New Testingstan

uraniun235 wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:Sure.

TBH, most of the complaints I heard were from the locals whose soils where contaminated for the centuries to come by toxic heavy metals, with all the associated health problem and photo of malformed babies. But they are brown people so who cares.

On the other hand, you hear a lot of disgruntled 1st Gulf War veterans talking about how DU gave them the "Gulf War Symptom". That's a shitstick PR-wise to sell back home.

It's not guaranteed that abandoning DU would mean that future battlefields would be "clean". The same tungsten alloy that would be used in a DU replacement was found to be extremely carcinogenic in rats. Inhalation wouldn't be as big a problem, but the long-lasting contamination might still be a significant issue. Hell, huge deposits of lead aren't a great thing to have lying in the soil, not to mention the problem of unexploded ordnance. War is going to leave environmental scars with or without DU, although I'm not going to say DU is vitally necessary for waging war.

It's morbidly interesting that so many modern efforts to kill tanks (advanced armor penetrators, cluster bombs, radiation bombs) have been proven dirty to some extent. For the purposes of reducing environmental contamination, it might ultimately be far more effective to try and draft a treaty to ban tanks and other heavily armored vehicles. You don't need DU/tungsten rounds or cluster bombs to kill infantry or light vehicles, and it would probably be difficult to conceal the production or maintenance of large armored divisions.

Oxymoron wrote:Sure.

TBH, most of the complaints I heard were from the locals whose soils where contaminated for the centuries to come by toxic heavy metals, with all the associated health problem and photo of malformed babies. But they are brown people so who cares.

On the other hand, you hear a lot of disgruntled 1st Gulf War veterans talking about how DU gave them the "Gulf War Symptom". That's a shitstick PR-wise to sell back home.

adr wrote:so the internet told me that kubrick wasn't trying to make an anti war movie with full metal jacket

he just wanted to show the way war is

i saw it as an anti war movie

Zod wrote: i dunno but something about the thought of banning certain types of weapons to make war 'cleaner' doesn't sit well with me

uraniun235 wrote:

Zod wrote: i dunno but something about the thought of banning certain types of weapons to make war 'cleaner' doesn't sit well with me

*shrug* It already happens. We don't use nuclear weapons or nerve gas. Many (though not all) nations have signed a treaty to abstain from the use of cluster bombs.

It occurred to me too: the notion that, hey, we should remember that we shouldn't be using this shit at all if possible. But, if reducing environmental contamination is a serious enough goal, then it seems like banning armored vehicles are a natural conclusion of that effort. Even if the weapons themselves weren't toxic, I remember hearing about how destroyed tanks are pretty damn toxic themselves.

I'm certainly not arguing that accomplishing such a ban is at all feasible in the foreseeable future.

timmy wrote:The way they dismantle tankers and freighters in Bangladesh is a model for that kind of work.

weemadando wrote:Sure, you sell your old arse rust bucket ship to a company. They beach the ship in Bangladesh where thousands of slowly dying workers get exposed to every nastiness under the sun as they tear the ship apart by hand...

Aaron wrote:

weemadando wrote:Sure, you sell your old arse rust bucket ship to a company. They beach the ship in Bangladesh where thousands of slowly dying workers get exposed to every nastiness under the sun as they tear the ship apart by hand...

See, I mean that we should train and equip them as if we were doing it.

Dooey Jo wrote:incidentally, i was looking up if there was any evidence behind the claim that "stone age people executed 10% of their male population every generation for being aggressive".