There’s also the issue of noxious hazards when the war ends. In an interview, Matthew Hoh, associate director of the Eisenhower Media network, a Marine veteran and State Department consultant who resigned over the escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, warned,
“Ukraine will be toxic for decades. First, there are the ‘duds’ — the shells, missiles, bombs and grenades used by both sides — that don’t explode. Even if the dud rate is only one percent, that’s an astounding amount of unexploded ordnance. We’ve seen what happened elsewhere.”
As late as 2016, Smithsonian Magazine reported “thousands of tons of unexploded bombs are in Germany, left over from World War II.”
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