this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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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.
Yeah but this a white country it'll probably get picked up pretty quick.
Ed: listen I'm sorry if that's upsetting but we've cleaned up two world wars faster then either of those countries and what's the major difference?
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.
That is not the same as actively mined areas with children who never saw the war walking around missing limbs because they powers that put munitions there refuse to pick them up.
Also, I'm not so sure Germans complaining about remnant bombs is the best example given that they started both world wars and Korea and Vietnam didn't even start their own wars.
They weren't complaining, just giving you an example of how a central European country still isn't "cleaned up" even after all these years. That country being Germany has nothing to do with their point.
It is for all intent and purpose cleaned up, finding eod is usually things people collected and shouldn't have or things deeply buried. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia have active surface level minefields that have been known and documented since during the war, it isn't a matter of hard to find in those places it's a matter of allied powers simply not having any interest in demining the places they mined.
So still finding WWI and WWII land mines in France as recently as 2014 as booby traps in pipes (over 100 years after the start of WWI) doesn't count somehow?
Things in the area of the alsace go up and rarely come down it's an incredibly mountainous area, there are still functional artillery pieces out there. That is however much much different than knowing you put mines there, knowing civilians cross through it and yet refuse to clean it up. And to add to your point there is an area of France that quarantined since ww1 because of the level of arsenic, but again that's an exception not the rule.