Comment by perihelions
3 days ago
You're welcome to go to the front lines and attack the Russian tanks with your own preferred tools!
The people doing the actual work, today, use depleted uranium[0] rounds, because they have common sense and prefer to not have a main battle tank survive long enough to shoot back at them. "Let's not use (mildly) toxic weapons" is a fair-weather principle that disappears the moment the weather ceases being fair. Like cluster bombs, or landmines: all of the civilized countries in Europe that adopted these idealistic bans, in peacetime, they're repealing those treaties left and right, now that the moral dilemmas are no longer academic.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-send-its-first-depleted-ura... ("US to send depleted-uranium munitions to Ukraine")
> You're welcome to go to the front lines and attack the Russian tanks with your own preferred tools!
By that logic, we should skip the depleted uranium and head straight to thermonuclear weapons, and throw in some Sarin for good measure. No, the purpose of prohibiting such weapons is for wartime, and whilst it is true that some countries are backsliding on previous commitments, that comes out of cowardice; it should not be reinterpreted as pragmatism. The rules of war weren't idealistic, they were prompted by very real horrors that were witnessed on the ground, especially during the Great War.
I don't believe that's historic; the landmine convention was drafted in 1997, and the cluster bomb one in 2008. The European nations that dominated these movements (USA signed neither) were in peacetime, and had known nothing other than peace for a very long time.
The treaties they're withdrawing from today aren't the post-WW1 Geneva conventions; they are modern treaties that were in actuality products of eras of peace.
> I don't believe that's historic; the landmine convention was drafted in 1997, and the cluster bomb one in 2008
Not historic in the sense of 'old', but still motivated by real horrors that Europe witnessed. The Bosnian War occurred only a couple of years prior to 1997 and left the region with over a thousand square kilometres of land contaminated by live landmines, which are still being cleared today. I don't know about cluster bombs specifically, but I would imagine that the (widely televised) Second Gulf War and the conflict between Israel and Lebanon had something to do with changing European perception of the weapons.
Certainly, the treaties are always drawn up in peacetime - it would be impractical to do so during an active conflict. However I believe that all of them have been prompted by some violent, horrific conflict in the years immediately beforehand.
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Europe has been dealing with unexploded ordinance from the fallout of European wars for over a century.
Of the countries you listed, its the US that has not actually known war. A few of its cities being reduced to rubble and a few thousand of its children losing limbs to land mines might convince some more of its people that war isn't quite the swell adventure they think it is.
The problem is that it is both pragmatic and cowardly. The unfortunate logical consequence of this is that as a race we will likely cease to exist as a result of a nuclear weapon(s) being used for any number of reasons including political expedience.
I genuinely agree with you and I am glad you are pushing back on those arguments, but our tendencies does not put me in an optimistic mood.
The main reasons those weapons aren't used is not idealism, it's because they're not actually that effective in a battlefield scenario.
Strategic nukes in particular are a hilariously bad example here. In most cases in war, the objective is to take ground, and making the ground uningabitable is counter productive. MAD, aka "pragmatism", is the main factor that prevents their use in general.
Chemical weapons, well, let's hope MAD holds there too, to some extent. But the US to my knowledge never signed any treaties banning them. We took them out of inventory because they're not that useful to a modern, mobile military.
Nuclear weapons don't make territory uninhabitable. (Nuclear reactor meltdowns do, but they are very different.)
More precisely, ground that receives fallout is deadly for 2 or 3 weeks. Ground that has been in actual contact with a nuclear fireball might stay deadly longer than that, but that will be only a tiny fraction of the area of the attacked country.
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> By that logic, we should skip the depleted uranium and head straight to thermonuclear weapons
Yes, actually.
(With a massive caveat being if the opponent does not also have nukes.)
I mean, why do you think the US nuked Japan at the end of WW2? Because it was the most expedient and economic way to kill enough people to break the government's will to fight and make them surrender.
The estimated losses for the invasion of their main islands were 1 million. Would you kill 1 million of your countrymen, some of those your relatives and neighbors or would you rather kill a couple hundred thousand civilians of the country that attacked you?
Ironically, this time the math works out even if you give each life the same value. If you give enemy lives lower value, how many of them would you be willing to nuke before you'd prefer to send your own people to die?
>I mean, why do you think the US nuked Japan at the end of WW2? Because it was the most expedient and economic way to kill enough people to break the government's will to fight and make them surrender.
Except that's not really true. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little to do with "ending the war more quickly"[0]:
"The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese colonies began at midnight on August 8, sandwiched between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was, indeed, the death blow U.S. officials knew it would be. When asked, on August 10, why Japan had to surrender so quickly, Prime Minister Suzuki explained, Japan must surrender immediately or "the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States."
As postwar U.S. intelligence reports made clear, the atomic bombs had little impact on the Japanese decision. The U.S. had been firebombing and wiping out Japanese cities since early March. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama. Japanese leaders accepted that the U.S. could and would wipe out Japan's cities. It didn't make a big difference whether this was one plane and one bomb or hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs."
[0] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-27/its-time-...
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Ew
Yeah. An active main battle tank will kill more people faster than inhaling uranium dust will.
(This does not make depleted uranium rounds anything less than nasty. But it does make them better than the alternative.)
What was the last time those uranium rounds were fired adequately, cca 1992 from A10 on iraqi tanks? Or 2003?
Abrams tanks on Ukraine dont need uranium munition, thats a fact. Everything russia puts against them up to and including T90 can be destroyed by regular AP rounds, no armatas running around requiring some special toxic munition. Suffice to say 98-99% of those abrams shootings are aimed at much worse armor than T90 has.
Sure you can try to have the best weapon available for all cases and not give a nanofraction of a fuck about consequences on civilians, just like US did everywhere. Videos of ie Iraqi kids being born en masse with nasty radiation diseases is a worry for some subhumans far away, not most glorious nation in the world right?
Ie we could pretty effectively end current war in Ukraine easily by bombing moscow from the ground with some 10 megaton bomb, or 10x1 megaton ones, the russian state would be in total chaos. Yet we humans dont do it, even russians dont launch those bombs on Europe despite repeatedly claiming so. Moves have consequences, being mass murderer of kids aint something cold shower washes away.
> You're welcome to go to the front lines and attack the Russian tanks with your own preferred tools!
Thank you for not immediately escalating the discussion. Anyway, ever heard of Tungsten? Cool stuff.
I am not really sure but isnt depleted uranium munition kida obsolete by this point ? It was used mostly in unguided kinetic tank shells and autocannon ammo.
But most of the destroyed russiant tanks in Ukraine are due to mines and guided munitions using mostly shaped charges, ranging from Javelins to 400$ DiY FPV drones, neither of which uses depleted uranium in any form.
Yes, the primary use case was in various direct-fire cannon systems, which have become less prevalent over time due to limited range. It still has use cases in auto-cannons because it significantly improves their performance against armored vehicles and allows them to go up against armor that may outgun them.
It isn’t just used in munitions, it is a component of heavy armor. When you blow up a tank you may be vaporizing some depleted uranium in its hull.
Burning tanks aren't exactly environmentally friendly either. Like, without the depleted uranium, you still probably don't want to be eating around the wreckage.