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.
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"
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...
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.
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...