this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Cleaning this shit up after the war is going to be nasty.
Kids in Vietnam are still taught about mines and explosives in school because there is still stuff left behind and they are in severe danger playing in the woods.
I saw a video where the Ukrainian soldiers in the field jerry-rigged together a pretty cheap RC drone the proved to be very good at clearing out smaller land mines. It's about the size of a scrunched up adult on wheels, with a small plow for a shield behind a big spinning tube with chains that just flail at the ground. It drives like an RC lawn mower, and has that big weed wacker tumbler on the front to trip antipersonnel mines while the soldiers just walk behind it a little ways so the shrapnel doesn't get them. It worked pretty good, and didn't require any crazy technology. Those troopers have gotten really good at using what they've got at hand to do the job. I hope they manage to push the Russians all the way back to sea and reclaim Crimea. Screw Putin and all of his BS.
Yeah but this a white country it'll probably get picked up pretty quick.
Ed: listen I'm sorry if that's upsetting but we've cleaned up two world wars faster then either of those countries and what's the major difference?
Uhh, the explosives from the world wars have not been cleaned up. I've been evacuated from my home twice due to the discovery of aerial bombs under construction sites, and the forest behind my childhood home was still being cleared of mines until ~2008, IIRC. This was in Germany.
That is not the same as actively mined areas with children who never saw the war walking around missing limbs because they powers that put munitions there refuse to pick them up.
Also, I'm not so sure Germans complaining about remnant bombs is the best example given that they started both world wars and Korea and Vietnam didn't even start their own wars.
They weren't complaining, just giving you an example of how a central European country still isn't "cleaned up" even after all these years. That country being Germany has nothing to do with their point.
It is for all intent and purpose cleaned up, finding eod is usually things people collected and shouldn't have or things deeply buried. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia have active surface level minefields that have been known and documented since during the war, it isn't a matter of hard to find in those places it's a matter of allied powers simply not having any interest in demining the places they mined.
So still finding WWI and WWII land mines in France as recently as 2014 as booby traps in pipes (over 100 years after the start of WWI) doesn't count somehow?
Things in the area of the alsace go up and rarely come down it's an incredibly mountainous area, there are still functional artillery pieces out there. That is however much much different than knowing you put mines there, knowing civilians cross through it and yet refuse to clean it up. And to add to your point there is an area of France that quarantined since ww1 because of the level of arsenic, but again that's an exception not the rule.
People are still dying from ordinance from WWI and WWII in Europe.
Also the US dropped more bombs on North Vietnam during the Vietnam War than the total number of bombs dropped during WWII. That is quite a difference, major even.
Yes just not nearly at the rate people are killed and maimed in countries not of European descent.
Bombs that were like 200% more reliable probably moreso so unexploded ordinance is rarer and ordinance was dropped in a much more concentrated area making that issue still less of an issue.
That said their issue is mines and mines and demining technology has gained huge huge steps in technology. Hell most of the mines dropped a around Ukraine are more than likely at and maple leaf style dropped time limited munitions.
The wholesale use of mines and particularly cluster munitions really did lasting damage in several countries post WW2. WW2 bombs went underground when they didn’t detonate and that offers some “protection”. We don’t do heavy carpet bombing like that anymore. Mines and cluster bombs remain on the surface. It’s going to be even worse because modern weapons use a lot of plastic to avoid being easily detected and more cheaply produced. And if the few video clips I’ve seen of Ukraine lately are any indication, the use of small cluster bomblets is rampant. They’re slightly larger than your palm, green, and plastic.
There’s going to be a lot of missing feet in the following years.
Edit: found out what is being used in Ukraine are called “butterfly mines”. . There are going to be multiple thousands of these laying around.