Brief History of Landmines

While there has been a recent surge in NGO campaigns against landmines, they are one of the oldest weapons used by militaries. According the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the very first landmines were used in the 15th century at the battle of Agincourt in France. As technology developed, landmines continued to be used in the 19th century during the Civil War by the Confederates, and by late World War I landmines were being used by most major armies. One reason for the increased use of landmines is that they are extremely inexpensive to produce; however, they become more expensive to detect and defuse once they are implemented.

The two most common types of landmines are anti-tank, and anti-personnel. Anti-tank landmines, which were first widely used during World War II, are created to destroy motor vehicles and the people occupying them. Anti-personnel landmines are intended to maim and injure people. Unlike small arms and other weapons, landmines are indiscriminate - they detonate upon contact. To paraphrase the often used argument - whether that contact is with an enemy combatant or a small child does not matter. In a cruel and unusual manner, landmines are designed to injure people, not to kill them - causing extreme prolonged pain and suffering.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, "the United States has pioneered in so-called 'safe mines,' which contain a self-destruct/self-deactivation mechanism. The mine blows itself up after a set period, shortening the lifetime of the mine, but not its lethality." An obvious disadvantage to these types of mines is that often times civilians are present at the time of self-detonation. There are also self-neutralizing mines, which defuse themselves rather than destruct, however; these are also unreliable because it is not always guaranteed that the mine will self-neutralize, and it is impossible to distinguish between a neutralized and non-neutralized mine.

Mines can be detected by trained dogs, rodents such as the Gambian pouch rat, bacteria that becomes fluorescent when near TNT, as well as nuclear detection which detects high levels of nitrogen often found in explosives. In addition, some countries, such as France, have developed robotic detection technology. Mines can be disarmed manually, through remote burning (which does not explode the mine), or by using various types of explosives such as the Bangalore Torpedo - which allows engineers to clear minefields from a reasonably far distance.

Currently, China is often cited as being the largest former producer of mines, and as having the largest stockpile of mines.