Season 5
EP06 - Landmines & Cluster Munitions
Discover why landmines and cluster munitions are banned by international treaty despite persistent military utility. Learn how decades of civilian casualties from post-conflict detonations drove the Ottawa Treaty and Convention on Cluster Munitions.
MINE THE RIVER! MINE THE JUNGLE! MINE THE SPAWN POINTS!
YES! They literally cannot move! I have achieved absolute map control!
Wait... NINE players?!
The enemy team has five people... my own team reported me?!
I’m carrying them! I locked down the map! Why are my own teammates reporting me for winning?!
Because you didn't lock down the map. You destroyed it.
Your teammates can't farm the jungle. They can't walk to the objective. You turned the map into a death zone.
You just griefed the server's real estate.
In military logistics, the anti-personnel landmine is incredibly seductive. It is the ultimate "passive defense."
Exactly! It’s set-and-forget!
I don't need to pay guards to watch the border! I just bury a cheap explosive, and the border watches itself! It’s the highest ROI in warfare!
Indeed, the ROI is staggering.
It costs a military about $3 to manufacture and bury a basic landmine.
But to safely find and remove that exact same landmine? It costs nearly a thousand dollars and takes hours of painstaking labor.
For a few thousand dollars, an army can instantly paralyze an entire enemy division.
So what's the problem?
There is no problem! It’s hyper-efficient!
The problem is that a landmine has no brain.
A bullet is fired by a soldier who looks at a target, identifies an enemy uniform, and pulls a trigger. It has IFF. Identify Friend or Foe.
A landmine is just a mechanical pressure plate.
It cannot read a uniform. It cannot see a white flag. It triggers at exactly 15 pounds of pressure. It does not care whose foot applies that pressure.
But the fatal flaw of the landmine isn't just its blindness. It’s its battery life.
In 1975, the war ends. The generals shake hands. The treaties are signed. The soldiers pack up their rifles and go home to their families. The conflict is over.
But the landmine did not sign a peace treaty. It does not know the war is over.
1975. A young soldier finishes burying the mine, wiping sweat from his brow, his rifle slung over his back.
The landmine was planted for a temporary conflict.
20 years later, the landmine doesn't know the war is over.
50 years later, the landmine is an environmental hazard ready to execute any unlucky victims.
No! Wait! Stop!
The soldier died of old age twenty years ago.
But his weapon is about to execute a completely innocent child today.
The war ended in 1975. The landmine is still fighting in 2025.
This is why your teammates reported you. You didn't just trap the enemy. You trapped evryone's future.
There are an estimated 110 million unexploded landmines buried across the Earth right now.
You cannot farm the land. You cannot build hospitals. You cannot lay roads.
A country with active minefields is economically paralyzed. You render your own territory functionally worthless for generations, just to win a temporary border dispute.
Okay, fine! I’ll just use airstrikes!
Drop a massive cluster bomb on the enemy! It explodes instantly! It does the AoE damage, the hitbox despawns!
You just traded a shovel for a jet plane, but you committed the exact same war crime.
Cluster Munition is also banned.
If you drop one giant bomb, you blow up one building.
But if you want to wipe out an entire spread-out infantry battalion, you use a Cluster Bomb.
A cluster bomb is a delivery pod.
Whoa... it’s like a shotgun blast from the sky. It covers the whole grid!
In a video game, weapons have a 100% activation rate.
In real-world manufacturing, there is always a failure rate.
We call it the Dud Rate. Usually around 5 to 10 percent.
If you drop one cluster pod containing 1,000 bomblets... and it has a 5% dud rate...
It means 50 of those tiny bombs will become environmental hazards.
You didn't avoid using landmines.
You just used an airplane to carpet-bomb the area with hundreds of landmines. We call it UXO—Unexploded Ordnance.
Unlike a landmine which needs 20 pounds of pressure, a damaged cluster dud is incredibly unstable.
A change in temperature, a bump from a tractor is enough to set it off.
The Ottawa Treaty of 1997, and the Convention on Cluster Munitions of 2008 looked at these weapons and realized they were environmental blights. Over 100 nations agreed to ban them.
In your game, you thought you were tactical with mining the enemy team.
But your own team couldn't leave their base. They couldn't farm gold in the jungle because your "defensive" bombs could teamkill them.
I am never playing a trap character again. BG.
EP05 - Hollow Points (Dum-Dum Bullets)
Understand the legal and humanitarian debate around expanding dum-dum bullets in armed conflict. Learn why hollow points are banned in war under the Hague Convention but remain standard in law enforcement.
EP07 - Pain & “Enhanced Interrogation”
Explore the legal, ethical, and practical failures of enhanced interrogation and torture. Learn why coerced intelligence is unreliable, how the UN Convention Against Torture defines the law, and what actually works.
