By Austin Mackell
The return of Landmines to Europe – part of a global rise in barbarism – shows the need for world federalism and global governance.
Between April and July of this year, five European countries Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland announced their withdrawal from the Ottawa Treaty, a treaty which Russia never signed. Ukraine also announced formally that it was leaving the treaty though it has already been using landmines in the war with Russia, who also uses landmines.
It’s a move that’s backed by at least some western military analysts. In a recent video, one of them, the Denmark based Anders Puck Nielsen, explains that the problem with the “It creates an asymmetry when one side can use these weapons and the other side can’t.”
The general thrust of Nielsen’s argument is that since Russia is doing it, Europe must too. Indeed he concludes by saying that it is in fact the moral thing to do, since otherwise European soldiers will potentially be sent to fight Russian soldiers, without the “tools they need to complete the task and return alive”.
People haven’t been, he suggests, particularly concerned about soldiers being torn apart, about the soldiers killed by landmines, and shouldn’t be, it is implied, by the young Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Estonian men, who will have their legs, their hands and faces blown off. He seems to agree. That’s what soldiers are for, after all, isn’t it?
The problem with land mines, he explains, is that “historically many civilians have been hurt by land mines that were left after the war was over, still active.” But, he continues, there are “technical solutions” to this. Enter the Smart-Mine.
I should be clear that this is my term, not his, or as far as I know anyone else’s. The example he gives is of a mine which includes a battery, and since this battery only has a short lifespan, the mine would become inert after “a day or a week” and so could be used “dynamically” in the modern battlefield, especially if laid by drones. Despite his buttoned up appearance, you can see him becoming animated with the possibilities, as, no doubt, are military thinkers around the world.
For a second, let’s imagine it stops there, with drone laid mines that have a battery-based lifespan. These mines, being safer, more useful as he describes, could quickly become a staple of the battlefields in Eastern Europe and beyond. And no mine can ever be fully safe, so long as it contains explosive charge. The trick with the batteries, or any other safety mechanism, will have some failure rate; a mine with a dead battery could still be triggered by fire, perhaps, or physical damage to the mine might disconnect the battery, preventing it from running out, only to be re-connected in the process of discovery. The explosives within them could be repurposed for crime, etc.
And if the number of mines laid goes up enough, it can overwhelm a reduction in the percentage of mines that end up causing an incident, and we are back where we started, or worse.
And once the arms race expands into this new domain there’s no reason designs wouldn’t become more dynamic, with remotely controlled mines, which could be turned on and off tactically, allowing soldiers to – for example – launch an attack, then retreat through the minefield, drawing the enemy into a trap, and turning it on. And so on, and countermeasures, and counter-counter-measures of increasingly infernal complexity and savagery.
What could go wrong?
Has anyone read any history (or sci-fi) books, ever?
Nielsen does at least mention the danger of a “slippery slope” and how “international law and international cooperation is under pressure”. But nowhere does he argue for any proactive support for a global government or any increase in the power, status, or funding of (nominally) neutral international authorities like the UN, the International Criminal Court, or any new body – not even as a long term goal. His vision is of a fortress Europe, in a world of endless, swirling, conflict and chaos.
Like so many in the contemporary west, he has imbibed a fundamental cynicism, in which values and norms – rather than foundational – are mere tools for the expression of in-group power. Democracy and human rights, the radical enlightenment spirit which preceded and underpinned European and western military dominance are not openly ridiculed, they are politely ignored, the way a babbling, demented, elderly parent might be. But it is the systems of extreme nationalism, western exceptionalism, and militarism which are past their use-by dates.
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Note on methodology: This article was composed with a variety of tools including artificial intelligence, algorithmically guided search engines, and depends on a variety of online sources.
To see the process in full, you can review the video bibliography in full here, or see the highlights in the research portal below:
https://www.writeinstone.com/widget/published-57e1190b-a852-451f-b9fe-ea2f784f1469