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Comment by raisin_churn | Hacker News Reader

I would prefer to use US senators who refuse to ratify the Mine Ban Convention. They won't need any particular skills or training, just have them wander around possible UXO sites until they find one with their foot. The great thing about this is, US senators are a 100% renewable resource.

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An interesting idea, although I think the US is actually ahead of the curve on mines. From Wikipedia:

>> Opponents point out that the Ottawa Convention places no restriction whatsoever on anti-vehicle mines which kill civilians on tractors, on school buses, etc. The position of the United States is that the inhumane nature of landmines stems not from whether they are anti-personnel as opposed to antivehicle but from their persistence. The United States has unilaterally committed to never using persistent landmines of any kind, whether anti-personnel or anti-vehicle, which they say is a more comprehensive humanitarian measure than the Ottawa Convention. All US landmines now self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours. While the self-destruct mechanism has never failed in more than 65,000 random tests, if self-destruct were to fail the mine will self-deactivate because its battery will run down in two weeks or less. That compares with persistent anti-vehicle mines which remain lethal for about 30 years and are legal under the Ottawa Convention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

Well, my comment was highly abbreviated for the sake of pithiness, but US ratification of the treaty would be more meaningful than the US simply not employing landmines itself. (NB While I place all the blame on senators for not ratifying it, technically no US president has signed it, so the Senate hasn't actually had the opportunity to ratify, but Senate leaders have made their opposition clear for decades so they definitely deserve the blame I'm pointing in their direction.)

Furthermore, landmines haven't actually been a weapon that the US military has considered tactically useful in nearly 50 years, so saying that we won'ist use them (because they're not useful to us), but not pressuring other countries which may find them useful despite their horrific downsides, isn't exactly upstanding. And, the article title on HN is misleading, because this isn't just about landmines, it's about unexploded ordnance (UXO) more generally. The US, in addition to not signing the Mine Ban Convention, refuses to sign/ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and has significant quantities of cluster munitions in the inventory, with an alarmingly high failure rate (meaning the munition doesn't detonate when it is supposed to, leaving dangerous UXO that only becomes more dangerous over time). So, yes, there's nuance, but honestly not enough to let US leaders off the hook for these horrors.

I'm not sure why the blame would rest on the political side. Yes, they are the ones who would ratify the treaty, but I'm sure they would be happy to do so unless the DOD was whispering in their ear (or shouting) that it would damage their warfighting capabilities. Maybe there are some special interests too but I'm skeptical the industry is big enough to have that kind of pull, whereas SecDef telling a Senator on SASC not to do this is probably enough to make a treaty a nonstarter.

The Democrats are for the treaty, so the Republicans are against it, just to own the libs, no matter what the cost or consequences or morality, regardless of the facts or anything based on reality or science or humanity.

>2014: The United States under President Barack Obama mostly accepted the terms of the treaty by ceasing to acquire anti-personnel land mines and prohibiting their use outside of the Korean Peninsula.

>2020: The United States under President Donald Trump reversed the Obama policy change and restored the George W. Bush administration position on anti-personnel landlines, authorizing Combatant Commanders to employ "advanced, non-persistent landmines".

>Trump eases restrictions on land mine use by U.S. military:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-war-landmines-idUSKBN...

>2022: President of the United States Joe Biden reverses the policy of his predecessor, Trump, and continues disarmament, saying that the United States will not produce or acquire anti-personnel mines, will not support any other country in its use of these mines, and commits to destroying all existing anti-personnel mines in its possession (excluding those on the Korean Peninsula).

>Biden administration commits to limiting use of land mines:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/21/biden-land-mines-tr...

"Sorry, having morals is partisan and since they were there first I am against acting morally."

Remember, these are the same brilliant moral "leaders" who murdered their own base en masse just to own the libs, by telling them not to listen to what medical professionals were telling them to do, not to wear masks, not to get vaccinated, not to self isolate, but instead to inject disinfectant into their veins, shove ultraviolet flashlights up their wazoos, eat horse dewormer pills, then mount a violent insurrection by storming the US Capitol. Leaders who don't believe in evolution or science or medicine or empathy, but are actively reducing the gene pool of people stupid enough to follow them. Not to mention stealing classified documents and dining with white supremacists. So yes, a lot of blame rests on the political side.

More Republicans Died Than Democrats after COVID-19 Vaccines Came Out:

https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2022/11/more-republicans-died-...

Thank you. That matches with my own understanding better than "usa doesn't practically use or procure mines " from previous posts.

Senators > Generals.

The Senate has a lot of power and is insulated from the electorate in such a way as an issue like this is not a threat to them. For whatever reason, the leaders who control what makes it to the Senate floor did not send it there.

They own that - it’s their call.

Not when there is a war - generals can and likely will shoot senators. US generals are patriotic enough to not kill US senators, but foreign generals that the US might be fighting in the future will target senators.

This is a comment out of a fantasy world.

That is how WWI started. It wasn't a US politician, politicians are targeted at times.

A reality check history reminder: a certain US President sent a mob of raving mad racist violent lunatics to storm the US Capitol and assassinate the US Vice President and US Senators, in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the election that he lost.

Remember the gallows that Trump's mob built and chanted "Hang Mike Pence"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/politics/jan-6-gallows...

And how Trump reacted approvingly?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/us/politics/trump-pence-j...

The same US President who eased the restrictions on land mines.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-war-landmines-idUSKBN...

This isn’t Guatemala. LARPing maga types may have fantasies about this, but don’t have the ability to execute and follow through.

Unless some god has told you the world will end tommorow, you have no idea what the future will bring. Over the next 1000 years things will change and we have no clue what (again, except of course if the world ends).

3 presidents have already been shot (that I remember). while the secret service is getting better, it wouldn't be hard for someone who wanted to get the next one. Senators are even easier.

It's not their call. A President has to sign a treaty for it to go to the Senate, and no US President has ever signed the land mine ban treaty.

Is this a case of “If you pressure others to not use mines, you cannot sell them mines afterwards”?

> All US landmines now self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours.

Supremely commendable, but it does seem remarkably short windows. I do wonder what troops on the ground, in 'busy', and highly stategic defensive positions, feel about having to re-lay the same mines every two days, let alone four hours: surely the enemy could take severe advantage?

I'd imagine that this simply means that the DoD expects to use them tactically as opposed to strategically in the field

Right but if enemy takes the terrain do you really want it to be "clear" off mines in a day or two coz they self-detonated ?

If the mines are known about, and prevent a location from being used for 2 days, I'd argue that they've done some job of area denial.

If someone is sitting next to the minefield waiting for mines to expire, they're not doing as many other soldier-y tasks like shooting people.

You lay those mines with an aircraft or missile, I'd suspect.

It's like a sleeping cluster bomb - one of the worst (in terms of humanitarian problems) antipersonal mines out there, the Russian PFM-1 butterfly mine [0] is a cluster munition that simply floats to the ground and stays there.

The PFM-1 also has a deactivation mechanism but it didn't work well enough in practice.

Deactivation mechanisms are one thing but what the explosives do over time is a big deal, even if the trigger/fuze is guaranteed to be inert after a short time.

Explosives can be like mayonnaise, they can separate after a while, forming sensitive mixtures, making the 'inert' mine suddenly dangerous again.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFM-1_mine

> Explosives can be like mayonnaise, they can separate after a while, forming sensitive mixtures, making the 'inert' mine suddenly dangerous again.

In the 1970s, there was a Friedkin movie, that used this as a plot point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(film)

There is a big difference between anti vecicle and anti personal mines.

First, they are way easier to detect, as they are bigger and have more metal/explosives to spot.

Also the risk is minimized for the people clearing those mines, if they know they only have to deal with the big ones.

Secondly, it is easier and more practical to mark a field as not save for big vecicles for some time, compared to unsafe for everyone. (schoolbuses usually don't drive through fields)

So yeah, ideally we would not have any kind of mines or war, but we do. And when you want to stop lots of russian tanks for example, I totally would use anti tank mines.

They just won't cripple random children, like the anti person mines will do. And you can clear them out quite easily and safe with just a metal detector and a minimum of training.

But if you have a field with both types of mines, yeah than it is really expensive and dangerous to clear it. And I am amazed by the concept of using rats for help.

And about the self destroying mines - if they would always work like this, it is indeed a big improvement. The concept that they only can go off as long as the battery has power, sounds quite failproof. I remain sceptical though.

It’s common to update treaties over time and to limit their scope to increase adoption. Failing to ban anti vehicle mines is no more relevant than the Ottawa Treaty failing to limit CO2 emissions.

Yes.

The US also has a voluntary ban on any submunitions with a greater than 1% dud rate. This forced the destruction of quite a bit of ordinance such as MLRS rockets with cluster warheads, huge stockpiles of 155 mm DPICM, etc. There's no question these weapons are devastatingly effective on the battlefield, but the US doesn't want to own the horrific aftermath.

So yeah, this is one area where the US is actually setting a good standard.

Also you see this pattern with quite a few similar treaties, where the US kinda wants to have its cake and eat it too, by not actually signing the treaty but adopting a similar or better standard voluntarily.

It's ok if we kill a hundred thousand Iraqis, we just have to use bullets to do it.

We dont like to be remembered of the War on Terror.

See we're fundamentally nice folks who make well meaning mistakes. So when we get out of a quagmire we should be immediately absolved of all culpability.

Unlike those dirty <insert rival country>. They're fundamentally evil and we should remember all their sins going back centuries.

Sadly, the Ottawa Treaty is a meaningless bit of political theater. Precisely zero of the major mine producers & users (US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, nearly the entire Middle East, etc) have signed up, and many of those that did, particularly in Eastern Europe, are having second thoughts after seeing what's happening in Ukraine (a signatory).

The main issue is that by nature, the convention only "punishes" responsible actors: it weakens the country that keeps its mines safely in a warehouse and has plans to deploy them within hours in clearly defined and well mapped minefields to defend its borders, and does nothing to prevent others from indiscrimately spraying plastic landmines that look like fun toys [1] from helicopters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFM-1_mine

> Sadly, the Ottawa Treaty is a meaningless bit of political theater. [...] The main issue is that by nature, the convention only "punishes" responsible actors

Calling it "theatre" seems unnecessarily cynical. Couldn't you say the same about any legal/treaty constraints on state violence? E.g the Geneva Conventions or the Chemical Weapons Convention? Do you really think that all such agreements are futile?

Yes, irresponsible actors are not going to abide by by a landmine (or CW) ban, and yes there was an element of self-interest in creating them, but also I think a real recognition of the unnecessary suffering that they cause to civilians. I think thats something worth being a bit proud of.

Pretty much everybody has signed up to Geneva Conventions and the Chemical Weapons Convention, so while not quite perfect, they're effective. For example, it's virtually impossible to buy chemical weapons, you need to DIY.

But when the Ottawa Treaty was being negotiated, the big boys made it very clear from the outset that they would not accept the terms, so it's been a dead letter since day one.

Let political realities not interfer with my utopian vision. Mines prevent more slaughter by a belarussian invasion right now. The truth is, all those dictatorships with operett emperors out there, are super fragile and will lean into external conflict as soon as internal strife boils over. And if you dont want a world armed to the teeth with nukes, you will have borders like the north south korea ones, were mines prevent these failing societies from becoming clinging boxers.

A nightmare? Yes, see it every morning in the mirror. Reality is pain, accepting real human nature and its limitations, learning to embrace this, turns one into a grown up adult.

Your discusson spam of a world made for unicorns is not helping anyone.

I do think it's symmetrical that, if we use senators to clear land mines, we should use rats to ratify the convention.

I see what you did there

Maybe we should use internet commenters who refuse to learn about a topic before casually suggesting we murder people over it?

I resent your assumption that only US senators should do mine hunting. Surely politicians everywhere of whatever stripe are good enough for this job?

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