Populations living near past conflicts continue to pay the price of that conflict to this day. Mines from the world war, Vietnam, etc continue to harm people today.
Near where I live, there's a kindergarten, and playground where my daughter would often play in. About a year or so ago, an undetonated missile was discovered. It was one of the many bombs dropped on residential areas during firebombing of Tokyo in WWII. The place where it was discovered is right in front of the kindergarten, and very close to the playground. Luckily it was safely extracted away. But kids have been running around that place for decades.
For what it's worth, the US is at least destroying its remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons, and is due to finish the process by September 2023. Let's hope the country doesn't get involved in a large scale conflict between now and then, which might cause a change of plans for those munitions.
The US is disposing of chemical weapons because they're enormously expensive and simply not that effective. Chemical weapons usage by Cuba in Angola didn't really turn the tide of the war.
Also, the US has nuclear weapons plus a huge fleet of bombers with conventional weapons. Pretty easy to give up an expensive party-trick when you basically decapitate the military of most countries in just a few hours.
There are still unexploded bombs in England and Germany being found. A few years ago, a Civil War shell exploded killing someone. Hopefully the last casualty of that war.
Me, I'd press for a law that mines can only be electrically set off using a battery that decays over time. (Or any triggering device that decays away.) This is so after a year or so, past any military value, they'll be inert.
Four people walking in a forest near Chernobyl killed by a land mine today. And farmers found also potato fields with land mines buried on it.
We can create the most "tremendous" and beautiful and well written law possible. It will not change the fact that war criminals don't obey the law, and that some armies are using still a lot of obsolete stuff. Landmines are still an unsolved problem.
Was this an old mine, or a new one due to the war?
Old mines don't decay, which is why new ones do.
Civilians being killed in war is tragic, but also seems out-of-scope, militaries aren't going to stop using area denial weapons. Making sure they don't kill people once they're no longer intended to is as close as we're likely to come without reaching utopia.
A country defending its frontiers with a warning mine field openly marked and delimited is not very surprising.
A country claiming that "this is not a war" putting bombs in random places in another country without any warning sign with the only purpose to kill as many civilians as possible, should be --very-- surprising. Is a totally different situation.
For what it's worth, most countries, including the US, are parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, of which Protocol II requires a ban on "the use of non-self-destructing and non-self-deactivating mines outside fenced, monitored and marked areas"[0].
I think that means that countries have to either use mines which decay over time, as you suggest, or they have to remove the mines themselves from any designated area once the relevant conflict ends. I'm not sure if any signatories have deployed any non-decaying mines since the convention entered into force, though.
Well in that case it isn't strictly 'profit' but rather just benefit. In the same way that antisocial urban development isn't necessarily profitable per se, it just allows the people doing it to reap all the benefits while pushing the burden onto society as a whole.
Why do countries invade others? It's often portrayed as being for the greater good of the attacker, restoring their territorial integrity. But let's be honest, you don't spend billions if you're not getting anything in return other than pissed off invadees - it's for profit.
Around $18 billion in 2019. To gain partial control of that revenue stream, Russia has largely smashed up the military it spends $50-$60 billion a year on. It's not a good trade.
You might protest that land also has factories and such on it, and that's true, but today many of those factories look like this:
Launching wars of aggression is a bad idea because killing people and taking things that don't belong to you is wrong. But if that fails to persuade, recall that it's also a financial catastrophe, for both sides.
Ukraine also has some of the best agricultural land in the world, which nets exports of around $18bn. Hard to argue that’s not about the land. Then there’s the big one; Putin believes that land belongs to him. Once you get into squishy questions like how much is it worth to get your thing back from someone the financial calculus becomes much harder.
> Around $18 billion in 2019. To gain partial control of that revenue stream, Russia has largely smashed up the military it spends $50-$60 billion a year on. It's not a good trade.
With my deeply cynical hat on...
I mean, if they keep the territory (which seems unlikely at this moment), they get that revenue, so good for them?
They also got to clear out their stores of old munitions, and run a sales demo for newer munitions. Might have been a better demo if the campaign didn't go sideways, though. Either way, lots of business for domestic producers of munitions to resupply.
Where a whole bunch of natural gas was recently discovered (Crimea specificly).
To be clear though, i'm not saying that its always direct. Plenty of things can be strategically valuable but not instantly translatable to $$$. Even businesses don't always do things for the short term profit exclusively - sometimes long term matters.
From the article (sounds very speculative though):
> Why the chemical agent was buried in Kamisu has not yet been clarified by government investigations. Some believe that during the chaotic years following the war, the substance was sold and eventually transported to the city.
Thankfully, research, development and deployment of chemical/biological weapons are heavily restricted and regulated in most developed nations. If do we not learn from the past we're doomed to repeat it. Only through education and awareness can we prevent this type of tragedy from occurring again.
The article mentions almost offhandedly that the substance was buried no longer ago than 1993. Surely that must have been illegal? Is anyone investigating that?
I was doubtful of your implication of a causal relationship between poison gassing of a father and problems passed down genetically. However upon some research I came upon this study, which definitely supports such a relationship:
This study is a joke. 20 years after exposure. Self reporting exposure. Done by a country with a huge reason to find positive results so bias is a strong possibility. No mechanism for how exposure could result in genetic modification specific to pulmonary issues.
not necessarily. a lot of the people in WWI were young and lied about their age. say he was 16, so born in 1900. he and this person's dad could have very well had kids at 50 or so, i.e. father born 1950 and the person born in 2000 making him young. though he is probably a bit older than this.
This has been my go-to "that can't possibly be right" factoid for years. He had two living grandsons the last time someone made me Google it. It looks like one of them indeed passed away in 2020, but the other is still alive albeit no longer in good health[1].
I can never remember when John Tyler was President but he was born in 1790, 232 years ago, which makes it sound even more implausible. We are further in history from the Ice Bucket Challenge than this still-living guy's grandfather's birth was from the end of the American Revolutionary War.
This is truly incredible. The grandson of a president from the 1840's has to bear witness to ... the Tic Tok age and China's growing mind control of the world's population.
Never mind, I had a brain fart and misread gand father for father, and the sibling comment provided a link to a study showing that indeed, mustard gas has a measurable effect on spermogenesis and can increase the rate of respiratory diseases in the victims offspring.
Random information: the article shows an image from Okunoshima Island. Today, this is also called Rabbit Island. It is chock full of rabbits of all colors. There is also at least one hotel on the island and a little museum that tells the dark past of this island. Rumor has it, the rabbits were used as test subjects for the chemical weapons and were freed after the war, multiplying uncontrolled. Everywhere you look, there is a group of fluffy rabbits.
I’ve been there for a day and it was a nice experience. The museum lacked English explanations for most of its exhibits though. But this was some years ago, may have changed.
> The tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea off Takehara, Hiroshima Prefecture, is a popular tourist destination known for being the home of hundreds of bunnies, but it was once a "poison gas island" where the Imperial Japanese Army secretly manufactured chemical weapons from around 1930 to the end of the war.
With no horse in the race, it seems the WaPo article is trying to prove a negative (that the military had no involvement in spreading a disease) by asserting that it wouldn’t be the first to spread the disease, and had neither a motive nor enough knowledge to do it intentionally.
As for most negative proofs, that still leaves plenty of rooms for any other combination of event where some of the above are not true (e.g the military accidentally participating in the spread of an existing disease for instance)
This is how conspiracy theories work by continually shifting to whatever has not yet been debunked — the opposite of the scientific process described in the papers referenced by that article.
The theory originally was that this was an escaped bioweapon. Proof going back to the previous century shows that’s not the case; as does basic consideration of the low hypothetical value of a weapon which is slow, not very lethal, and easily managed by basic military hygiene practices; and now we’re left with, what, the claim that the military might have caused slightly faster spread of the same pathogen which was already spreading in the wild? That’s like saying that COVID must be an escaped bioweapon because some PLA soldiers coughed on civilians, and it’s a weak enough formulation that nobody leads with that rather than the dramatic sounding false claim.
I'm not here to support conspiracy theories but you're falling into the same trap: you're trying to prove a negative. In this cause you're arguing it is "not very lethal" and thus not the result of a military weapon experiment.
Guess what? The military and humanity at large make things that suck all the time. Just because something is ineffective doesn't prohibit it from being a military weapon. If that was the case we'd never have boondoggles where military spending runs amok and never produces anything useful.
> you're trying to prove a negative. In this cause you're arguing it is "not very lethal".
Not quite: I’m saying that it wasn’t new, notably more virulent or resistant to treatment, or different from earlier samples. I’d really recommend reading the full WaPo article and especially some of the links as they help understand how there just isn’t any reason to believe this claim.
In particular, notice how this sounds:
> If you draw a circle around early Lyme Disease cases, it just happens to be in the middle of that circle.
Every part of that is wrong: those weren’t the earliest cases (unless Wisconsin moved while I wasn’t looking) and the distribution is all over. Once you remove the known untrue portions, we’re left with the far less exciting version:
> A cluster of cases was detected in an area similar to where other clusters were detected. The cases were not unusual in impact or spread, nor especially close to a base which had switched roles decades before.
This is a classic conspiracy theory: there’s no evidence but we’re asked to believe that something with minimal value was attempted, failed completely at its goals but not before leaking, but then was hushed up perfectly for decades by the same group which is supremely good at hiding their traces … except that nobody thought about the possibility civilian medical reports from an escaped bioweapon? There are an infinite number of similar probability scenarios you could dream up but it’s not scientific.
Successful "conspiracy theories" work on unprovable grounds. The obvious ones like faking the moon landing are based on the principle that you can't prove some past event wasn't fake, as it is proving a negative and there is no need to shift anything: the possibilities are infinite from the start.
Now, not being provable doesn't mean either that it's a just conspiracy theory, as any successful conspiracy will have enough plausible deniability.
To me, the whole endeavour of trying to prove or disprove a conspiracy is a fools errand. You either believe it or not, and can have adiscussion about it, but there's no point in bringing in a scientific process for something that is not science at its core.
> To me, the whole endeavour of trying to prove or disprove a conspiracy is a fools errand. You either believe it or not, and can have adiscussion about it, but there's no point in bringing in a scientific process for something that is not science at its core.
Yes, my thought is mostly that it's important to explicitly recognize that it's basically the god of the gaps argument because conspiracy theorists like to sound science-y and, especially, to leave as many blanks as possible for the reader to fill in so they have as much wiggle-room as possible for the future.
Sorry to hear that. I'm sure that those who were responsible for such a crime will be held responsible. Either in this world, or otherwise in front of god.
I'm still amazed that chemical weapons weren't used in a widespread way during world war 2 (compared to, say, world war 1). Several of the nations involved in that war were fighting a war of extermination against somebody, and almost every other war crime you can imagine was commonplace.
I believe you’re referring to this article which makes the point https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch..., though with a slightly different conclusion: it says that chemical weapons are useless for a top tier modern army, because top tier modern opponents can easily protect against them, and other opponents are better targeted using conventional means. But for armies that are not top-tier modern armies, they still make sense and are still in use.
When I went to the University of Kentucky for college I remember hearing from friends who grew up in Richmond, and the surrounding area, about the chemical weapon drills they had (similar to active shooter, fire, tornado, etc). Turns out Richmond had/has a large cache of chemical weapons waiting to be decommissioned and there was always a worry about a leak (due to age or natural disaster).
It appears that as of this year [0] they are finally nearing the completion of decommissioning the weapons but it's crazy to me to how long these just sat without any real work (or very slow work) being done to remove the threat.
70 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
It is hard to watch, be aware.
The Vietnam War's Agent Orange legacy | Unreported World - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMzJvwG2rsQ
https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2022-08-10/colorado-chemica...
Also, the US has nuclear weapons plus a huge fleet of bombers with conventional weapons. Pretty easy to give up an expensive party-trick when you basically decapitate the military of most countries in just a few hours.
Me, I'd press for a law that mines can only be electrically set off using a battery that decays over time. (Or any triggering device that decays away.) This is so after a year or so, past any military value, they'll be inert.
We can create the most "tremendous" and beautiful and well written law possible. It will not change the fact that war criminals don't obey the law, and that some armies are using still a lot of obsolete stuff. Landmines are still an unsolved problem.
Old mines don't decay, which is why new ones do.
Civilians being killed in war is tragic, but also seems out-of-scope, militaries aren't going to stop using area denial weapons. Making sure they don't kill people once they're no longer intended to is as close as we're likely to come without reaching utopia.
A country claiming that "this is not a war" putting bombs in random places in another country without any warning sign with the only purpose to kill as many civilians as possible, should be --very-- surprising. Is a totally different situation.
I think that means that countries have to either use mines which decay over time, as you suggest, or they have to remove the mines themselves from any designated area once the relevant conflict ends. I'm not sure if any signatories have deployed any non-decaying mines since the convention entered into force, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock
Let's look at some numbers. Ukraine, a largely agriculture country, is one of the strongest possible cases for your thesis. So consider net Ukrainian raw materials exports: <https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/UKR/Yea...>
Around $18 billion in 2019. To gain partial control of that revenue stream, Russia has largely smashed up the military it spends $50-$60 billion a year on. It's not a good trade.
You might protest that land also has factories and such on it, and that's true, but today many of those factories look like this:
<https://gdb.rferl.org/07520000-0aff-0242-a90c-08da3a5a2c06_w...>
Launching wars of aggression is a bad idea because killing people and taking things that don't belong to you is wrong. But if that fails to persuade, recall that it's also a financial catastrophe, for both sides.
(Edit: formatting)
With my deeply cynical hat on...
I mean, if they keep the territory (which seems unlikely at this moment), they get that revenue, so good for them?
They also got to clear out their stores of old munitions, and run a sales demo for newer munitions. Might have been a better demo if the campaign didn't go sideways, though. Either way, lots of business for domestic producers of munitions to resupply.
Where a whole bunch of natural gas was recently discovered (Crimea specificly).
To be clear though, i'm not saying that its always direct. Plenty of things can be strategically valuable but not instantly translatable to $$$. Even businesses don't always do things for the short term profit exclusively - sometimes long term matters.
> Why the chemical agent was buried in Kamisu has not yet been clarified by government investigations. Some believe that during the chaotic years following the war, the substance was sold and eventually transported to the city.
Thankfully, research, development and deployment of chemical/biological weapons are heavily restricted and regulated in most developed nations. If do we not learn from the past we're doomed to repeat it. Only through education and awareness can we prevent this type of tragedy from occurring again.
All his children had pulmonary problems.
Some of his grand-children also have similar problems.
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917398/
Why is this a problem? They have medical records in Iran. It is a developed country.
> Done by a country with a huge reason to find positive results
What reason? This study was done long after the Iran Iraq war.
> No mechanism for how exposure could result in genetic modification specific to pulmonary issues.
Does every study have to explain a mechanism for cause?
I don't know much about epigenetics, but I would be highly surprised if this had anything to do with that.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/last-civil-w...
John Tyler was President starting in 1841. It is indeed possible.
I can never remember when John Tyler was President but he was born in 1790, 232 years ago, which makes it sound even more implausible. We are further in history from the Ice Bucket Challenge than this still-living guy's grandfather's birth was from the end of the American Revolutionary War.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ruffin_Tyler
My apologies.
> The tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea off Takehara, Hiroshima Prefecture, is a popular tourist destination known for being the home of hundreds of bunnies, but it was once a "poison gas island" where the Imperial Japanese Army secretly manufactured chemical weapons from around 1930 to the end of the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island
> The island was dangerous for all mammals after experiments with the anthrax bacterium in 1942, until it was decontaminated in the late 20th century.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-not-...
As for most negative proofs, that still leaves plenty of rooms for any other combination of event where some of the above are not true (e.g the military accidentally participating in the spread of an existing disease for instance)
That feels like a lost battle to me.
The theory originally was that this was an escaped bioweapon. Proof going back to the previous century shows that’s not the case; as does basic consideration of the low hypothetical value of a weapon which is slow, not very lethal, and easily managed by basic military hygiene practices; and now we’re left with, what, the claim that the military might have caused slightly faster spread of the same pathogen which was already spreading in the wild? That’s like saying that COVID must be an escaped bioweapon because some PLA soldiers coughed on civilians, and it’s a weak enough formulation that nobody leads with that rather than the dramatic sounding false claim.
Guess what? The military and humanity at large make things that suck all the time. Just because something is ineffective doesn't prohibit it from being a military weapon. If that was the case we'd never have boondoggles where military spending runs amok and never produces anything useful.
Not quite: I’m saying that it wasn’t new, notably more virulent or resistant to treatment, or different from earlier samples. I’d really recommend reading the full WaPo article and especially some of the links as they help understand how there just isn’t any reason to believe this claim.
In particular, notice how this sounds:
> If you draw a circle around early Lyme Disease cases, it just happens to be in the middle of that circle.
Every part of that is wrong: those weren’t the earliest cases (unless Wisconsin moved while I wasn’t looking) and the distribution is all over. Once you remove the known untrue portions, we’re left with the far less exciting version:
> A cluster of cases was detected in an area similar to where other clusters were detected. The cases were not unusual in impact or spread, nor especially close to a base which had switched roles decades before.
This is a classic conspiracy theory: there’s no evidence but we’re asked to believe that something with minimal value was attempted, failed completely at its goals but not before leaking, but then was hushed up perfectly for decades by the same group which is supremely good at hiding their traces … except that nobody thought about the possibility civilian medical reports from an escaped bioweapon? There are an infinite number of similar probability scenarios you could dream up but it’s not scientific.
Now, not being provable doesn't mean either that it's a just conspiracy theory, as any successful conspiracy will have enough plausible deniability.
To me, the whole endeavour of trying to prove or disprove a conspiracy is a fools errand. You either believe it or not, and can have adiscussion about it, but there's no point in bringing in a scientific process for something that is not science at its core.
Yes, my thought is mostly that it's important to explicitly recognize that it's basically the god of the gaps argument because conspiracy theorists like to sound science-y and, especially, to leave as many blanks as possible for the reader to fill in so they have as much wiggle-room as possible for the future.
Ref: https://www.smh.com.au/world/agent-orange-caused-damage-to-d...
World War 1 must have really scarred everybody.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/04/11...
It appears that as of this year [0] they are finally nearing the completion of decommissioning the weapons but it's crazy to me to how long these just sat without any real work (or very slow work) being done to remove the threat.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/kentucky/articles/20...
You must not be very familiar with the speed of government work.