Landmine removal tech

I saw an article on CNN about an Afghani entrepreneur who developed a $40 device to detonate landmines. Over the years, I have seen a lot of innovations directed at this problem. Have any of these panned out?

Thanks,
Rob

This organization breeds and trains rats to sniff out the explosives in landmines. The rats are far too small to set off the mines. The difficulty there of course is that the rats can only identify the mines, they can’t defuse/detonate them.

The difficulty is rarely in removing the mine once you know it’s there. The hard part is knowing it’s there.

IIRC one detail was that during the Nicaraguan war, a major hurricane came along and washed out many areas of the back country. Sometimes mines ended up far away from where they were planted.

I’ve often wondered why there isn’t any better solution to minesweeping. Why not blow them up en masse? For relatively open areas, I’m thinking of maybe a heavy metal mesh dragged by a helicopter. The chopper is high enough that the explosions don’t touch it; the mesh will, I guess, eventually be too damaged to use, but surely cheaper to replace than training minesweepers, or their rodent assistants.

In thicker terrain, it’s harder, but to be effective mines have to be laid on roads/tracks/trails, not in thick jungle or forest. I’m thinking of an APC pushing a similar metal mesh ahead of itself.

Why is my idea bad? I assume it is or it would be in practice.

I’d say the rats give you more certainty that you got all the mines, since the rats can smell the explosives even if the mine’s trigger is corroded or otherwise non-functional.

Maybe using a traditional mine-sweeping flail (which do exist, BTW, and can be equipped on the front of armored vehicles) would be a good first step, but it’s not the comprehensive solution.

The Bosnian Tourist Office advised us to throw a stray dog onto any open land that we wanted to walk on. They even mimed picking up a dog and throwing it. If something explodes please put up a stick with an upside down bottle on it so people will know not to go there. :eek:

ETA: I think they’re actually doing really well removing them, though I don’t know what other methods they use to detect them…

See Wikipedia on “mine flail,” “mine roller” or “mine plow.” The armies of the world have spent lots of time trying to figure out ways around their destructive weapons.

A colleague of mine and I did a story for Car & Driver years back on the Minecat 230. From what I remember, they said it was “good enough” for military use and got 99% (or something like that) of landmines, but in order for the area to be declared safe for civilians, it still required a manual (human) minesweeper to go through and check the area.

Thank you for the Wiki links. So such a device is part of an array of options depending on the terrain and types of mine, and also whether it’s a combat or noncombat situation. Ignorance fought and severely wounded if not totally defeated.

Basically that exact thing has been invented already. Not sure if it’s actually in use, though.

It is not very difficult to detect ordinary mines. Minimum metal mines and non-metal mines are considerably harder to detect, you need a mine detector with ground penetrating radar for that. BUT - while a metal detector will find even tiny metal objects (which can cause quit a few false positives when detecting) the radar will only detect objects which are (depending on soil conditions) at least 10-15 cm big. And the radar won’t work very well in clay or loess soils. And it won’t work at all in saltwater. And it is quite expensive. So small non-metal mines or non-metal mines in the wrong soil are very difficult to find. The Mine Kafon seems to be a nice idea, but it will probably only destroy mines at or near the surface. So you still have to send a minesweeper in the affected area.

Probably because the people who make the mines spend a considerable amount of effort ensuring they are hard to sweep.
Nobody would bother with mines that the enemy could detect and sweep for a trivial amount of effort since delay and inconvenience is the primary purpose of a minefield. Unfortunately they tend to keep delivering the delay and inconvenience pretty much indefinitely.

The Roomba was invented with minesweeping in mind, but after poor trials, they attached a vacuum and sold it to the public.

Note that the US military, at least, divides minesweeping into two categories with distinctly different hazards and goals;

[ul]
[li]Mine clearance – typically in combat situations, where speed is essential, techniques might be limited by exposure to enemy fire, and only a very limited area needs to be cleared, such as a path for advancing troops.[/li]
[li]Demining – removing all mines from an area to render it safe for general use. Typically there is no time pressure, one can stand around in the open without getting shot at, a much larger area must be entirely cleared, and extreme thoroughness is essential.[/li][/ul]

When it comes to demining, the main problem is finding all of the damned things, as they can be blown up or disarmed fairly easily under noncombat conditions. Lots of techniques have been used, including trained rats, luminescent bacteria, and possibly, soon, honeybees.

The military has used line charges to blow lanes through minefields during mine clearance. Sometimes they’ve used “overpressure” from very large bombs or fuel-air explosives; that gets a wider area but is still probably impractical for demining whole regions.

The thing that got me about the $40 version is that appears the wind has to be blowing in the direction you want to go.

The Posleen generally just run troops across a mine field until it’s clear and then, as a bonus, eat the dead troops or otherwise use them as rations or weapons resources. From what I understand it’s pretty effective, as long as you don’t mind expending thousands of soldiers to clear a mine field. Works for them though.

:wink:

This is the important distinction with regards to most of the mine clearing equipment mentioned, flails, plows, line charges, etc; armies are very effective at breaching minefields, but actual demining of an area remains a much more difficult task. In theory the use of breaching equipment can make complete demining more difficult as they can push aside or dislodge mines without detonating them, and in theory armies are recording the locations where mines are placed as required by Protocol II of The Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects, an annex to Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949. This is all of course in theory, not only does it not happen in practice, a lot of effort has gone into making scatterable mines that can be deployed by aircraft, artillery, helicopters, and ground vehicles.

This might be of interest:

http://www.halotrust.org/