Would you walk through a field of "self-disarmed" land mines?
Much more happily than I would a field of non-disarmed ones.
Military explosives are generally pretty stable. They can't just explode when you bump them.
If your detonation mechanism requires ignition of a primer by a battery that (a) is runs a timer and then disables itself and (b) has batteries that only last so long anyway, there's not a lot that can reasonably set the thing off.
A buried explosive will still have a non-zero chance of detonating.
More complexity means more things that can go wrong.
But we do have smoke detectors, for example, with ten-year sealed batteries. I don't think I've heard of those having any failures.
Would you walk through a field of "self-disarmed" land mines?
Much more happily than I would a field of non-disarmed ones.
Military explosives are generally pretty stable. They can't just explode when you bump them.
If your detonation mechanism requires ignition of a primer by a battery that (a) is runs a timer and then disables itself and (b) has batteries that only last so long anyway, there's not a lot that can reasonably set the thing off.
A buried explosive will still have a non-zero chance of detonating.
More complexity means more things that can go wrong.
But we do have smoke detectors, for example, with ten-year sealed batteries. I don't think I've heard of those having any failures.