Cleaning this shit up after the war is going to be nasty.
Kids in Vietnam are still taught about mines and explosives in school because there is still stuff left behind and they are in severe danger playing in the woods.
I saw a video where the Ukrainian soldiers in the field jerry-rigged together a pretty cheap RC drone the proved to be very good at clearing out smaller land mines. It's about the size of a scrunched up adult on wheels, with a small plow for a shield behind a big spinning tube with chains that just flail at the ground. It drives like an RC lawn mower, and has that big weed wacker tumbler on the front to trip antipersonnel mines while the soldiers just walk behind it a little ways so the shrapnel doesn't get them. It worked pretty good, and didn't require any crazy technology. Those troopers have gotten really good at using what they've got at hand to do the job. I hope they manage to push the Russians all the way back to sea and reclaim Crimea. Screw Putin and all of his BS.
Uhh, the explosives from the world wars have not been cleaned up. I've been evacuated from my home twice due to the discovery of aerial bombs under construction sites, and the forest behind my childhood home was still being cleared of mines until ~2008, IIRC. This was in Germany.
The wholesale use of mines and particularly cluster munitions really did in several countries post WW2. WW2 bombs went underground when they didn’t detonate and that offers some “protection”. We don’t do heavy carpet bombing like that anymore. Mines and cluster bombs remain on the surface. It’s going to be even worse because modern weapons use a lot of plastic to avoid being easily detected and more cheaply produced. And if the few video clips I’ve seen of Ukraine lately are any indication, the use of small cluster bomblets is rampant. They’re slightly larger than your palm, green, and plastic.
There’s going to be a lot of missing feet in the following years.
People are still dying from ordinance from WWI and WWII in Europe.
Also the US dropped more bombs on North Vietnam during the Vietnam War than the total number of bombs dropped during WWII. That is quite a difference, major even.
i dont know if you're from europe or not. if you are from europe, you should know better than to make that claim. we are not even close to finishing the cleaning up of UXO from the wars.
Experts reckon it could take another 500 years to clean up the mess... ...Even today (in Germany), more than 2,000 tonnes of unexploded munitions are dug up annually and all construction sites need to be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance (UXO).
i do get where you're coming from with your first statement, it's just... maybe a bit strongly worded, and definitely, factually incorrect. bosnia is a prime example of a white country that is absolutely littered with UXO and mines. i'm not trying to downplay the severity of the UXO issue in southeast asia, just to make the point that white countries don't have some magic intrinsic ability to clear mines faster.
i cant be bothered to research anymore, so i will guess that the UXO clearance rate is mostly a factor of time, and mostly a factor of the amount of initial UXO that was deployed. if anyone wants to follow up on that (because i'm lazy) then go ahead 😃
That looks like a VOG-17M or a VOG-26, but without its primary fuse. It is supposed to be launched from a grenade launcher and I think there was a type that could be launched off of an AK.
it's tripwire detonated, odds are good that this was concealed with foliage and the only exposed bit was a length of monofilament, which is pretty invisible.