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You lay those mines with an aircraft or missile, I'd suspect.

It's like a sleeping cluster bomb - one of the worst (in terms of humanitarian problems) antipersonal mines out there, the Russian PFM-1 butterfly mine [0] is a cluster munition that simply floats to the ground and stays there.

The PFM-1 also has a deactivation mechanism but it didn't work well enough in practice.

Deactivation mechanisms are one thing but what the explosives do over time is a big deal, even if the trigger/fuze is guaranteed to be inert after a short time.

Explosives can be like mayonnaise, they can separate after a while, forming sensitive mixtures, making the 'inert' mine suddenly dangerous again.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFM-1_mine



> Explosives can be like mayonnaise, they can separate after a while, forming sensitive mixtures, making the 'inert' mine suddenly dangerous again.

In the 1970s, there was a Friedkin movie, that used this as a plot point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(film)




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