Sandia's Robots Pull Apart Warheads to Recycle Thousands of Micro-Grenades

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4 points·mcspecter··4 comments

I don't want to diminish how good it is, to see robots able to do this kind of finicky stuff, and anything which improves the safety of working on munitions has strong upsides, but lets not forget: the worldwide landmine, and anti-personnel bomb problem is huge, and it is causing extreme, life-long agony for women and children in disadvantaged places, and russia, america and britain have a massive un-met burden here, selling the weapons almost indiscriminately.

I don't expect Sandia to own this, but I do expect Sandia to recognize they are part of the problem. dismantling these bomblets to re-construct the parts into more modern bomblets is NOT HELPING in the sense I mean.

But it is very fine application of robotics: Great engineering, terrible ethics issues.

Women and girls makes up about 14% of all casualties of mines and explosive remnants of war. Why are you excluding male victims in regard to landmines and anti-personnel bombs that is left around after wars?

Children is gender neutral. But thanks for correcting my misapprehension about the relativities. What's the source so I can understand distribution to kids?

I honestly just took the first google hit that gave the ratio, but digging a bit more and here is numbers from 2017 which was the most recent that I could find: http://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/2017/landmine-monit...

It bumps the number to 16% for women and girls. Children are 42%.

Landmine and anti-personnel bombs are a major problem, especially for the poor which is more likely to be working farms or forests. An theory is that because of gender roles men and boys are more likely to be working in such areas while women in those nations tend to be more at home or in the village.

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