Drones Used to Find Toy-Like “Butterfly” Land Mines
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Possibly? Why is this article softballing? The Russian version of the mine is a DIRECT ripoff of the American version. They look EXACTLY the same.
Here is a BLU-43, the American version: http://www.big-ordnance.com/subs/BLU43OD.jpg
Here is a PFM-1, the Russian version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFM-1#/media/File:Russische_Sc...
It's the same damn mine! There is no "possibly" about this. The author didn't lie but he's damn sure being dishonest. The article never even mentions the BLU-43 by name, which would allow more readers to look it up and decide for themselves.
I must have expressed myself poorly, I meant to suggest exactly such a bias. The 'American Exceptionalism' bias in American media continues decades after the fact.
> a land mine of Soviet production, very similar to the BLU-43 US Army landmine. Both devices are very similar in shape and principles, although they use different explosives.
The author probably reworded the above.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Though I'd use ignorance here instead of stupidity.
This whole concept really upsets me to think about.
>"In stark contrast to the lack of public commentary on the Dragontooth system, the subsequent Soviet analogue, the PFM-1, spurred a lot of controversy after being used in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, being a key element leading to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.[citation needed]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43_Dragontooth#Overview
To answer your question more directly, the (official) design intent for the BLU-43 was to create an antipersonnel mine that could be deployed from aircraft without requiring parachutes. To that end, they designed it to be similar to maple seeds (the sort that flutter through the air when falling.) It's doubtful that they considered the possibility that the mines would be perceived as toys, although it should probably be noted that children also like to play with maple seeds...
Finally, the US invaded during an existing civil war, whereas the Soviets just straight-up invaded to conquer another region. I grant these are fine distinctions when we’re talking about mining civilians, but I think it goes to explain the perception of each country’s activities.
In 2017, there were 14 recorded casualties from mines/unexploded remnants of war (ERW) in Vietnam, while in 2016 there were 1,943 in Afghanistan. However since 1975 there have been 105,073 casualties from mines/ERW in Vietnam, while there have been 29,662 casualties from mines/ERW in Afghanistan since 1978.
http://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/2018/afghanistan/ca...
http://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/2018/vietnam/casual...
The Soviet-Afghan War was started in 1979 when Alfa Group (the KGB's 'spetsnaz') dressed in Afghani uniforms stormed the Queens Palace in Kabul and murdered the Afghani president Hafizullah Amin. Amin had been in office only three months, and came to power by deposing and ordering the murder of his predecessor Nur Muhammad Taraki. Taraki was a communist and before his demise, had plead with the Soviets for military intervention. Before Taraki's demise he and Amin had worked together and together both are known for murdering thousands of civilians and political opponents.
The Vietnam War was sold to the American public in 1964 after two separate attacks on USN ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. However in 2003 Robert McNarmara (who was the Secretary of Defense when this happened) publicly admitted the second attack had never happened. The American public was told there were two distinct attacks on two separate nights, but that wasn't true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HODxnUrFX6k
I suppose my point is that both wars were huge unpopular clusterfucks that were started on false pretexts, that neither Afghanistan nor Vietnam were placid before foreign intervention, and that excessive mining caused staggering civilian casualties in both countries for many years after the war. Despite what all the above may suggest, I don't really like historic analogies or equivalencies. However given that the BLU-43 and PFM-1 are nearly identical mines, a comparison seems warranted. The mines in Afghanistan are an ongoing issue while in Vietnam it seems to have petered out, probably because it was that many years earlier. In this context the focus on Afghanistan instead of Vietnam is justifiable.
This is not true. The Soviets were defending already existing communist regime.
Not that any of that makes it ok. I'm more convinced than ever that failure of imagination is a form of morally judgable (what's the right word here?) negligence. But it would have been hard to see that far into the future in this case.
You are probably not making mines. I don't know. It makes perfect sense to me the kind of mass murdering sociopath capable of working on such a device would find it perfectly ok to target children.
Only one physicist quit the Manhattan project iirc. Maybe the indiscriminate nature of mass murder is not such an irksome burden for a weapons designer or distributor. Maybe the people that find themselves in that line of work fully understand the risks but just don't care.
I do not say such a thing lightly, i don't say it merely because i don't like them (although seriously, how could you like someone responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children?) nor do i say it because i do not understand them. I say this because i do understand.
What i don't know is if they were never faced with the visceral effects of their life's work. Or if they were, and they simply don't care. What i do know is mostly they never publicly denounce it or try to atone for their bastardry.
Most of all it can help to contextualize these actions in the history of those who did similar things, and those who refused. If your choices are not “murder children” or “have a lovely glass of dry sherry,” but rather “murder children or “have your children murdered” it can make the choice more difficult, and less likely to attract sociopaths.
I have actually read a lot about it (though it may not seem that way), along with the justifications and reasons etc. I believe people have a tendency to act in their day to day without ever confronting their own complicit cruelty. Division of labour and all. The difficult choice would have been to face the reality and opt out in that situation, as Rotblat did.
The truth of the matter though was more of "murder children" or "someday the possibility of somehow your children getting murdered and also have a glass of dry sherry".
I also never said they were monsters, that mischaracterises everything i said about the banality of it. What i said was i find it easy to believe the kind of person capable of working on cluster bombs or toy land mines would not have an issue with killing children. Whatever fucked up justification they used to live with the rest of their work would function just fine to also include future children. Despite all the years between Vietnam and Laos and Afghanistan and now, mines are still being designed made and planted. Yes. They definitely know now.
Also, despite the facts that you mentioned, despite the hindsight of doubt in the necessity of the dropping of the bombs, a lot of people still defend it to the hilt. Still need for it to have been justifiable beyond any evidence to the contrary.
So Hiroshima made sense. Then we really didn’t give them enough time to process the enormity of what had happened and surrender. They might not have, in which case Nagasaki was an option, but there are enough questions as to their full understanding of the events in Hiroshima that Nagasaki was premature, and possibly unnecessary. At the end of the day the world has been subjected to the second global conflict started by Germany’s desire to conquer Europe in a handful of decades. The appetite for a long slog to inevitable victory over a mountain of allied and Japanese corpses wasn’t there, and I don’t blame them,
But this was kind of my point. And you pretty much say as much. They were happy to sacrifice a hundred thousand innocents for the benefit of reducing the hard slog. We know now the Japanese forces were close to spent (relatively speaking). We know now they had offered conditional terms to the soviets. It is arguable that the US, in communications with the soviets, also knew the soviets were preparing to attack Japan, knew of Japans lack of offensive capability, but were concerned that the terms of surrender may end in a carve up of japan with the soviets. This was a careful and premeditated attack to further american interests for the post war, rather than a do or die fight for survival.
Even with hindsight, (as in, if you knew then what you know now) people are loathe to admit it may not have been the correct course of action. Thing is, even when we know what we know now, and with the benefit of being someone without 'skin in the game', mentally, most people are with Thanos on these things. Somehow when faced with the scale of events people lose their shit, are unable to make morally defensible decisions. How about approaching it from an individual point of view and scaling up from there, what if a person burned someone alive because they believed it would deter some other person from invading their home?
And the reason I brought it up, it is a well known story where the views of the designers, the victims, the proponents are all well known. Only one of them quit during the project, they all knew what they were doing. They knew it would kill children. Some of them cared, not enough to stop doing it. No idea who designed the cluster bombs. The only other well known weapons designer who has brought as much havoc I could think of is Kalashnikov, but that case is less certain. The cluster bombs, the atomic bomb, they were designed to kill indiscriminately. They knew it.
The whole point of using both bombs was to demonstrate not only that it had been achieved but also that it was easy to repeat indefinitely, since the consensus among German and Japanese scientists seemed to be that atomic bombs were impractical to implement in a reasonable timeframe. Had only one been used, or so the thinking went, the suspicion would have been there that it was a one-off thing.
Moreover, by most accounts, use of the atomic bomb didn't really change the behind the scenes politics of the Japanese leadership, though it may have accelerated things. The faction who wanted to sue for peace continued to do so and the military continued to advocate continuation of the war even after both bombs were used.
J. Robert Oppenheimer passed away from complications of throat cancer. It was Katherine "Toni" Oppenheimer Silber his daughter, who took her own life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Final_ye...
Like with most aerial bombs at the time, there where quite a few who didnt detonate. Its one thing to dispose of a regular bomb, but the time delayed ones are mostly just stuck. They detonated since then once some unlucky bloke moved or just touched them. Just in 2012 for example such a bomb killed 3 bomb disposal experts.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1283273/WW2-bomb-ki...
With them getting older and older, they get more likely to detonate without even any interaction as the trigger guard rots through.
The situation of some south eastern Asian countries with unexploded ordnance and actual land mines is a better example though. Using a weapon like this will continue to indiscriminately kill people for well over a century.
edit:
To be a bit more positive, there is also people doing the opposite, like Aki Ra.
The problem is the sheer amount of war, constant war, completely unjustified war. Vietnam is a great example (credit to darkpuma for knowing their stuff) of just such a waste, which makes the lengthy fallout all the more unforgivable. WWII by contrast, a subject I didn’t raise incidentally and so had no Godwin moment (I responded to a post explicitly mentioning the Manhattan project), was nothing chosen by anyone other than the Axis. Developing and deploying nuclear weapons existed in the context of a fight for survival, against powers that systematically murdered millions of non-combatants. Japan, putting aside Pearl Harbor, was monstrous in China, Korea, and the Philippines. They dropped plague fleas on Manchuria, slaughtered a small tortured prisoners, and Germany... well, we all know about that.
There was no reason to believe that victory over them was certain, or even likely until the war had rages for years. There was every reason to believe that life under the Nazis would be hell, and fatal for swathes of humanity. The Japanese were not particular better, and China and Korea still bear the scars.
All of which is to say, I objected to mixing up people who designed mines for Vietnam, with people fighting WWII on the front, or in the lab.
Overworked the the comment it was a bit off.
My "favourite" example is the Valsella VS-50, a viciously clever piece of engineering. It has practically no metal content, making it almost impossible to detect; this also makes the mine cheaper to produce and impervious to corrosion. The amount of explosive is carefully calibrated to blow off your foot without killing you, because wounded soldiers are more expensive for the enemy to deal with than dead soldiers. The pressure plate is isolated from the trigger with a compressible bladder, so the mine will react to the steady pressure of a foot while ignoring the shock from being helicopter-dropped or from explosive or flail demining.
That wasn't quite devious enough for Valsella, so they made the VS-50AR. The standard VS-50 will only trigger due to pressure, so once you've done the difficult work of finding them, they're relatively straightforward to render safe. The AR variant has mercury tilt switches, designed to detonate in response to standard mine probing and defusing techniques. If you find a VS-50, you have to act on the assumption that it's an AR, massively complicating demining efforts.
The icing on the cake? Valsella illegally exported 9 million mines to the Iraqi government in 1991, via a front company in Singapore. Heroically, some of Valsella's own employees lobbied the Italian government to ban the production of anti-personnel mines, effectively protesting to demand their own redundancy.
War is hell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VS-50_mine
https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica...
Much less for wanting of an “I would NEVER!” attitude regarding the hypothesis of aiming these weapons at little kids; but more to the point, you cen see the intent of the design is generic and unassuming, and not actually coaxing of an audience.
It’s designed for air drop, so it has aerodynamic wings.
It’s a mine, so it needs to blend into the appearance of the terrain (all mines employ booby trap tactics on some level, since they cannot rely on people to use them to commit suicide).
It’s designed to harm military personnel, which are often model examples of some of your strongest humans; which, of course, means it will harm anything weaker than a physically fit 100KG person wearing boots, gloves, flak jacket and a helmet.
Mines, as a strategy, fall under the “area denial” category. That means blocking paths. Any path. Area denial means: NO HUMANS.
Actually, it means kill anything that moves, including animals. A cargo bay full of these things will stop a column of pregnant women, the elderly, people in wheel chairs. The scope of fittest below fully armed soldier has a lot of bycatch. Sometimes, mines are not even dolphin-safe.
Is there any affordance given for the possibility that some of this military technology will actually be used for good?
While I get why some people don't want to work on things that could potentially be used for evil, the dividing line between good and evil is often a lot blurrier in hindsight than it seems in the moment. Many of the most valuable technologies (see above) have come from the desire to kill people and not be killed in return, while many of the ideas that have killed the most people (communism, Nazism, eugenics, manifest destiny, crusades) have come from the desire to make a more perfect world.
None of these are tech products, so it's apples to oranges.
Additionally, just because most good things have come from military in the past doesn't mean that's the best way to produce good things, now or in general.
We all look back at the Apollo program with a kind of a nostalgic sorrow because many of its achievements have not been surpassed yet. We would be capable if we put the resources into a worthy successor project. But the truth is that Apollo was a cold war project intended as a propaganda campaign against the Soviets. It would never have happened without that conflict (including the Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars).
I've also read the hypothesis that the Apollo project also served as a peaceful demonstration of ICBM capabilities without expending (and revealing actual capabilities of) real ICBMs. Kind of like applying an added layer of assurance in MAD, by demonstrating through technological affinity the missiles aren't duds and the claims of performance not fabrications. If so, then that's one helluva diplomatic gesture for the history books to cover in the future.
I think this continues in US in some degree. US military gets as much money as it wants. Military spends how much money it wants on whatever research it wants.
For me that's the secret weapon of US science. Other countries struggle to allocate any significant portion of the budget to research while in US it's easy because it goes through army under the guise of protecting the country.
I think that technology that can be used to protect people, especially civilians, should be developed. I know that I personally draw the line at weapoms platforms and weapon systems. You may develop and build them with the best intentions in mind ("we're at peace and this system is only a necessary deterrent"), but recent history tells me that once these systems are built and sold, they will be used by someone, somewhere to shoot at other people. Even the oh so pacifist Germany sells a lot of weapons and I think every type of weapon system sold to another country by Germany since the second world war has seen some action.
I think a lot of people in tech work on really questionable projects that create huge social ills, then talk about "Well, at least we don't build weapons!" -- ignoring that when measuring human suffering, their unrestrained manipulation and exploitation causes much more than weapons of war do, in practice.
So when unqualified, I tend to hear your argument as simply trying to hide the messiness of what you do, rather than than it's inherently more ethical than building weapons would be.
tl;dr: I don't believe the military is less ethical, I think they're just more honest about what they do.
I am not sure of this discussion of social media is framed correctly. At its core, all this social tech tries to satisfy the very basic human need for communication in novel ways. There is nothing bad about trying to achieve that. But somewhere along the way something unintended and bad happened. We need to find out what it is and how to fix it as a society. The underlying tech and concepts will never go away again. It can be used for good. We realized too late that we failed to use it properly.
It's a standard human fallacy, which I've made numerous times: we look at the intentions of ourselves (the tech community) while looking at the results of others (eg, the military). But the question we really need to be asking is if our impact on the world leads to better outcomes than theirs, regardless of what either group intended -- and I'm not sure it's so clear cut, once you account for second order effects of social media.
And it's certainly not as simple a moral calculus as "Well, they work on weapons so they're worse people than me!"
Because not everyone who is affected by mines has infinite money available.