Further, there is a big difference between long term persistent land mines out of a plane into a civilian area (what the treaty is meant to stop), and keeping a careful inventory of (mostly wire controlled) mines in a controlled area just south of the border.

The former will kill tons of non-soldiers and persist long after the war is over. The latter will kill NK soldiers moving south and can be easily collected in the event they are no longer necessary.

> It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.

Ah, yes, complexity explains everything from the role of private oil companies in Iraq to the ties of the Bush family with the Bin Laden family.

> But, I fundamentally can't shake the feeling that I have no clue what's going on, so maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge.

I think a very safe way, given the histoy over the last decaded, to form an opinion, is to consider everything the US defense industry-slash-ministry proclaims an outright lie and only accept very small points as true when they have been verified.

> It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.

The problem is the other extreme of not expressing an opinion where you have reasonable doubt will lead to leaving the discussion to everyone else. And there will always be a huge crowd of people who will voice their very uniformed opinion no matter what.

Even worse, you become extremely susceptible to malign publicity tactics. For example I would not see it beyond the US government[1] to argue with South Korea's defense even if the land mine treaty explicitly had an exception for these well cataloged mines in narrowed down locations [2]. They would of course word their public statement carefully so they can later refuse to acknowledge a causal connection between the two in case their bluff is called.

[1] And my government on other topics.

[2] I'm assuming the best case here. I don't know how the mines along the border are actually distributed, or even if there are mines at all.

I'm pretty sure North Korea used the exact same reasoning when they didn't sign.