Anyway, long story short, conventional wisdom seemed to be that FASCAM self-destruct didn’t work worth a damn.

Short duration self-destructed in less than 24 hours (how much less was classified, and unknown to us). Long duration self-destructed in more than 24 hours (again, the exact time was classified and unknown to us).

The nature of the tripwires was supposed to ensure that even if an individual mine failed to self-destruct, its neighbors would set it off. I have no idea if this worked in practice, since the balloon never went up. They only let us fire one live Copperhead in four years, and certainly didn’t let us fire FASCAM.

If the US military wants to give up using them on their own, as they did with flamethrowers for tactical and humanitarian reasons, I think many groups would deserve credit for raising the issue.

There are some weapons that are designed in ways indiscriminately to maximize widespread suffering, and in any discussion of just war that cannot be tolerated. Wars are fought shortsightedly, and without fail civilians are left footing the bill.

I’m far from sure your argument holds water; military types I know seem to think otherwise (or did when we discussed it). Attacking through tunnels instead of across a broad front would be a big difference….

I guess I fall back on Von Clauswitz, who wrote that it was all very well to blunt our swords in the name of peace, but someday somebody would come along with a sharp sword and hack off our heads. The military apparently believe that mines are a necessary part of our arsenal. While I do not put blind faith in the military, I put somewhat less in the “peace above all else” types, particularly on technical matters. For one thing, they seem to lie a lot.

Like #10 Mike said, there’s another side to the story that we’ll never know which precludes making a fully informed judgment. The only surprising thing is that they would not tell him the reason for revocation. From my line of work, I have a passing familarity with how the security clearance system works (but only DoD, not DoE – otoh his company Bettis, is one of two main contractors wrt the Navy Nuclear Power Program, so works with both departments). The security clearance rejection/suspension/revocation letters from HQ always did say in broad terms why a particular person’s clearance was being denied. Normally it was excessive debt/poor credit history combined with failure to report this accurately when applying for the security clearance. But they were almost always preceded by a letter to the local security manager requesting additional information / justification when adverse information was discovered.

But if he should prevail in his legal case somewhere down the line, he said he will come back to Pittsburgh to claim the rights he thought he was entitled to as a U.S. citizen.

To be further contrarian, sorry, being a US citizen doesn’t automatically give you a right to a security clearance nor a right to employment at a government contractor. He’s not being kicked out of the country, he’s leaving on his own.

Mines aren’t much of a deterrent to North Korea. They have numerous underground tunnels to bypass mined areas, rolling artillery barrages to destroy mines along the axis of advance, a huge number of sappers to breach fields, and most importantly, soldiers either fanatical or fearful enough to plunge straight through the fields anyway.

The North is deterred mainly by our overwhelming superiority in air power, the 500K+ ROK military (relatively low manpower? hardly), and most importantly their lack of real interest in adventurism in the first place. Yes, NK builds nukes and threatens war every other week, but a war would endanger the good thing the chonger and the top brass have going. Unless circumstances change drastically in the near future, mines are pretty low on the deterrent list for these guys.

So, whatever their other merits or problems, I don’t see how the DMZ a good example for not banning antipersonnel mines.

I guess I’m just tired of “do good” groups that don’t think things through. The DMZ in Korea is a fairly significant “aspect”; if the treaty doesn’t make an exception for it, the treaty is no good. If the treaty is no good, then the group pushing it needs to be criticized until the treaty IS good, not patted on the back for good intentions. Good intentions count for bupkiss in the real world, and wishful thinking isn’t – strictly speaking – thinking.

Too many treaties and manifestoes get signed without much real thought on how they will affect the real world. Then we discover that we can’t really shut down all the coal power plants and run the world with windmills, because we can’t pay for it. We find that disarming the good British subjects leaves the thugs in charge. We learn that stopping the hunting of Big Cats in Africa causes the locals to exterminate them as dangerous pests (where they were once useful ways to extract money from would-be Great White Hunters).

And we can’t go back and start over from scratch because the legions of the well-meaning will hold their breaths and drum their heels on the floor if we even bring the subject up.

foo.

LMAO…that would earn you a good tasering. Don’t have your dog with you when you do it….

The problem I would have with an article that bashes the anti-land mine movement because they didn’t make an exemption for the DMZ is that it really does focus on a small aspect of one group working to cleanup minefields and as a consequence has the effect of undermining support for the entire movement. Although the reasoning behind the article may not necessitate it, the end effect is an impression of pro-land mines and general indifference, if not hostility, to the fact that they pose a serious risk to civilians during and after periods of conflict worldwide.

In a politically correct world, militaries would clean up their messes when they’re done fighting, and maybe land mines wouldn’t be a big issue. Unhappily, reality proves otherwise.

Mines allow a country like South Korea to keep the cost of adventure-ism on the part of North Korea unacceptably high for reasonably low cost in manpower.

I think the issue is that- like Gun Control – the anti-mine movement is a solution from people who have given up on condemning barbarism, and turned their attention against tools. It is too much trouble, or too politically incorrect for these folk to say “These countries use mines in a responsible manner, but these do not; therefore the latter are barbarians and we should thump them”. Just as it is too politically incorrect to actually seriously punish thugs and stickup artists until they do something outrageous and twisted, so the same folks want to ban handguns.

In a politically correct world, there would be no use for landmines because everybody would play nice. Unhappily a politically correct world is presently achieveable only through recreational drugs.

I think the problem is that land mines are inherently indiscriminate. If ideas of just war and just violence concern appropriate targeting and minimizing civilian casualties, it’s pretty hard to defend land mines. Kinda like saturating the ground with mercury in order to deter forces from maybe passing through. Kinda leaves a big and dangerous mess to clean up.

And doesn’t attacking the anti-land mine movement because there might hypothetically be a situation in which they could be useful kinda, you know, red herringy? I mean, I don’t think people are really focusing on de-mining the Korean border. Sounds like a nice excuse to me for doing nothing about the places where land mines are a problem.

Or so I think. Anyone have another angle?

I wanted to get caught speeding in the next town over so I could ask one of the neighboring cops how hard he laughed when he heard about the SWAT mishap.