10 ms·

There is a similar problem in the western desert of Egypt, where unexploded ordnance from the battle of El Alamein in WW2 has been killing and maiming Bedouin f

There is a similar problem in the western desert of Egypt, where unexploded ordnance from the battle of El Alamein in WW2 has been killing and maiming Bedouin for decades: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8576292.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon.... It's strange to realise that there are still many people yet to be born who will die as casualties of WW1 and WW2.

TheCoelacanth 10y ago
> the French government estimates the current rate of removal will clear the battlefields between 300 and 900 years from now If it ends up taking until the upper end of their estimate, casualties from WW1 could span an entire millennium.
- Razengan 10y ago
  Suddenly, all those science-fiction/fantasy stories seem plausible now, about ancient weapons, traps and guardians staying lethally functional for thousands of years..
  - jqgatsby 10y ago
    Terry Brooks!
  - speeder 10y ago
    Many of these stories became popular because of the Egypt archeology. 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.
    - capnrefsmmat 10y ago
      Do you have a link to details on the fungus theory? I haven't heard it before, but it sounds like a fascinating medical mystery.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        It's a theory although it seems that most experts are skeptical: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_mummycurse.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_...
      - nnq 10y ago
        Was a strain of Aspergilus Niger - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_mummycurse.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_.... Same kind of mold you find in your kitchen on forgotten fruit, but probably this strain was different enough from ones Europeans had exposure and immunity to that it killed a few mildly immunodepressed explorers and a tourist. I remember even a documentary about some of it... kind of boring though. 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 :)
    - ak217 10y ago
      > 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" Do you have a source?
      - KumarAseem 10y ago
        If you can, then read the vedas, the upanishads, ramayana, mahabharata (bhagvad gita) and other texts which do mention such weapons.
nostromo 10y ago
Don't forget about radiation exposure from nuclear weapons (including test bombs here in the US) that will continue to cause cancer deaths among people that are alive today. This map shows just how many people were exposed to fallout from a single nuclear test: http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.aspx?key=xi6i6nJGw48vKULXvfEIZOOm8IOPKgCE http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.asp...
- angersock 10y ago
  There is a qualitative difference between stepping on a land mine and maybe--possibly!--having a higher chance of getting cancer.
  - komali2 10y ago
    The lesson we can learn from the poisoned battlefields of WWI can be applied as a counter-argument to anyone saying we should nuke something - consider not only the short term implications of the nuke, but the long term effect on local and global environments.
    - mangeletti 10y ago
      And on the flip side... they didn't have nukes, so they used all that artillery.
      - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        s/nukes/tanks
        Millennium 10y ago
        s/tanks/mines
        bashinator 10y ago
        I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but the tank was invented in WWI.
kuschku 10y ago
The same is happening everywhere in Germany. 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.
matwood 10y ago
Also a common problem in Croatia from the war in the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minefields_in_Croatia 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.
- yread 10y ago
  Also the sea has all kinds of military garbage "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=64f53412f4d84603b277cdccdd6370c7 http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=64f53412f4d84603b277...
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Lots of areas were used to dump surplus munitions at the end of both world wars. North Sea, Irish Sea[1], Baltic[2], Gulf of Mexico[3], and many other places. 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-munitions-in-the-Irish-Sea.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1488371/MoD-dumped-mu... [2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/world-war-ii-munitions-dumps-a-rusting-timebomb-in-the-baltic-a-475520.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/world-war-ii-muni... [3] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/28/14141378-world-war-ii-bombs-mustard-gas-in-gulf-of-mexico-need-to-be-checked-experts-warn?lite http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/28/14141378-world-wa...
- thebeardedone 10y ago
  You did not happen to go across the border to Bosnia did you? Even places that have been cleaned are bordered by places that are mined (villages in the north from my personal experience) meaning that if you are kicking the ball around in a back yard and it goes over the fence, don't go looking for it.
angersock 10y ago
Somewhat darkly--is any of the software we write going to still be useful in 80 years? Terrible devices with awful intent, but they do still work.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  Most likely some military control systems will live much longer than the designers thought...
- dmitrygr 10y ago
  DMV's systems (given their speed) are from 80 years ago
  - jharger 10y ago
    So that's a scary thought... but what's an even scarier thought is that they were probably made pretty recently.
- ansible 10y ago
  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.
  - munificent 10y ago
    The worst-written software always lives the longest. Maintainable, modular software, by definition, is easy to change and swap out. So the evolutionary forces favor awful spaghetti codebases that everyone is too afraid to touch.
    - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
      So then the solution would be true natural selection and self-evolving software. As long as external entities (programmers) are tasked with killing off the unfit code, selection is going to be pretty bad.
terryf 10y ago
This is one of the reasons for telling everyone: if you are in a foreign country, holding a gun and shooting at someone, then please just stop. If you are forced to not stop by your commanding officer, then miss and shoot as little as possible. Fighting is not the solution.
- justinhj 10y ago
  This advice probably sounds a lot better when you're not in a foreign country being shot at. Shot at people being lead by a dictator who wants to take over your country.
  - terryf 10y ago
    I specifically excluded defending your own country and/or home. Everyone certainly should be allowed to that. 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.
55555 10y ago
The US dropped more bombs on Laos while fighting the viet cong than the sum of all bombs dropped during WWII. Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world and wasn't directly involved. People are still walking through fields and getting blown up and we don't help them de-mine. 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-million-bombs/ http://legaciesofwar.org/resources/books-documents/land-of-a...
- malandrew 10y ago
  Do the number of casualties remain relatively constant over time or have they been trending downwards as more ordinance is detonated accidentally? In other words, is the rate of accidents high enough to de-mine and reduce the likelihood of future accidents?

TheCoelacanth 10y ago

> the French government estimates the current rate of removal will clear the battlefields between 300 and 900 years from now If it ends up taking until the upper end of their estimate, casualties from WW1 could span an entire millennium.

Razengan 10y ago
Suddenly, all those science-fiction/fantasy stories seem plausible now, about ancient weapons, traps and guardians staying lethally functional for thousands of years..
- jqgatsby 10y ago
  Terry Brooks!
- speeder 10y ago
  Many of these stories became popular because of the Egypt archeology. 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.
  - capnrefsmmat 10y ago
    Do you have a link to details on the fungus theory? I haven't heard it before, but it sounds like a fascinating medical mystery.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      It's a theory although it seems that most experts are skeptical: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_mummycurse.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_...
    - nnq 10y ago
      Was a strain of Aspergilus Niger - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_mummycurse.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0506_050506_.... Same kind of mold you find in your kitchen on forgotten fruit, but probably this strain was different enough from ones Europeans had exposure and immunity to that it killed a few mildly immunodepressed explorers and a tourist. I remember even a documentary about some of it... kind of boring though. 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 :)
  - ak217 10y ago
    > 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" Do you have a source?
    - KumarAseem 10y ago
      If you can, then read the vedas, the upanishads, ramayana, mahabharata (bhagvad gita) and other texts which do mention such weapons.

nostromo 10y ago

Don't forget about radiation exposure from nuclear weapons (including test bombs here in the US) that will continue to cause cancer deaths among people that are alive today. This map shows just how many people were exposed to fallout from a single nuclear test: http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.aspx?key=xi6i6nJGw48vKULXvfEIZOOm8IOPKgCE http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.asp...

angersock 10y ago
There is a qualitative difference between stepping on a land mine and maybe--possibly!--having a higher chance of getting cancer.
- komali2 10y ago
  The lesson we can learn from the poisoned battlefields of WWI can be applied as a counter-argument to anyone saying we should nuke something - consider not only the short term implications of the nuke, but the long term effect on local and global environments.
  - mangeletti 10y ago
    And on the flip side... they didn't have nukes, so they used all that artillery.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      s/nukes/tanks
      - Millennium 10y ago
        s/tanks/mines
      - bashinator 10y ago
        I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but the tank was invented in WWI.

kuschku 10y ago

The same is happening everywhere in Germany. 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.

matwood 10y ago

Also a common problem in Croatia from the war in the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minefields_in_Croatia 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.

yread 10y ago
Also the sea has all kinds of military garbage "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=64f53412f4d84603b277cdccdd6370c7 http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=64f53412f4d84603b277...
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Lots of areas were used to dump surplus munitions at the end of both world wars. North Sea, Irish Sea[1], Baltic[2], Gulf of Mexico[3], and many other places. 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-munitions-in-the-Irish-Sea.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1488371/MoD-dumped-mu... [2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/world-war-ii-munitions-dumps-a-rusting-timebomb-in-the-baltic-a-475520.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/world-war-ii-muni... [3] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/28/14141378-world-war-ii-bombs-mustard-gas-in-gulf-of-mexico-need-to-be-checked-experts-warn?lite http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/28/14141378-world-wa...
thebeardedone 10y ago
You did not happen to go across the border to Bosnia did you? Even places that have been cleaned are bordered by places that are mined (villages in the north from my personal experience) meaning that if you are kicking the ball around in a back yard and it goes over the fence, don't go looking for it.

angersock 10y ago

Somewhat darkly--is any of the software we write going to still be useful in 80 years? Terrible devices with awful intent, but they do still work.

ptaipale 10y ago
Most likely some military control systems will live much longer than the designers thought...
dmitrygr 10y ago
DMV's systems (given their speed) are from 80 years ago
- jharger 10y ago
  So that's a scary thought... but what's an even scarier thought is that they were probably made pretty recently.
ansible 10y ago
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.
- munificent 10y ago
  The worst-written software always lives the longest. Maintainable, modular software, by definition, is easy to change and swap out. So the evolutionary forces favor awful spaghetti codebases that everyone is too afraid to touch.
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    So then the solution would be true natural selection and self-evolving software. As long as external entities (programmers) are tasked with killing off the unfit code, selection is going to be pretty bad.

terryf 10y ago

This is one of the reasons for telling everyone: if you are in a foreign country, holding a gun and shooting at someone, then please just stop. If you are forced to not stop by your commanding officer, then miss and shoot as little as possible. Fighting is not the solution.

justinhj 10y ago
This advice probably sounds a lot better when you're not in a foreign country being shot at. Shot at people being lead by a dictator who wants to take over your country.
- terryf 10y ago
  I specifically excluded defending your own country and/or home. Everyone certainly should be allowed to that. 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.

55555 10y ago

The US dropped more bombs on Laos while fighting the viet cong than the sum of all bombs dropped during WWII. Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world and wasn't directly involved. People are still walking through fields and getting blown up and we don't help them de-mine. 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-million-bombs/ http://legaciesofwar.org/resources/books-documents/land-of-a...

malandrew 10y ago
Do the number of casualties remain relatively constant over time or have they been trending downwards as more ordinance is detonated accidentally? In other words, is the rate of accidents high enough to de-mine and reduce the likelihood of future accidents?