A landmine is a type of mine which is placed onto or into the ground and explodes when triggered by a vehicle or person. Landmines are used to secure disputed borders and to restrict enemy movement in times of war. Because of this, and also because not all types are designed to be buried in the ground, and to avoid using the word landmine, they are sometimes called area denial munitions, serving a tactical purpose similar to barbed wire or concrete dragon's teeth vehicle barriers — that is, channeling the movement of the attacking troops in ways that permit the defenders to ambush them more easily, or attack them with artillery bombardments planned in advance to cover a certain area.

From a military perspective, landmines serve as force multipliers, allowing an organized force to overcome a larger enemy.

Following the lead of Canada the majority of the world's countries (144 to date) have made the use and posession of anti-personnel landmines by its military forces illegal. The only two western democracies that have not banned anti-personnel landmines are the United States and Finland. Some other countries like China, Russia and North Korea also continue to use them.

Contents

1 Mechanisms, varieties 2 Laying minefields 3 Detecting and removing landmines 4 Efforts to ban anti-personnel mines 5 Manufacturers 6 History 7 Related topics 8 External links

Mechanisms, varieties

A landmine can be triggered by a number of things including pressure, movement, sound, magnetism and vibration. Anti-personnel mines commonly use the pressure of a person's foot as a trigger, but tripwires are also frequently employed. Most modern anti-vehicle mines use a magnetic trigger, to enable it to detonate even if the tyres or tracks did not touch it. Advanced mines are able to sense the difference between friendly and enemy types of vehicles by way of a built-in signature catalog. This will theoretically enable friendly forces to use the mined area while denying the enemy access.

Many mines combine the main trigger with a touch or tilt trigger, to prevent enemy engineers from defusing it. Also, landmine designs tend to use as little metal as possible to make searching with a metal detector more difficult. Also, landmines made mostly of plastic are very inexpensive.

The Chinese Type 72, which is according to some sources the world's most popular landmine, costs only $3 apiece if bought in large quantities. It is mostly plastic, only about the size of the palm of a man's hand, and contains just enough TNT to blow off a foot.[1] http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/DTU/pubs/wp/wp48/07t72.html

An antipersonnel mine that is used within a building or with some sort of psychological bait is called a booby trap. The term booby trap also implies that the device is improvised, perhaps from an artillery shell or a grenade, rather than manufactured for this specific purpose.

Mines used by the U.S. Army and many other forces are designed to self-destruct after a period of weeks or months to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties at the conflict's end. However, these self-destruct mechanisms are not absolutely reliable, and most landmines laid historically are not equipped in this manner.

Laying minefields

Minefields may be laid by several means. Mine-laying shells may be fired by artillery from a distance of several tens of kilometers, ejected from cruise missiles, or dropped from helicopters or airplanes. Armored fighting vehicles equipped to lay mines have also been built. However, if time allows, the preferred way is to place them into the ground by hand or with relatively simple tools, since this will make the mines practically invisible and reduce the number of mines needed to deny the enemy of an area.

Often anti-tank minefields are scattered with anti-personnel mines to make its clearing more difficult and time-consuming by disabling or destroying mine clearing vehicles.

Detecting and removing landmines

While placing and arming landmines is relatively inexpensive and simple, the reverse of detecting and removing them is typically expensive, slow and dangerous.

Various means to detect landmines include:

• Land mine experts carefully examining areas for mines.
• Using metal detectors to sweep a suspected mined area. However, the detectors cannot easily differentiate various types of metal objects, which can slow down the search.
• Using animals like dogs that can sniff out explosive chemicals like TNT in landmines. Recent experiments with the Gambian giant pouched rat have indicated that this animal is particularly effective with its smell sensitivity, reliable with food reward incentive and is too small to typically set off the mines.

Methods for removing landmines include:

• A landmine expert manually disarming a bomb by hand.
• A creeping barrage of artillery will clear mine field.
• Using an heavily armoured vehicle like a modified tank or bulldozer to purposefully drive through a minefield to deliberately detonate the explosives. To stop this method of clearance, during World War II the Germans developed the technique of burying an artillery shell deeper in the ground attached to a sensor some distance behind the shell, so that when the tank flail or dozer blade went over the sensor the shell exploded under the tank.
• During World War II Bangalore Torpedoes (poles filled with explosives) were pushed into mine fields by attaching a second pole to the first pole and so on, until the desired length was achieved. A path could then be blown through the mine field. Today the same technique can also be performed using a hose pipe filled with explosives and carried across a mine field via rocket. This is known as an Antipersonnel Obstacle Breaching System .[2] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/apobs.htm

Efforts to ban anti-personnel mines

Anti-personnel landmines or APLs are widely considered to be ethically problematic weapons because their victims are commonly civilians, who are often killed or maimed long after a war has ended. According to anti-landmine campaigners, in Cambodia alone mines have resulted in 35,000 amputees after the cessation of hostilities. Removal of landmines is dangerous, slow and costly; however, some countries maintain that landmines are necessary to protect their soldiers in times of war.

The use, production, stockpiling and trade in anti-personnel landmines was outlawed by the Ottawa Treaty in 1999. It was signed by 141 countries, of which 120 ratified it. The biggest countries not to sign the treaty were the People's Republic of China, India, the USA and Russia. The treaty was the result of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, launched in 1992, whose web site at http://www.icbl.org has the treaty text and the complete list of signatories. The campaign won the Nobel peace prize in 1997 for its efforts; the prize was shared with its leader, Jody Williams.

The Ottawa Treaty does not include anti-tank mines or cluster bombs.

Manufacturers

The legal export of anti-personnel landmines has ceased as of 1999. Anti-personnel landmines continue to be produced in the following countries:

• Burma
• People's Republic of China
• Cuba
• Egypt
• India
• Iran
• Iraq
• North Korea
• South Korea
• Pakistan
• Russia
• Serbia and Montenegro
• Singapore
• Turkey
• United States
• Vietnam

Some have claimed that despite the 1999 ban, the People's Republic of China and Russia have continued to mass-produce landmines for export around the world.

(see [3] http://www2.gol.com/users/bobkeim/landmine/lmupdatefac.html#prod_export ).

The Soviet Union had been accused of using specifically-designed mines looking like toys (to target children) in its conflict with Afghanistan. Some of the Soviet mines used were small, green, made from plastic and winged so that they could be deployed from planes, with the result that children often mistook them for toys, but others were allegedly manufactured of red and white plastic in the shape of toy trucks.

Unexploded bomblets from cluster bombs pose the same dangers as landmines. This is probably in some cases a design feature, intended to pin down the military force upon which they are dropped and discourage it from moving. Although they are not designed to be hidden, they may remain undetected for a long time due to soft soil or vegetation. Children could also mistake the bomblets for toys due to the bright colors commonly employed in the manufacture of cluster munitions to indicate they are "live" or explosive ordnance.

The current trend in design of cluster bombs is the use of smart munitions, such as those incorporated into the CBU97 used by the US Air Force and US Navy. The smart munitions are approximately the size of small artillery shells and have guidance circuitry allowing them to seek out and destroy armored vehicles, or self-destruct if they do not achieve target lock before reaching the ground. This innovation seems likely to reduce the humanitarian cost of using cluster bombs though the CBU97 and other weapons in its class, such as the Russian RBK500, are extremely expensive.

History

The basic concept appeared through out human history in various forms. In Europe in the early 18th century, often going by the French term fougasse, improvised landmines or booby traps were constructed in the form of bombs buried in shallow wells in the earth and covered with scrap metal and/or gravel to serve as shrapnel. The term is sometimes still used in the present day to describe such devices. The technique was used in several European wars of the 18th Century, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Some sources report that Zhuge Liang, of the kingdom of Shu of China, invented a landmine type device in the third century AD. Similar in concept to the modern landmine, small foot-sized holes dug in the ground with a sharpened spike, and then covered, were used by forces of ancient Rome. In the Middle Ages in Europe, small, 4-pronged spiked devices called caltrops or Crows feet could be scattered on the ground.

The first modern mechanically fused high explosive antipersonnel landmines were created in Imperial Germany, circa 1912, and were copied and manufactured by all major participants in the First World War. In World War I, landmines were used notably at the start of the battle of Passchendale. Well before the war was over, the British were manufacturing landmines that contained poison gas instead of explosives. Poison gas landmines were manufactured at least until the 1980s in the Soviet Union and the United States was also known to have at least experimented with the concept in the 1950s.

Nuclear mines have also been developed, both landmines and naval mines. An example is the British Censored page project.

The name itself probably comes from the skills used by miners in World War I in which tunnels were dug under the opposition forces, filled with explosives, and detonated. Some 45 tons of explosives were detonated at Spanbroekmolen on June 26, 1916, forming a crater some 430 feet in diameter. Many such smaller mining operations were used to attack entrenched enemy emplacements.

Related topics

• Roots of Peace, a humanitarian organization dedicated to the removal of landmines.
• Claymore mine
• Naval mine
• Honeywell - for other types of mines
• The International Committee of the Red Cross on Landmines http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList2/Focus:Landmines
• The International Campaign to Ban Landmines http://www.icbl.org

External links

• Equipment for post-conflict demining http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/DTU/pubs/wp/wp48/index.html
• The Tubular Bangalore Torpedo activates mines by blasting the tube after it has been pushed into the minefield. http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/camouflage/exel/