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Manufacturers of prosthesis, rejoice!
Anti-personnel mines are making a big comeback in Europe, with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty. Poland has now decided to deploy millions of mines on its eastern border. Ukraine is of course in breach of that treaty, but as a non-signatory I do not see that Russia would get to whine about it.
On the one hand, I will concede that the Ottawa Treaty was always lacking support from the superpowers, unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention. Of course, the US has its own excuse (WP):
I do not think that the US argument is without merit, and if they had pushed for a treaty exemption for mines whose design had been approved by international experts so that they explode within 48 hours, that would perhaps not critically weaken Ottawa. The problem is that the military incentives do not lie that way. Obviously there are situations where it will be advantageous for a mine to remain dangerous years after they are placed. And anyone producing short-lived mines can easily switch to producing cheaper long-lived ones by just getting rid of the timer. I wish I could say that I believed that Trump would say "unfortunately, the US unilaterally committed to never use persistent landmines under Clinton, so we will not do that", but realistically he will just say that this was Bad Radical Leftist Democrat policy and ignore it. So "no anti-personnel land mines" seems like the obvious Schelling point for an international agreement. (Anti-vehicle mines are a lesser concern, either they are planted on roads, where they are easily discovered (one way or another), or they are planted offroad, where the chances of civilians triggering them are much slimmer. Lots of kids play in the woods, few kids drive jeeps through the prairie.)
Personally, I would prefer for Poland to start a nuclear weapons program to them relying on landmines.
Wow. I had always thought they were supposed to live on the order of months. I really struggle to understand the military utility of such short-lived mines. Surely any situation in which you need to deny an area for only 4 hours, it is already unsafe to be deploying the mines in the first place.
Many people are under the impression that deploying mines requires digging into the ground and placing them, but that is outdated. That was truer of older mines, but more modern mines are built to be dropped from air, and even shot out of canon artillery, because the speed is more important than trying to hide them.
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Most mines are deployed by gun, rocket or helicopter e.g. FASCAM or butterfly mines.
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