
Sandia's Robots Pull Apart Warheads to Recycle Thousands of Micro-Grenades - mcspecter
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/sandia-robots-pull-apart-warheads-to-recycle-thousands-of-microgrenades
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ggm
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.

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belorn
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?

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

~~~
belorn
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...](http://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/2017/landmine-
monitor-2017/casualties.aspx)

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.

