Land mine

A land mine is an explosive device designed to be hidden by burying it at a shallow depth or camouflaging it above the ground in such a way that the explosive it contains detonates when inadvertently activated by a person or vehicle. They consist of an explosive charge and a detonator. The name originates from the ancient military technique of building tunnels to weaken and breach enemy fortifications.

Landmines are used to secure disputed borders and restrict enemy movement in times of war, so that attacking troops can be ambushed or bombed more easily.

From a military point of view, mines allow an organized force to overcome a larger one.

The majority of countries in the world (currently 144) have outlawed the use and possession of anti-personnel mines by their armies. The only Western democracies that have not banned them are the United States and Finland. Other countries, such as China, Ukraine, Russia, Israel and North Korea continue to use them.

Types of landmines

Mining of fortifications

It is the oldest form of mine for military use and from which other buried artifacts take their name. Basically it consists of a way of attacking by digging a tunnel until you reach under the opponent's walls and undermine their foundations, which usually consisted of making a large cavity at the end of the tunnel, under the wall, propping up the roof. Once it was large enough, the props were set on fire, causing the roof to fall and opening a gap in the wall. There are written references from Roman times. The Greek historian Polybius, in his Histories, offers a graphic description of a mine and countermine attack in his account of the Roman siege of Ambracia. With the invention of gunpowder, the final stage was carried out by filling the cavity with it and exploding it. There were several methods to discover and destroy mines before they achieved their objective, giving rise to what was called mine warfare.

Mining was frequently used in classical antiquity and later in the Middle Ages. It resurfaced during the First World War and was later used sporadically, such as in the Siege of the Alcázar of Toledo in the Spanish Civil War.

From this method comes mina as a name for hidden explosive devices, as well as the figurative use of the term mined (undermining resistance, undermining health, etc.)

Anti-tank mines

Anti-tank mines or anti-tank are designed to immobilize or destroy armored vehicles or tanks, along with their occupants. They are usually larger and require more pressure (at least 150 kg) to be activated.

Minas antipersonal

In principle, anti-personnel mines are intended to cause as much damage as possible. They are used to overwhelm enemy medical services, degrade the morale of their troops, and damage unarmored vehicles. Therefore, the objective sought above all is to seriously injure or mutilate, and not so much to kill, since a dead person does not cause as many problems as an injured person. Thus, its most common effects are amputations, genital mutilations, burns, muscle injuries and internal organs.

Originally, they were used to protect anti-tank mines; but they soon began to be used as weapons in their own right.

There are several types:

• Explosive mines or Pressure pressure: its goal is to cause the greatest possible damage, destroying and burning its target. They seek to cause both physical and psychological damage.
• Fragmentation mines: When it explodes, they expel a lot of fragments, which makes its reach can exceed 50 meters to the round. In some cases, your goal is to damage the maximum number of people. Within this category, there are jumping mines, whose shell, when activated, jumps from the ground to a height of 1.8 m, detonating and throwing their fragments; thus, they reach even greater distances. Others are installed on the ground, and project their fragments by forming an arch of about 60 degrees in all directions.
• The American company Claymore Inc. also manufactures several other special types of mine:
  • Mines whose function is to destroy and cauterize the lower members of your victim. The goal is to hurt, but without killing, forcing to suffer horrible pains as long as possible, in order to break the morals of the enemy troop.
  • Mines that shoot about 3000 needle-shaped shells made of depleted uranium, in order to cause the greatest number of damages to the attacked group. Its range is several hundred metres.
  • Chemical mines, which are used to disperse chemicals in their environment. These may be liquid or gases, persistent or not. The most used gas is chlorine.

Activation mechanisms

A mine can be activated in many ways: pressure, movement, sound, magnetism or vibration. Anti-personnel mines usually use the pressure of a person's foot as a trigger, but cables are also often used. Most modern anti-vehicle mines use a magnetic trigger, which allows them to be detonated even without being touched. The most advanced mines can tell the difference between friendly and enemy vehicle types through their own catalog of characteristics. This could, in theory, allow friendly troops to use a mined area while denying access to enemy troops.

Many mines combine the main trigger with a contact or swing trigger, to prevent enemy engineers from being able to deactivate them. It is also common to reduce the amount of metal to a minimum, using, for example, plastic, to make detection of the mine by means of a metal detector more difficult. On the other hand, plastic mines are very cheap.

The mines currently used by the US military, among others, are the so-called 'smart type'. They are designed to self-destruct after weeks or months, in order to reduce the number of civilian casualties after the end of the conflict. For this, different means are used, such as detonators that depend on a battery. These self-destruct mechanisms are not entirely reliable.

Creating a minefield

A minefield can be created in several ways:

• The preferred method is to use trained personnel to bury mines, as this makes mines practically invisible and reduces the number of mines necessary to deny an area to the enemy.
• They can launch missiles capable of sowing mines from distances of tens of kilometres, or being fired from cruise missiles, or fired from helicopters or planes.
• There are armoured vehicles equipped to sow mines.

Anti-tank minefields are often also mined with antipersonnel mines to slow manual clearance; Anti-tank mines are also often planted in anti-personnel minefields to avoid the use of armored vehicles to quickly clear them. Some types of anti-tank mines can also be detonated by infantry, giving them a dual purpose even though their primary purpose is to act as anti-tank weapons.

Detecting and removing mines

Although laying landmines in a field is relatively cheap and simple, the task of detecting and removing them is typically expensive, time-consuming and dangerous.

Some methods of detecting mines:

• Carefully search for them in areas known or suspected to have been mined. Often, this is slowly advancing through the field, introducing something (anything, from a knife to a stick) on the earth looking for hard objects. To walk through the mined areas, special foot platforms are used, in order to distribute their weight and cushion the impact of their footprints, as small ground disturbances could shoot old, unstable, or intentionally sensitive mines. However, there are mines that explode when they are unearthed because they have a photosensitive detector.
• Use metal detectors to examine a suspicious terrain. Detectors cannot easily distinguish between one type of metallic object and another, which slows the search. There are mines that explode at the time of receiving the signal of a detector and non-metallic mines that are not detected.
• Use animals (e.g. dogs) that can smell explosives (such as TNT) from mines.
• Seed from the air genetically modified seeds of flowers on the area, which acquire different colors when there are explosives in the vicinity.

Some methods to remove mines:

• Disarm them manually: the only method that does not cause serious damage to the ground, and the most used. Unfortunately, it is also the slowest and most dangerous.
• Cover the ground with an artillery shell.
• Drive a heavily armoured vehicle (such as a tank or a bulldozer) through the minefield to detonate the explosives. To counter this method, anti-tank mines are often mixed with anti-personnel mines.
• Use a Bangalore torpedo to clear a path through the minefield, or similar.

History of landmines

The creator of the land mine in Europe was Pedro Navarro, a 16th century Spanish officer, who devised a system to blow up the walls of the fortresses in Italy. Although primitive versions were already used in the Civil War, anti-tank mines began to be used in the First World War. During the Second World War, the first anti-personnel mines began to be used in Europe and North Africa, in order to protect anti-tank mines.

During the Cold War, they were used intensively in local conflicts. In Vietnam, the US military began air-dropping them. Over time, its use by insurgent armies in farming areas, water sources, and other basic infrastructures became frequent. Thus, they began to be used in many conflicts as a weapon against the civilian population, terrorizing them and denying them access to basic resources.

Antipersonnel mines have been used in conflicts in Angola, Afghanistan, Argentina, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Kosovo, Mozambique, Malvinas, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Sudan, Western Sahara, among others.

In 2005, a UN report estimated that more than 167 million of these devices remained stored around the world, 82 countries have unlocated mines. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people in the world are victims of landmines each year.

Campaigns against

Sir Paul McCartney is best recognized as the lead singer of The Beatles. He is also famous for his love of animals and his efforts to abolish landmines. McCartney learned of the problems from his ex-wife, Heather Mills. ^{[ citation needed ]} In 1993, Mills lost part of her left leg in a car accident. She learned of other people who had lost their legs or arms, and discovered that many had fallen victim to landmines.

Mills began collecting artificial legs and arms to help people injured in landmine explosions. To date, she has helped 27,000 people. Together Paul and Heather have also raised funds to rid the planet of buried landmines (the cost of producing a landmine is $3, but the price of safely unearthing one can be up to $1,000). To raise the funds, McCartney has hosted dinner parties, sung at concerts and created, with the help of his wife, a T-shirt that says "No More Land Mines."

The couple even dedicated their wedding day to the cause. Knowing the camera crews would be present, they made a deal. To publish his photo, magazines and television shows had to pay a fee of $2,000. They donated it to a group now working to remove landmines. Their plan made them raise 161,000 euros.

The ban

Reasons

The use of mines is becoming increasingly problematic:

• By starting to use as an offensive weapon against the population, many camps have ceased to signal themselves as such.
• The sowing of mines by air or through projectiles leaves mined areas without any signage. In many cases it is smart mines whose self-destruction devices often fail, or do not discriminate as much as is intended.
• Rain and other weather events often shift mines to other places.
• Mines often wound the same soldiers who are supposed to protect, which has made the military question their usefulness.
• The withdrawal of landmines is dangerous, slow and costly.
• They cause serious human damage, as their victims are usually civilians, who are often killed or maimed long after the end of the war. According to their detractors, only in Cambodia mines have caused 35,000 amputations after the cessation of hostilities.
• Serious economic damage:
  • They demand enormous health costs: the injured must be operated and treated, often invalid, which increases social costs.
  • They prevent the use of basic infrastructures (roads, crop fields, etc.).
• It causes serious ecological damage by preventing the development of local flora and fauna, as well as contaminating underground aquifers.

Despite all these problems, some countries, such as the United States or China, insist that they are essential to protect their soldiers in time of war.

The Treaty of Ottawa

The Ottawa treaty entered into force on March 1, 1999, being the result of an international campaign to ban landmines that began in 1992, and which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Its signatories They committed not to use, develop, manufacture, store or trade antipersonnel mines. Stockpiles must be destroyed within four years of signing the treaty. It was originally signed by 122 countries in 1997 and, as of February 2004, has been signed by 152 and ratified by 144.

Of the remaining 42 countries that have not signed, the largest are China, India, the United States and Russia. The United States refuses to sign the treaty because it does not allow a 'Korean exception', since land mines are a vital element in the US military strategy on the Korean Peninsula. According to the US government, the million mines in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea help maintain the delicate peace by preventing attacks on North Korea. On the other hand, the United States claims to be researching new technologies capable of replacing mines in Korea by 2006.

Currently, only 15 countries continue to manufacture (or have not stopped manufacturing) antipersonnel mines: China, North Korea, South Korea, Cuba, Egypt, United States, India, Iran, Iraq, Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore and Vietnam.

The largest manufacturer of antipersonnel mines is Claymore Inc, in the United States, which produces the mines of the same name.