After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and uninhabitable
wearethemighty.com
wearethemighty.com
I live in the region (West Flanders, Belgium) so here are some local stories.
* When my brother in law was a kid, he found an old bomb at the roadside and decided to take it home on his bike, saying things like 'Look what cool stuff I found'. Of course mom panicked and called the deminers. All friends came to look how the dismantling went.
* In fact I know plenty of people finding old grenades and stuff. People die every year messing with them at their kitchen table, even if everybody should know by now not to do that.
* Lots of farms have a heap of old bombs on the terrain. Once a year or so DOVO comes and picks them up.
* Polish people are used a lot as cheap builders and road workers. In general they dont understand Dutch (the local language) or even English. So while people try to warn them not to touch any strange metal things they find on building terrains, the message doesnt come trough (' Know nothing. Talk boss'). Nasty accidents happen as a result.
* A few years ago, an old lady dug up a hand granade from her vegetable garden. So she calls DOVO, the organisation that does the demining. DOVO responds something like no time, call back later. This pissed her off enough to throw the bloody thing in a bucket, drive to dovo, and give the bucket at the reception desk saying ' This is yours'.
While typing this, my wife asks why I'm typing on that nerd site of mine. So now she suggests going to the dunes 2 km from here and taking a photograph if I see one. Sorry guys, Im not messing with old bombs in the dark after the Brussels terrorist attacks, but yes, it's that easy.
(And yes I know this is a serious subject.)
For dutch people: here's an already classic video of west-flemish farmers trying to explain to Polish workers they need to run away if they see a bomb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWD3GqLOTgk Basically they suffix every Dutch word with -ios so it sounds Polish. The polish workers just nod without understanding a single word.
For 4) I hear the storys second hand, and i tried talking to them an dgot nowhere fast, so I can see it happening. I know a few year ago there was a scandal where hurt polish people were silently transported back to poland. In general, they are cheap and work in unsafe ways, and the builders hope like hell the authorities don't catch on, so bad news is hush-hush.
For the fans: Here is a local news article where a bomb was found and cleaned up recently. http://www.hln.be/regio/nieuws-uit-oostende/oesterbank-geeva... I live just above the map so didn't have to evacuate or stay away from the windows. These things still happen every 2 years or so. At this point, everybody stopped caring much.
* you dont' always know when you hire workers from a temp agency that nobody speaks your language.
* Its only recently that there is GSM internet reception in most fields here.
* Even I, an ITer pure sang of the internet generation, didn't think about this when being confronted with them while doing a small walk around and meeting them unexpectedly.
None of these makes this right, of course. But, I can see how this happens.
I'll be there for the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, and probably a bit of time before/after. Contact info is in my profile if anyone's interested in getting together.
It's strange to realise that there are still many people yet to be born who will die as casualties of WW1 and WW2.
If it ends up taking until the upper end of their estimate, casualties from WW1 could span an entire millennium.
Many of the early "acheologists" (they were more like tomb raiders, invading egyptian tombs, stealing the contents, and shipping to Europe) died of misterious diseases, or got mad in some way, it is where the "cursed pyramid" trope came from.
Recently it was found out that the culprit for these, was mostly fungus, the fungus locked inside those places over thousands of years, would slowly fill the air with toxic stuff, that then would poison anyone breaking in, with effects ranging from poison-related death/disease, to poison-related brain damage (thus, madness).
Also, losing technology and weapons is not new, India Oral tradition has tales that scientists estimate they were already "mythical" 6000 years ago, and they talk about "giant metal arrows that create pillars of fire and light", "air chariots that shoot other air chariots with light" and "air chariots that fire arrows that follow heat"
Or Atlantis, that was already mythical in ancient Greece (what we know of Atlantis, is about ancient greeks writing about the Atlantis myth... so to them, Atlantis was already a mythical thing).
And of course, people would always stumble into random crap left behind by earlier generations.
For example recently something puzzled many historians, when in germany archeologists found a bronze-age battlefield with traces of having people from all countries in Europe (something kinda bizarre, since until then bronze-age was considered mostly isolationist), with signs of a large scale battle (bizarre because historians thought the population to be too small then, for that happen), and lots of signs of civilisation (advanced clothing and weaponry, including signs of that the soldiers involved were some kind of special forces, having expensive clothes and weapons, multiple scars on their bones, and yet were very strong and healthy).
Or another interesting one, here on HN someone shared recently about the people found dead on tar pits are frequently murdered, not just died there stuck, and research matched ancient roman legends (To the romans, it was a legend already), about how they heard that ancient countries threw prostitutes, adulterers, enemy nobility, and other undesired people into the tar, instead of giving them normal execution and burial.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_...
Ancient Indian mythology is creepy as fuck though, got to agree - they even mention units of time of sizes like 8.64 billion human years and longer mentioned in scriptures more than 2000 years old... I mean, I imagine they got to that by playing with exponentiation and logarithms for the first time while trippin' on some 'shrooms... but that's still a good creepy basis for some alternate history tales :)
Do you have a source?
Also I realise this sounds crazy out there, but if you're interested keep an open mind and read them. The actual copies and stay away from research authors like Childress.
It's all pseudoscience/"amateur" history though. As far as I know, no experts take it seriously.
I grew up in a religious household and even as a kid, I couldn't help but draw parallels between current technology or science fiction and religious icons or events, before I even knew the name for that concept.
For example, in Islam the Quran mentions a steed, made of light in some tellings, whose step takes it to the farthest point within its sight.. [1]
A craft that travels at/near the speed of light?
They also have the concept of seven skies, or heavens; could it be seven planets known at the time?
What about the different orders of angels in Christianity, flying beings (again made of light in some versions) each having an increasing number of wings?
And of course there are already adaptations of the story of Atlantis as an alien mothership that crashed into the ocean and eventually sank.
In any case it's fun to think about.
Each one either ascends to the stars or collapses, but they all leave behind remnants that continue to shape the world for those who come after them.
Given the current political and environmental turmoil worldwide, it may not be too far-fetched that we humans of today are but one page in Earth's story. Whatever happens to us, the planet will live on and others may eventually take our place.
[1]: http://www.numenera.com/what-is-numenera/ [2]: https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com
This map shows just how many people were exposed to fallout from a single nuclear test:
http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.asp...
It is reasonable to feel aggrieved about risk you have not consented to simply because it is an injustice. Perhaps the injustice won't be visited upon me in particular but that is not the point.
You're more at risk getting an x-ray at the dentists office.
Also, why specify the continental US? Is irresponsible offshore testing somehow okay?
A small distance away from 'ground zero' of the nuclear test sites there is basically zero difference in background radiation from elsewhere in the US in 2016.
Here's some data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/10/the-h...
This is from Norway - they were close to the very large and frankly unsafe tests the Russians did. It claims some health-hazard, but then admit that the effective exposure of the population from all that testing was the equivalent of 2 medical x-rays. Not entirely benign, but not a massive health hazard either - and this is back in the 1950's right after the testing was done.
The lingering effects from nuclear testing in SE USA are really, really small and from a health perspective, completely irrelevant.
An airline pilot will be exposed to significantly more radiation than anyone living near the test sites.
I mentioned 'continental testing' because most testing in the US is not 'high yield'. The tests they did out in the Pacific were orders of magnitude greater, and there are almost zero health effects for anyone but the surrounding animals, granted the effects on sea life is not immaterial.
In the grand scheme of things, nuclear tests are a non-starter in terms of public health. Nothing has come of it.
Nuclear energy is a little bit of a different story, but even there there is a lot of hysteria and misinformation.
Well, yes, obviously. That's why I asked.
> This is from Norway - they were close to the very large and frankly unsafe tests the Russians did. It claims some health-hazard, but then admit that the effective exposure of the population from all that testing was the equivalent of 2 medical x-rays.
That is such a misrepresentation that you are basically lying. The article says the effective exposure was equivalent to sixty X-ray mammograms, or two whole-body CT scans. A single CT scan has an estimated 1/2000 chance of causing a fatal cancer[1], a reasonable risk if it's used to diagnose a much more dangerous existing condition. The population of Norway in 1956 was 3,460,000--that means ~3,500 deaths from the equivalent of two unnecessary CT scans, in Norway alone.
Additionally, from your article, "Exposure to nuclear radiation during months three and four of pregnancy [due to fallout over Norway, 1956-1966] was associated with reduced educational attainment, high school completion, and adult earnings. Such exposures were also associated with reduced IQ scores among boys at 18 years of age. A one standard deviation increase in ground exposure reduced high school completion by about 1 percentage-point among men, and by about 2 percentage points among women."
> The tests they did out in the Pacific were orders of magnitude greater, and there are almost zero health effects for anyone but the surrounding animals
This is also a complete lie. Read any account of Castle Bravo alone, and the radiation poisoning and birth defects inflicted on the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, which the US government covered up for decades.
[1] http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/diagnosis-staging/ct-scan...
If think of exposure to radio isotopes in terms of 'chest x-rays' you need to study more.
No it doesn't. That map shows the wind disbursement of detectable fallout over a course of days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Atmospher...
That map shows how exposure was effected.
It notes that today background radiation is increased by 5µSv per year.
xkcd helps us understand it https://xkcd.com/radiation/
So the yearly increased dose from testing... is like getting a dental x-ray, taking a short flight, eating 50 bananas, or spending 4 days in Colorado.
* I-131 has a half life of 8 days
* statistically significant cancer rate increases are only seen when exposure happened under the age of 20
* cancer risk peaked 15 years after exposure
* the 30-year survival rate for related thyroid cancer is 90%
(don't worry about drinking milk these days)
So if you were a kid at the time, it happened to rain in the short time when atmospheric I-131 concentration was high after a test, and you drank a lot of milk... you had a noticeably higher chance of a fairly low risk cancer around 1980. A real risk to be sure, testing was stopped for a reason, but let's not blow it out of proportion or claim millions of people are still at risk.
And don't forget to notice that your risk of dying in a war is drastically lower as a direct result of these weapons. A direct result of their creation has resulted in relative peace unprecedented in the history of human civilization. War between major powers now seems impossible and old fashioned, though unfounded fear of these weapons was used for decades after WWII as an inappropriate game to control populations and fight-out conflicts between states that could no longer actually go to war.
We’re still evacuating entire cities every week because some new WWII ordnance was found, and has to be defused.
Or you learn that they found some 500lbs bomb half a meter below your school’s football field, with an unstable system that could explode every minute.
You just learn to live with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minefields_in_Croatia
It was a bit unnerving seeing all the signage in the hills above Dubrovnik when I visited.
"The southern Adriatic Sea has represented a major dumping area of war residues of both conventional and chemical weapons for almost a hundred years"
http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=64f53412f4d84603b277...
In the case of the Irish Sea, which was the main MoD dump since around 1920, 14,600 tons of Phosgene, and by 1949 the RAF alone had dumped 137,000 tons. It ceased being used in 1973. [1]
In the Baltic fishermen catch upto 3 tons of munitions each year.
BP turned up quite bit of unexploded ordnance while exploring for their now infamous Gulf of Mexico rig.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1488371/MoD-dumped-mu...
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/world-war-ii-muni...
[3] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/28/14141378-world-wa...
Terrible devices with awful intent, but they do still work.
Technically, the shells being found now are the buggy ones, that didn't explode when they were supposed to.
My point is - we as a society should be actively distilling in everyone the reverse of the results of the stanford prison study - you are responsible for your actions, even if someone else tells you it's ok or even orders you. Because in the end, as the attacker, you always have a choice, when it's just you and someone else.
In the end it's just a person against another person, just because someone told them that the other guy is bad. Everyone should be taught to question that. Probably he/she is just as scared as you are.
I recently watched "Lessons of Darkness" (documentary by Werner Hertzog) again and the scene where a woman describes soldiers coming into her home and stepping on the head of her infant was just haunting, because I could not stop thinking of, why would anyone do that. In that moment, it's not your superior ordering you - it's you making the decision to be the terrible torturer.
Please, just walk away.
EDIT: I see some upvotes/interest so I want to state a feeling that I have: that we would have never done this if we respected Laotian people or thought of them as our equals. Only by thinking of them as simple poor brown hill folk could something like this happen. If Norway invaded Sweden via Denmark, we would never have treated Denmark the way we treated Laos.
> From 1964 to 1973, as part of the Secret War operation conducted during the Vietnam War, the US military dropped 260 million cluster bombs – about 2.5 million tons of munitions – on Laos over the course of 580,000 bombing missions. This is equivalent to a planeload of bombs being unloaded every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years – nearly seven bombs for every man, woman and child living in Laos.
> Nearly half of Laos is now contaminated with unexploded ordnances (UXOs), explosive weapons such as bombs, grenades and land mines. Cluster bombs, explosive weapons that work by ejecting hundreds of smaller submunitions over a wide area, make up the majority of UXOs that plague the country. Cluster munitions pose an especially grave danger to civilians, according to specializing in the field of disability, because they are “highly imprecise and indiscriminate” weapons designed to “scatter explosives over swaths of land often hundreds of yards wide.”
> Of the 260 million cluster bombs dropped by the United States, up to 30 percent of them failed to detonate. These bombs were released on targets in a large shell or casing. Each of the casings contained roughly 600 to 700 small bomblets, or “bombies,” as they are often called in Laos.
> There are now close to 78 million unexploded bomblets littering rice fields, villages, school grounds, roads and other populated areas in Laos, hindering development and poverty reduction. More than 34,000 people have been killed or injured by cluster munitions since the bombing ceased in 1973, with close to 300 new casualties in Laos every year. About 40 percent of the accidents result in death and 60 percent of the victims are children. At this time, less than 1 percent of the UXOs have been cleared.
http://legaciesofwar.org/resources/books-documents/land-of-a...
In other words, is the rate of accidents high enough to de-mine and reduce the likelihood of future accidents?
In theory it sounds great to pay Laotians to de-mine fields in an organized and systematic manner, thus making quantifiable progress, progressively de-mining, and boosting employment. I don't know if it would work or if it's a realistic goal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFY2vTW538
Edit: I found an amazing video of a man disarming a mine that I thought I'd share as well. I assume this is how they do it over there currently. "If you press that, blow up"
Edit: Compare him to this guy[0] doing the same mine.
Edit Edit: Down that same rabbit hole I found this[1], I had no idea this stuff was so easy to find.
The issue with forcefully exploding mines is that a certain number might be defective, and/or unstable. Maybe the trigger doesn't work well enough - but maybe it can still go off - perhaps the main charge becomes unstable on its own etc.
There's a reason anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions are illegal (well, in/by civilized countries, anyway) - it's really, really hard to de-mine/clear up this stuff.
Interesting video.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munition...
So, in the comment section about an article about how two countries of white people went to war and dropped so many bombs that a century later some areas are still unusable, you are claiming that the only reason a country of white people dropped so many bombs on another country that a century later areas will still be unusable is because... the other country had brown people?
The points you make about Iraq, war profiteers, and context are all spot-on and very informative. Thank you.
Laos-the-country wasn't, but Laos-the-geographic-area definitely was. Rightly or wrongly, the US was bombing southern Laos because that's where the North Vietnamese supply channel was. It had nothing to do with the skin colour of the Laotians, and everything to do with the lack of political and military power of Laos.
Long, harrowing and left me hankering for more. He covers Verdun in the later episodes.
The entire length of the series is nearly 24 hours, but it is so worth it. Even if you're not a fan of history, check it out because Dan weaves a masterful true story that keeps you on the edge of your seat for the entire 24 hours.
[0] http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepri...
It's a good listen, and it's worth your time if you haven't tried his stuff.
edit: Woah where do I even start on that?
Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity -> so good!!
History of Russia: From Peter the Great to Gorbachev
Rise and Fall of the British Empire
- Machiavelli in Context (probably the best course of theirs I've listened to)
- Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity
- Conquest of the Americas
- Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages (same lecturer--one of the best)
- Foundations of Western Civilization I and II
- History of Ancient Rome
- Birth of the Modern Mind
- Story of Human Language
- History of Science from Antiquity to 1700
It was fantastic! it talked about the anabaptist takeover of munster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnster_Rebellion.
I'm finishing the last episode right now. Among the topics he covered so far:
- The murder of Franz Ferdinand and the mentality of the Serbian assassins. Carlin has a way of explaining how terribly coincidental everything was: the first assassin failing, the couple escaping and complaining at the police station about their treatment, the driver taking the wrong turn out of the city, the car backfiring near where a second assassin happened to be standing...
- Carlin does a great job explaining the new German nationalism and the status quo before the war. He explains how carefully Bismarck made a web of diplomatic relations to protect Germany against a two-front war that his successors immediately tore down.
- Stories of German efficiency in the initial invasion of Belgium and the exact moments when people realized that this was a different type of war. The French were still wearing white gloves and the Germans issued everyone gray khakis.
- Descriptions of how naval warfare was changing and how most battleships, even those made just ten years ago, became obsolete. One great story is how the British original planned to use these now obsolete ships against the Turks in Gallipolli but the admirals were too hesitant to move quickly and risk the ships because they had an emotional connection to them! Most of those admirals served as junior officers on those ships!
- How unspeakably terrible Verdun, the Somme, the Marne and Ypres were. Ypres, for example, Carlingoes into detail about men falling off of duckboards and drowning in the mud. Most of the time, the mud was so thick and the equipment so heavy that their platoon members couldn't help them or they'd risk drowning themselves. So they'd stay up at night, hearing the survivors slowly sink...
There's so many other stories I can't remember. It's a 24 hour series. Can't recommend it enough.
He's an excellent storyteller and really grips you with the details.
Then some days ago we had here on HN frontpage, research that shows that PTSD, even in more recent conflicts, IS shellshock, that the air pressure of the explosions and the shaking actually damage the brain, and cause inflammations that cause PTSD symptoms.
I wonder then, how bad it was for the WW1 people, those that were near the concentrated fire of 150 explosions per hour nearby, and survived, maybe some of them wished they had been hit instead of surviving...
Not trying to start a flame war. Just interested in the PTSD thing itself.
Examples: childhood poverty; abusive/neglectful parents; societal discrimination (especially if violence or a heightened possibility is a factor).
As far as cortisol goes well it is again not that simple, both elevated and lowered cortisol levels have been recorded in PTSD cases which is why it's still debated if lower or higher levels of cortisol cause or are a symptom or an indicator of PTSD, and since cortisol levels are only usually tested in cases where the person has already been or being diagnosed the correlation is even harder to identify, especially when considering that both lowered and elevated levels of cortisol can be recorded in nominal people and in people suffering from other mental disorders.
PTSD is just another placeholder akin to "shell shock" and the later "combat fatigue", in the end it would be an umbrella of various disorders with various preconditions and causes expressing themselves in a similar fashion.
They could be correct, regardless of evidence.
There are tons of people walking around with similar or even more "minor" forms of PTSD. And it's causing them stress and giving them potentially harmful behaviors like hypervigillance. Many of them will go through their lives not knowing or even recognizing the possibility that they're experiencing PTSD, because society says PTSD has to be a 500 pound gorilla, and a 2 pound monkey on your back is not even worth worrying about.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/what-if-ptsd-is-m...
(NOTE: This is for some of what goes under the umbrella term "PTSD", so of course not for every single diagnosis. Only the people exposed to such shock waves.)
Also, "that later got changed to PTSD" is a gross oversimplification.
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2016/07/01/anatomy-of-a-world-...
The YouTube video posted downstream in this thread, at about 7 minutes, touches on this -- both physical and psychological stresses would result in symptoms described as "shell shock".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cc7ehb8agWY
Modern PTSD similarly describes a set of symptoms which may result from physical or psychological stresses. There was a commenter in the earlier thread who seemed to have a distinct inability to grasp this even when presented with NIMH and Mayo Clinic definitions of the condition:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033214
Both causes are included.
My own lay sense is that the brain is a complex organ, and may well exhibit multiple modes of breakdown, several of which express similar end results. Whether it's repeat psychological strain or physiological disruption, or chemical or idiopathic causes, failure of proper neural function would seem likely to result in similar types of symptoms: shaking, loss of speech or senses, decline in mental function, paralysis.
PTSD is, and always has been, a thing of its own. But for a very long time people with explosive blast traumatic brain injury ("shell shock") were misdiagnosed as having only PTSD. In all likelihood many people with "shell shock" that has been misdiagnosed as PTSD alone also actually have PTSD as well.
The major symptoms of "shell shock" include disorientation, weakness or numbness in extremities, dizziness, memory problems, irritability, confusion, etc. Typical major symptoms of PTSD include reliving the event in your mind (such as through "intrusive imagery"), hyperarousal, hypervigillance, and emotional distress (especially negative changes in thinking, ideals, mood, etc.). There is some overlap because the stress aspect will make people irritable and distressed. Because all of these things are filtered through personalities and cognition it can be difficult to suss out the underlying true symptoms, especially if someone doesn't want to share their feelings.
But you can have both. And the fact that many soldiers who have been the victims of blast trauma almost certainly will have some degree of PTSD as well (due to the likelihood that the blast was a major traumatic incident in their life, possibly involving the death or grievous injury of someone close to them) has made it all the more difficult to suss out the particular role of "shell shock". I suspect that a lot of the research into traumatic brain injury in boxing and football has aided the discovery (or re-discovery) of "shell shock" greatly.
We will use all the means at our disposal to clean up and undo the damage we have done to our home.
Swarms of autonomous robots, and possibly nanites will replenish the soil, water and air. We will restore coastlines and replant forests.
Wiser, and ashamed of our primitive past, we will rebuild a pristine paradise fitting of a spacefaring civilization.
Doubly asinine to link that old utopian thought to mystical singularity nanobot swarms etc...
PS: nanobot swarms would make a terrifyingly effective military weapon.
Responding to violence aimed at destroying or enslaving your society with enough violence to prevent it is kind of required by any society that does not have a death wish.
I can choose to respond with pacifism to violence directed at me. I do not have the right to choose that for anyone else, nor for my nation.
Would it really have mattered to the common man? Maybe not. did it matter to the common man that he or his sons got sent away to war to die? Definitely.
Pacifism can be a sensible policy sometimes. Some wars aren't worth fighting, even if you "win" or force a stalemate.
This is not entirely true. The term "war of attrition" came from WWI, and it was specifically referring to depopulating the opponent's country by killing all the males.
I'm pointing out that if say the French had surrendered to the Germans early in WWI there's no historical evidence that that would have been the case, and likely countless lives would have been saved.
The destruction of the state is not synonymous with the destruction of the people in it. Most wars only seek to abolish state power, not the people that make up those states.
Or even earlier, France could have declared neutrality in regard to Serbia like Germany asked them to
E.g. the Germans believed the British wouldn't go to war with them over Belgium, the British knew Belgium was under threat in advance, but wouldn't draw a clear line in the sand telling the Germans that violating Belgium was an act of war.
Likely doing that would have kept Britain out of the war entirely since Germany would have attacked France directly.
The Kaiser wasn't a bloodthristy genocidal maniac, and an unconditional surrender from the Entente would not have been the only outcome of an early peace. War reparations, and, as per most European wars, small territorial/colonial concessions would have been the far more likely outcome.
What really was at stake was national pride. For the ruling class, that was one thing that they would not surrender. The common man should not have given a rat's ass about.
Responding with violence actually is the only reason why there was WWI. Also every party that took part in the war saw it as an opportunity to further their own interests.
What could cause this change?
What could be different tomorrow compared to the past many thousands of years of wars that will stop wars from happening?
War is pretty simple in the general sense. Limited resources (land being the main one), and selfish people. We have more technology today, yes, but we let the population explode so land resources are still quite limited.
If you're expecting people to just 'wake up' I'm afraid that wont happen now for the same reasons it did not happen in the past.
Cultures ebb and flow. You cannot expect anti-selfishness culture to be a forever-lasting deterrent to war.
When technology advances such that individuals have the power to cause massive destruction in lone wolf attacks, and science advances to the point where we have the ability, we will have the choice of whether or not we will allow traits such as psychopathy to continue in the gene pool or to be edited out.
We will come to a point where we will just not be able to tolerate the destructive power of anti social individuals.
I think we will edit out the sadistic, dominating and anti social parts of our nature or we will become extinct.
The article one of the most poignant things I've ever read. The tone was essentially "Finally we've figured out how nations can live together in peace and harmony, and never again will humans engage in a war of that magnitude". Crucially, this article was from one of the editions published after World War I, and shortly before World War II. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
I've often wanted to reread that the article and ponder how applicable it is to the present. Does anyone happen to have a copy? The 11th Edition is available online from archive.org, but that's too early. And I presume it was revised quickly in any editions printed after World War Two.
There are places in Cambodia that are no-go areas because of all the stuff we dropped there that did not explode.
I think we hear more about the ordinance in WWI because was dropped in such a small part of France and Belgium that is so heavily populated.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest
2. My numbers don't add up. I just saw a BBC story about WW1 industrial production (tl;dr: allies vastly outproduced the central powers by more than 2 to 1). There's a graph showing that Germany produced 400,000 tons of explosives from 1914 to 1917. Four times that amount is less than 2 million tons, so the number in wikipedia (1 ton per m^2) is definitely wrong.
http://www.inertord.com/subgravelmines.html or here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43_Dragontooth
weighing 20g, looking like a fucking toy, 4800 of them in a cluster bomb.
So you could easily imagine "mines" that were a tenth of that size, 2g, with an embedded microcontroller to trigger them under arbitrary conditions, and enough explosive to maim you if you picked them up or stepped on them. A 1kg-payload weather balloon could carry 500 such "mines".
It's going to be difficult to keep having civilization.
When I was in Cambodia, I saw the results of what landmines did, they're fucking horrific. They aren't designed to kill someone, but to only blow their foot off and maim them.
I believe that they're one of the most barbaric weapons of war. It's a damn shame that the USA, China, and Russia won't ratify the Ottawa Convention.
Actually, I think a lot of people would consider that a significant improvement.
"A propellant made with ammonium nitrate would swell and shrink with temperature changes, and eventually the tablet would break down into powder. Water and humidity would speed the process. Powder burns more quickly than a tablet, so an air bag whose propellant had crumbled would be likely to deploy too aggressively."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-02/sixty-mill...
That's just about the same reason the Clinton/Gore administration gave for not signing the climate change agreement.
The US has declared that it's going to abide by the treaty except on the Korean peninsula, which is entirely about the mines in the Korean DMZ meant to stop North Korean tanks from rolling in.
That's not comparable to the general use of anti-personnel landmines in warfare. It's a specific cordoned off area with big signs surrounding it saying "enter here and die".
Given what I've seen of strip mines from the air, I wonder how long it would take to process 100' of material from 65 square miles (~17,000 hectare) through a refining process. Could you just decide that what ever plant and animal life and structures would be forfeit and just dig it out, process it, and put it back? How long once everything had been processed might you expect it to take for the forest to regrow, certainly within 100 years you'd have a solid regrowth. So can you pull 150 to 200 years off the restoration time ?
I guess you are thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messine.... One of them exploded in 1955, a few others may yet explode or may be fairly harmless by now.
Edit: The German bucketwheel excavators like the Bagger 293 might do it faster.
You can think of it like a mortgage with interest, if you pay it off slowly over time it takes less money per month, but the total money over time is large. If you pay off the mortgage it takes a lot of money but the overall cost is lower. What if you do the modern calculus of costing the land use, versus the cost of complete remediation more quickly.
Let me put it into a modern context. If you took 65 square miles and turned it into a city with the density somewhere between Manhattan and Aleppo, you could settle the entire middle eastern diaspora on land that is currently unused. This is fertile land which once had 9 villages. The diaspora is filled with working age people you could recruit as labor for the effort. How much would that cost? Would that be more or less than the cost of refugee programs and border management and social programs for the unemployed immigrants?
I only ask the question if anyone thinks about it this way, I don't think they do.
[1] http://www.navistardefense.com/navistardefense/vehicles/maxx...
The land may not be usable for another few hundred years, but what is the opportunity cost of all that upfront remediation? It's big. That's capital that can be invested in other things.
Some land in the middle of nowhere is not really that valuable. The productivity of such rural land is low. This is why no one has bought up that land and remediated it in the first place.
> How much would that cost? Would that be more or less than the cost of refugee programs and border management and social programs for the unemployed immigrants?
That 65sqm could be anywhere; there's tons of un-mined land in Europe. It's a whole continent. There is no necessary connection to remediation. If you can't make such a 'diaspora city' work economically on unmined land, you can't make it work on mined land either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9609091
EDIT: the guy who took all these pictures merits a credit and has a website all by himself: http://oliviersainthilaire.com/?page_id=38
I'm having trouble finding a reference, but I don't find 2.5 million tons unbelievable. The comparison to Vietnam is silly because that was a much smaller and different war, and aircraft have limited weight capacity.
It's said that some artillery bombardments in WWI were called drum fire because it sounded like a drum roll. During Verdun there was so much artillery that it's said you couldn't distinguish the individual explosions, it was just a load continuous roar that went on for many hours. Perhaps that battlefield is where the statistic comes from.
They were going through tens of thousands of shells a day and were quickly running out after a few weeks in. Many factories were converted or built to produce explosives. Dozens of trains were built to transport them to the front lines where they were fired continuously for 4 years. The scale and duration of the war was just insane.
I think you are misreading the OP. 2.5 million tons is the amount that would be required to cover a single square mile at 1 ton per square meter. Since the Zone Rouge is many square miles, it would require 1.2 billion tons of explosive for the 1 ton per square meter figure to be correct.
"I don't think the combatant nations produced 2.5 million tons of explosives altogether during the whole war" should be read as "While 2.5 million tons for the entire war might be plausible, 500 times that amount for a single front is clearly an error". My guess would be that someone along the way confused "acre" or "hectare" with "square meter".
http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/nitrate says:
> Great Britain, for example, stepped up production of powder and explosives from 50,000 tons in 1914 to over 1,860,000 tons in 1917
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17011607 has a graph of the British and German explosives production during the war years. It looks like about 625,000 tons, with 285,000 by Great Britain.
I have better feelings about http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/68/2/171 ("Lord Justice of Appeal John Fletcher Moulton and explosives production in World War I: ‘the mathematical mind triumphant’"). Figure 3 shows Great Britain manufactured about 340,000 tons of high explosives, and 400,000 tons of propellant. (Rough eyeball numbers.) But that gives only about 350,000 tons for the year 1917, compared to the 1,860,000 tons earlier.
Table A7, p122 of https://books.google.com/books?id=2YqjfHLyyj8C&pg=PA121&lpg=... lists partial wartime production as 409,000 tons of explosives for Great Britain, and 350,000 tons for Germany, or 759,000 tons total.
Table 9 p87 of https://books.google.com/books?id=q_G_Qnag_TcC&pg=PA64&lpg=P... says Great Britain produced 409,000 tons of powder and explosives.
I can believe 2.5M tons produced by all sides during the war. Barely.
I can't believe that would all be on a single square mile. That would be equivalent, after all, to a 2.5MT nuke, or a Little Boy/Hiroshima-sized bomb equivalent every day for 3-4 months.
And they dropped a few of these too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb)
Most munitions, whether fired by artillery or dropped from aircraft, were much smaller of course.
Super heavy stuff like railroad guns were much bigger and more powerful. Terrible stuff.
An even taller (but lighter) shell was fired by the Long Max [2] converted battleship guns.
The majority of the bombardment was carried out by 75-85mm guns, like for example [3]. Their shells were about half the caliber, and a quarter the mass, of modern 155mm howitzer ammunition, but still twice the mass of modern light infantry mortar shells.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bertha_(howitzer)
Very close to where I live here in Australia is a beautiful cliffside area that is frequented by locals and tourists alike to watch the sunset over the sea. At the foot of the cliffs is an old WWII dumping ground that is absolutely littered with asbestos waste. The local council won't move it because it is (a) too expensive and (b) actually safer to leave it in situ because the sea water keeps it damp and prevent asbestos dust from spreading. I wonder at the other toxins.
Lot of local kids still go down at low tide and forage - you are guaranteed to find bullet casings etc., and a friend of mine once found an actual Colt .45 down there once (totally rusted and useless, and he handed it in to the police).
Is that the actual thought process of an adult in 2016 Australia? You hear "no wildlife" and your first thought is not environmental damage but "bad karma"?
EDIT: Do you also derive moral superiority by going around critiquing millions of people who still 'irrationally' believe in 2016 that some higher entity created the earth in 7 days?
http://www.landscapesatwar.eu/2015/04/26/the-ecological-resi...
Apparently it is an excellent habitat for bats!
In fact the Verdun Forest area is a protected habitat [1]. The shell holes filled with water and provide a habitat for wetland species.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/05/wildlife...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/13/wildlife...
E.g. this picture: http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/...
The remaining fissionable material in the bombs was 139 pounds of U-235 (Little Boy) and 12 pounds of Pu-239 (Fat Man). Essentially atomized and spread into the upper atmosphere, where it spread throughout the global environment and may have caused a hard-to-measure uptick in cancer, but the actual demolished territory is rebuilt and thriving today.
Horrifying to think that in the long-term view, the conventional ordnance of the European theater was a bigger threat to human life and ecosystem stability than the atomic bombs.
How about the lives that weren't lost as a result of
(1) nuclear deterrence preventing wars between great powers
(2) nuclear power competing with coal and preventing deaths from air pollution/coal mining/global warming
though?
> human life and ecosystem stability
You're going to have to pick one of those.
You're defending something no one was attacking.
http://helcom.fi/baltic-sea-trends/hazardous-substances/sea-...
http://www.euronews.com/2014/02/21/troubled-waters-the-hidde...
These lands are scarred by the war but are surely inhabitable if those countries had higher population density. All the government has to do is perhaps spend couple of billion dollars picking up all the shells, bombs and mines.
Bullshit.
It's a interesting story but this article is repeated blog spam.
The comments here are much more informative.
And we're always looking for opportunities to use them. Remember Donald Rumsfled's "Shock and Awe"?
The UN, WTO, EU, etc, are ineffective, bureaucratic messes, but no matter how bad they are, they're a better way of solving international disputes than the historical alternatives.
Western nationalists like to talk about how the cultures of the middle east are inherently violent, but seem to forget that the history of europe was a centuries-long bloodbath that eventually engulfed the entire world in horror and put us nearly on the brink of the extinction of all human life.
It's those alliances and international organizations that allowed us to step backwards from it. Solving our problems in courtrooms and at negotiating tables rather than on the battlefield.
Practically, even had the UN been built instead of the League, World War 2 probably would have still happened (Italy was on the Detente side in World War 1 and would have vetoed any anti-Germany resolution).
I think it's just that:
1. A weakened Europe has nothing left to fight over, and any war between two European countries would have resulted in the Soviet Union sweeping through, swallowing them all up
2. Even the "winning" side would be devastated due to Nuclear weapons.
3. Land has much less importance in a service/technology economy. Look at Singapore, for example.
The other thing that happened after WWII, which probably has a bigger impact on the lack of war, was that, rather than deciding which countries gets which land by plebiscites, the people who lived on the wrong side of the borders were simply deported en masse. Deportation of the Poles from Lwów, the Germans from Stettin, or the Finns from Karelia did a lot to dampen irredentist claims to those lands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Crisis_en...
It seems to be a constant that larger human organizations are simply impossible to reform effectively, so we're stuck with chaos. I don't think there's a solution for this, short of genetically-engineering humans to work better together, or else we would have found it over the past couple of millennia.
Introspection driven change is hard for every organization. Sometimes you just need a tantrum or external stimulus.
Instead, I think Brexit will happen, the EU won't reform, the economies of both will collapse, followed by the US's, and then China's, a massive world war will happen, and then life for the survivors will resemble scenes from "The Walking Dead".
I know someone who used to handle transporting goods around Europe and experienced the reduction of paperwork and inspection and costs and delays and so on, until he ended up with basically none. He says all the troubles he used to have that no longer exist utterly dwarf anything new.
I don't have much actual evidence, though.
This is cleary true, but it doesn't follow that the right solution is to quit the union rather than reforming it. There are more options than rabid nationalism vs total financialization.
That's a funny way of defining 'interests'.
The problem is that sometimes those institutions overreach into areas that should be handled at a lower level. Arguably the British Parliament is more guilty of this than the EU and has control of things that are much more important to everyday life.
It is sad it only takes such a short time for people to forget.
I have met a couple of people who have experienced World War II, although most of them were only children at the time. I listened to stories of being woken in the middle of the night by sirens, and then spending the rest of the night in a bunker, unable to sleep, constantly being shaken by explosions. I cannot imagine what that must be like, but I know that I would not wish that on anyone.
Somebody once said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. So far, it looks like whoever said it was right.
WWIII will probably start with what will look an awful lot like the Forth Crusade.
Edit: obviously I meant fourth, and I don't mean this from the religious perspective, just the European involvement in conflicts in the Middle East.
More seriously, I don't see the West responding to a call from the Pope to reconquer Jerusalem.
British politic elites haven't been listening to the lowly for ages - They've done many things against the countryside English people for long, for example importing new workers in London and forcing multiculturalism on people who don't want it. I don't care whether it's good or bad for England to welcome extremely good Indian talents - If the People didn't want that, then don't do it, because it's how the democracy works. The Brexit vote is just a vote against the elites.
The cause of the war, if any, is not the Brexit as you pretend, but the divide between the People's opinions and their elites certainly causes a war.
Another thing. It's all a democracy theater. In France I'm persuaded the police is not doing its job. In a single day I could find cocaine and photograph a hundred of traffic infringements. A trained reporter could buy a gun. So why can't the police? We have police everywhere but I don't see them working, they sometimes kick a thief at 10 policemen against 1 civilian, or they themself jaywalk or use their sirens. Terrorism is the result of the police letting things go. It's a theater, they just have to wake up and do something to find criminal networks, but they want people to vote more extremist, so they'd rather not work.
Next time you have an opinion on which vote is right and which one is war, please also consider that the people only vote among a limited set of options. For example, in France, the next vote is for the president. No-one is asking the French people whether they want to limit the family visas, extend the refugee visas, add more education in poorer areas or get the police to work. No, the French people are just asked whether they want the same president (the one who didn't listen to 6 months of demonstrations, didn't improve economic results, created new taxes and searched 3200 Muslims without due diligence the week after the Bataclan attack), or whether they want to switch to someone (Le Pen - extreme right) who will bark against immigrants. It's an extremely narrow choice. I'm not sure whether an incompetent president is a good thing.
Is democracy about pandering to a minority who happen to be very opinionated on the matter? I can not think of a single vote that has democratically rejected multiculturalism or even immigration. At the last election people mostly voted for parties that promise to control numbers, and are broadly in favour of immigration.
Ultimately people had many of reasons for voting for Brexit, which may well have included bashing the elites. But in a democracy we do not decide policy on the basis of perception of a referendum but by normal parliamentary democracy.
> Though the Zone Rouge started at some 460 square miles in size, cleanup efforts reduced it to around 65 square miles.