
Drones Used to Find Toy-Like “Butterfly” Land Mines - prostoalex
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drones-used-to-find-toy-like-butterfly-land-mines/
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darkpuma
> _" More than a million Russian-made PFM-1 land mines—the most common
> butterfly type, possibly inspired by similar U.S. weapons deployed during
> the Vietnam War"_

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](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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFM-1#/media/File:Russische_Schmetterlingsmine_PFM-1.jpg)

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.

~~~
woodruffw
Lazy research, not dishonesty, is the far more likely explanation here. From
Wikipedia[1]:

> 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.

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

~~~
beatgammit
Hanlon's Razor:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Though I'd use ignorance here instead of stupidity.

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Waterluvian
What is the design process like for landmines? Do they consider if they look
like toys? Do they put duds in a toy chest and see what a sample of children
will pick out?

This whole concept really upsets me to think about.

~~~
andrewflnr
My guess is that the question never comes up. If you're an adult thinking in
terms of an abstract blueprint of a weapon, the thought of a child stumbling
on the dirt-strewn concrete implementation of your device is very far from
your mind, almost impossible to think of. The only way you would think of it
is if someone pulls the possibility off a checklist built from cases like
this. Be honest: if you saw the picture in the article _without_ the
surrounding context to make you think about toys, how likely would you have
been to think of them that way? To think that someone else would think of them
as toys? I'm guessing it's low. My first visual impression was of dead bugs or
cigars wrapped in leaves (which I'll grant might be just as tempting to a
child).

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.

~~~
cam_l
>If you're an adult thinking in terms of an abstract blueprint of a weapon..

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.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
I wouldn’t design weapons for the US government today, but if we were facing
another Hitler and another WWII-era Germany, along with Japan? Remember that
we wouldn’t have the benefit of hindsight and know that Hitler would shoot
himself in the foot with the Russian front and wasting resources on his insane
genocide. The Manhattan project might be one of the most prominent exceptions
to the sweeping generalization you’re making. It’s also unhelpful and unwise
to frame people you don’t like or understand as sociopaths, or crazy.

~~~
cf498
Since the Hitler period came up, there are great parallels to the topic of
land mines for that time period. During Harris bombardment of the civilian
population they did not just use regular and incendiary bombs, but also delay-
action bombs which exploded hours or days after the impact with the goal to
hit rescue workers who dug out the dead or wounded.

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...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1283273/WW2-bomb-kills-G-
ttingen-experts-attempt-defuse-it.html)

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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aki_Ra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aki_Ra)

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
Yes, land mines are horrible, the incalculable environmental damage and
subsequent human (and other) suffering of any war can’t be overstated. War
however, at least wars of the “necessary” type are the kind of the thing that
don’t allow for those considerations. It is a _very_ strong argument, not for
trying to change how war is fought (minimally effective), but to accept that
war is truly an atrocity to be avoided at nearly all costs. Instead we spent
the years after WWII trying to make war on anything vaguely “red” and after
Vietnam, just sought to make a constant stream of wars and armed conflicts
more palatable to the public.

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.

~~~
cf498
>a subject I didn’t raise incidentally and so had no Godwin moment (I
responded to a post explicitly mentioning the Manhattan project)

Overworked the the comment it was a bit off.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
No harm, no foul.

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d357r0y3r
I understand there are many tech workers that flatly refuse to work on drone
technology, especially if it may have military applications.

Is there any affordance given for the possibility that some of this military
technology will actually be used for good?

~~~
gmueckl
Military technology is a wide and pretty vague term. A lot of technology is
implicitly dual use. A nice example of an unexpected military use case for a
completely innocent looking technology was a work that explored potential weak
spots in a proposed tank design by using real time 3d graphics and order
independent transparency in particular to estimate armor strength against
attacks from different directions. Originally, OIT was developed for games and
3d data visualizations.

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.

~~~
NotAnEconomist
I think you've killed less people working on literal sniper rifles for the
military than working on the addictive feed dynamics of Facebook, given the
Rohingya massacre and other social ills they've supported.

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.

~~~
gmueckl
I never worked on social media; this does not interest me. I will agree that
it has caused a lot of change and may have contributed to outbreaks of
violence in the recent past. I could compare these conflicts to others in the
past that were massively more devastating, but I wom't.

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.

~~~
NotAnEconomist
My point is the double-standard in the tech community making that argument on
behalf of one kind of technology, while ignoring that weapons extend from the
very basic human need for security and agency.

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!"

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basicplus2
Seems odd to me to waste so much time and money and risk to lives when one can
simply drive a mine flail through any given area to clear it of mines.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_flail](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_flail)

~~~
InclinedPlane
How expensive do you think it is to operate a mine flail? Especially factoring
in transport to remote areas?

~~~
basicplus2
what price do you put on a life?

~~~
InclinedPlane
How much money are _you_ spending on mine clearance globally?

Because not everyone who is affected by mines has infinite money available.

