Landmines :: Nuclear War Weapons Essays

Landmines The possible use of weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons, terrorizes us, as it can have catastrophic repercussions if they were to be in the hands of terrorists. One of the reasons behind our fear is that no matter where we are in the world can we tomorrow suffer from the use of such weapons, and are in no place completely safe, as we have seen with the catastrophe of September 11, 2001. Yet there exists many other weapons that can be used to harms civilians, from which we are less conscious about since they don’t affect us. The result of the use of landmines, for example has been horrendous in many third world countries, hurting many non-military personnel, even once a conflict between tow nations has been resolved. They have been implanted on the battlefield of more than 70 countries in the world, and are still being built by some of the most powerful nations such as Russia, China or the United States. The first known description of a pressure-activated landmine was by the German military historian Frieherr Von Flemming in 1726, but such mines were not commonly used in warfare until the Second World War. It has been accounted that more than 300 million mines were deployed between 1939 and 1945. In the first part of the war mines were solely used as a device to counter enemy tanks. Yet, one of the problems with Anti-Tank (AT) mines of the time was that they were easily removed and re-used by the other side, so Anti-Personnel (AP) were created to solve this problem. They were deployed around AT mines to prevent their removal. Originally, both AT and AP landmines were developed as tactical, defensive weapons. They were intended to protect troops, military bases, and key installations like power plants and water supplies. After the Second World War, with the advances in technology the landmines became an offensive weapon. Mines in the 1960’s could be simply launched from an airp lane, and would only activate once on the ground, thus making it possible to drop more mines from the air than if placing them on the ground. Not only this would allow mines to be placed in a war zone in a much greater frequency, but until now, each mine that was placed was recorded and mapped, in order to be able to remove it once the conflict was over.