Comment by sbaiddn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbaiddn | Hacker News Reader

This is a serious question:

In a place like the DMZ, are mines really immoral? Are land mines universally immoral? Anymore than any other weapon of war? Does this immorality extend to naval as opposed to land mines?

No one is walking freely in the DMZ. Certainly not children. If land mines are effective (US generals say no, but they don't win too many wars.) they raise the cost of attack almost for free.

This stabilizes the situation avoiding what would be a devastating war.

Some object that a war that gets rid of the North Korean regime is necessary and not to be avoided. I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but point out that I chose the DMZ merely as a widely known dangerous example. The example can be changed to any border dispute between two "dangerous" countries (say India and Pakistan).

Nor can the "indiscriminate nature" save the argument. A cluster bomb thrown into a city is indiscriminate and a terrible thing. But the immoral act is deploying the weapon where it acts without discretion. This is no different from carpet bombing city a la WW2.

So the question remains: why are land mines malum in se? And how are the uniquely evil compared to any other weapon of war? [1]

[1] Im not being facetious. I believe there are inherently evil weapons, chemical or biological ones come to mind, while other weapons have, if not a nobility to them, are not inherently evil: the rifle.

But this easy to answer. In a war -- as annoying as they are -- the idea generally is to kill precisely the enemy and avoid killing civilians. Once the military is eliminated, then the country surrenders and the war is over.

This is obviously NOT how it really works in practice.

But this is why carpet bombing, phosphor, mines and so on are not precise and deliberate but indiscriminate. Mines particularly persist long after wars, killing people who have presumably made peace or people who were not even involved in the war.

So immoral? Definitely if a mine kills you or someone you know while on a relaxing vacation 40 years after it was planted -- it feels immoral. So immoral? I think so.

Your example of the DMZ is not well chosen. Lots of innocent civilians try to defect across it to South Korea. Killing them with randomly planted mines seems immoral, unless you would like immediate execution of all defectors. Which I find immoral, personally.

> while on a relaxing vacation 40 years after it was planted

Maybe we need an international treaty on maximum lifetimes for things like landmines. After 10 years they deactivate. That way if the war continues you need to re-plant but at least you have a well-defined lifetime for when an area is safe after a war.

If these were digital devices it would be fairly simple to accomplish, but I suspect a lot of these are far more primitive. How hard would it be to add an expiry that for example was accurate enough to fail reliably between 9 and 10 years after deployment?

I think this is less about the casualties of war itself, but the effects of when trying to move on after the war.

If people die due to landmines many years after a ceasefire are they a casualty of the war?

I think landmines represent a physical device that artifically extends the destruction of war in a time that is way after the parties may have agreed to peace. In that sense, the landmine inflicts death on people with no agency. A bomb dropped on a someone has intent and an army responsible for it. A landmine planted decades ago is so divorced from its original intent that any resulting death or injury feels random and injust.

War has many generational effects.

Russia still has periodic fertility gaps from WW2. In Paraguay blond, blue eyed, natives who only speak Guarani are witnesses of the Triple Alliance's widespread rape (150 years ago?). Europe is littered with unexploded ordinance

A landmime is not a pleasant thing to leave behind. But if deployed strategically (not scattered everywhere as a terror weapon), and if it can avoid a war its not obvious to me that the generational effects aren't the least evil.

This may be a poor analogy:

Imagine, during a war, a missile that has been set to target a city. The casualties will be many, and random, and innocent, but this is wartime and horrible things happen.

Now, imagine that this missile is set to target the city, but will launch at a random time in the future. The missile may launch during the war, or many years after.

Now it's obvious to me that the missile that lauches at the random point in the future is more evil than the one fired immediately.

It's a poor analogy, but the random missile is how I view landmines.

Cant reply to jai's missile comment:

Targeting cities is already a war crime regardless the weapon.

Nor am I arguing that laying landmines everywhere is not immoral. Certainly not landmines in a city.

Im arguing that a concentrated land mine field across a small strategic piece of land (say a mountain passage, the DMZ) can be militarily effective and therefore help avoid war.

Does this then change the moral calculus of land mines?

Land mines persist long after the wars have ended, quietly waiting to maim the innocent.

Ok, thats a strong argument. But, Im not convinced.

For starters, if we assume humans have the ability to solve conflicts like the DMZ we should be able to put a structure in place to prohibit people from going to old mine fields. That is, fundamentally, the basis of nuclear waste storage: the belief that society can create a future political structure to keep humans out of a dangerous place. (I doubt that we can, so Im opposed to nuclear power, and I'll grant that it follows that this is an argument against mines.)

Im not arguing that land mines should be used liberally over large swaths of land. The DMZ is a narrow strip of land. If the Korean dispute ever ends (I have my doubts), it can be made into a nature preserve. Or it can be carefully de-mined over centuries like Europe has been since the wars. Continental Europeans have lived and worked around unstable explosives for over 100 years.

And, as long lasting as land mines are, its not obvious to me that our conflicts can not outlast them (!! I do have faith in our obstinacy). The Korean war is 70 years old, the DMZ is not a dry desert (some border regions are, however). Eventually the materials will crumble and nature will take over.

Finally, the basic question remains unanswered: are the (relatively rare) loss of life and limbs of innocents over decades or centuries worse that a war like the one that would break out between the Koreas? That's not obvious to me.

> Finally, the basic question remains unanswered: are the (relatively rare) loss of life and limbs of innocents over decades or centuries worse that a war like the one that would break out between the Koreas? That's not obvious to me.

That is a false dichotomy. There are choices between "all-out war" and "decades of needless innocent casualties," and pretending otherwise does your argument no favors.

Its not a false dichotomy because, so far, no one has argued against my argument that landmines can increase the cost of war and therefore help avoid it. The argument has been implicitly accepted.

Attack the argument, reject it, and then argue for the third way. Or argue that war is a blast.

However, Ill accept no citations from a US general or RAND corp. Itd be the "appeal to authority" fallacy and they've lost too many wars to claim expertise. You're free to restate their arguments though.

Would it be feasible for an advanced military to field remotely-deactivatable mines that could be killed after the conflict?

Itd be theoretically easy too [1] . Put a dead man switch on them. If a landmine doesn't receive a "keep alive" signal at a predetermined, known skipping frequency then self destruct.

Or use a timer and re-lay them periodically.

[1] famous last words. In reality these things don't work and landmines are a terrible legacy of conflict.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com