soldiers to collect labdmines on purpose to dissasemble them and take out tiny amount of explosive? And after loosing dozens of soldiers and huge amount of time to get explosives of dubious age and quality, do what with it?
>Do you imagine a major military will send out it's soldiers to collect labdmines on purpose to dissasemble them and take out tiny amount of explosive?
I literally said the complete opposite of that by saying the mines have to self-destruct. They still need to explode. Try another read of the original post.
I worked with an EOD group in OIF. Where do you think IEDs come from? You think farmers and merchants are mixing ANFO in their huts? No, it's all seconardy explosives they we "donate".
Mines and bombs can be complex objects, especially bombs that are intended to not immediately explode and thus deny access | use up human resources due to the poised threat.
Even as far back as WWII bombs from aircraft included booby trapped "anti personnel" bombs with secondary fuses hidden back to kill bomb disposal experts.
In the case of your concern, bombs can be released with "chemical burn safeties" (for example - when released from an aircraft two agents are released that start a timed burn that arms the bomb after X minutes (and the ground is reached).
Other technicques can use the impact force to arm a mine, it's not dangerous until after it's been slammed into the ground, etc.
Short version, the person working with the bomb would call out what they saw, then do what the partner said. The partner had a book and was out of the blast radius. They recorded it all, and if the bomb blew up would write down not to do THAT again!
Eventually they learned to somewhat reliably disarm the bombs by this type of trial and error. And then the other side would add better booby traps to stop them from succeeding.
> Cambodia is contaminated with millions of unexploded ordnances dropped as cluster bombs by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. In addition, millions of land mines were buried throughout the country during a series of civil wars from the 1970s–1990s.
Millions. I can't process numbers that large. I know what a million is, but I struggle to imagine what a million land mines would look like. What happened to Southeast Asia during the 20th century was so sad and tragic.
> Rats have been so successful that the rodents are now seen as competition for the more traditionally used military dogs for mine clearance.
I didn't know dogs were used to clear mines. I would have thought they would be too heavy to walk on mines, considering that mines can kill children, and military working dogs have a weight comparable to children.
Lastly, I wondered whether it would be both possible, economical, and militarily sensible to create mines that expire after a certain time, due to an engineered deterioration process for the detonator or for the explosive charge. A form of planned obsolescence. Few conflicts last more than a few years. Is a five year old mine really that useful militarily? Fresh mines can be dropped from aircraft now if a sudden need arised. The Korean Demilitarized Zone is the most obvious example I can think of where old mines might still serve a future purpose.