this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Can we agree that mines should deteriorate after a few years?
How to do that reliably though. One bad mine that doesn't deteriorate might even be more dangerous since people don't expect it.
It's usually more difficult to make it not deteriorate tho?
The chance that it just doesn't go off seems way higher to me, which would be negligible, since they aren't used for precise strikes.
That's just not how chemistry works.
Every bomb, grenade, or other munition will have some kind of explosive substance, which contains a large amount of chemical energy that is ordinarily released very quickly as kinetic energy and heat, in a big explosion. These weapons are designed to where the explosive is resilient against accidental or incidental detonation. So there are a ton of safeguards in place to prevent these things from blowing up unexpectedly.
The problem is that the energy contained within those chemical bonds is still always going to be there. And there's not an easy way to gradually release that energy. That's why unexploded ordnance is usually disposed of by blowing it up, in place, with an external explosion. The deterioration of the safeguards around accidental detonation makes the whole thing less safe, so the safest thing to do is to detonate it in place.
Even chemical batteries, which are designed for gradual release of the stored chemical energy, can sometimes overheat and cause a runaway reaction of a battery fire. Deterioration of the device is bad for controlling how that immense quantity of stored energy gets released.
So if you have a device that is hard to accidentally detonate, how will you make it so that the explosive degrades over time, without causing an explosion at an unexpected time?
Some condition that is triggered by it being burried in earth instead of being in a storehouse.
An agent that slowly reacts with oxygen/water, to make the trigger/reaction mass unusable or something? Or one that causes it to slowly release the chemical energy to the ground, after a while.
In what form? Like a really hot rock that warms the earth around it for a few decades? That's dangerous in itself, and, like my example about electrical batteries, susceptible to their own runaway reactions that cause fires or explosions.
Ok, bad idea. But making the trigger/reaction mass unusable?
That's what I'm getting at in my first comment. Any explosive is inherently in a state of high stored chemical energy. That energy will want to come out somehow. And if it isn't released, it will always stay there, ready to be released at any time.
It's the equivalent to stacking a bunch of really heavy objects on really high shelves above where people walk. When that energy gets released, it's going to be really destructive. And if that energy gets released in an unsupervised, unplanned way, people are gonna get hurt.
Yeah the thing is you cannot guarantee that all mines deactivate. Some will last longer than others and this will put a probability on ending someone's life.
It won't change how you would handle them, you need to treat them all as a risk, but it would reduce accidental detonation after the time limit. Like a kid running over one in 20 years time.
Still better than guaranteed to ending a civilians live 20 years after.
Some do?
https://www.itv.com/news/2024-11-20/why-is-the-use-of-anti-personnel-mines-in-ukraine-so-controversial
According my linked article:
Some do
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_denial_artillery_munition