A government that decides to restore a weapon to its inventory acquires, at most, permission for itself. It does not acquire an engineer in another country, a licence to a patent held abroad, a credit line from a bank supervised elsewhere, or a surety bond from an insurer whose own rules were written without reference to its decision. Between 27 December 2025 and 20 February 2026 five European states ceased to be bound by the prohibition on antipersonnel mines, while the states that host much of Europe’s defence-industrial base remained bound by it. That configuration is unusual. It is not a disagreement about whether a weapon is lawful to possess, which alliances accommodate routinely; it is a disagreement that runs through the interior of a single industrial programme, separating the entity that wants the capability from the entities whose people, technology, capital and coverage would ordinarily build it. The question this poses is not whether the withdrawing states may field mines. They may. It is narrower and more awkward: which contributions to such a programme remain legally unavailable because they are governed by rules the withdrawal did not touch, which persons and relationships those rules actually reach, and whether the programmes now under way have been designed to sit outside their reach. Answering it requires separating three things that are routinely conflated — a prohibition on conduct, a prohibition on funding a company, and a private decision not to accept a risk — and then asking, of each, what it actually covers.