October 26, 2024 • 51 mins
One of the worst legacies of war are the millions of landmines left behind. They hide for decades after a conflict is over, exploding beneath unsuspecting civilians and children. To many, removing mines and banning new ones is of paramount importance. Learn all about the scope of the problem and this important work in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Chuck here on Saturday with an important show to curate
here on this select Saturday. It was an important episode,
a pretty depressing one though, because it's about the history
of land mines and it's from April tenth, twenty eighteen.
Wide land mines are the deadliest legacy of war. Welcome
(00:24):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland. Back
together again at last, Just like last week.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I was about to say, what are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You know what I'm talking about, willis what you're talking about.
Oh that was a pretty good one, subtle, understated. So Chuck,
how are you feeling today?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I'm kind of tired of this weather.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Yeah, it's pretty nasty. Huh Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
I mean it's almost April in Atlanta and it's still
cold at night.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
It's during the day for that.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
It usually like the way that Atlanta is for those
who don't know, it'll be cold, cold, cold, like really
cold down in the freezing. Sometimes it'll snow and then
it'll start to warm up, and then at the end
of February boom, one more snow out of nowhere and
then spring. That's not how it's going this time. No, No,
it's been like real gloomy and dismal. Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, I got the sads.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It's okay, it'll clear up soon enough. Easters on its way,
Peter Rabbit's gonna bring us some sunshine and.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Springtime good and poison eggs.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Poison eggs. No, you're thinking of Halloween candy. Oh right,
so today, Chuck, we're not talking about Halloween or easter
or even the weather. We're talking about something that has
been come kind of an international global issue, rightfully, so
(02:06):
in like the best way possible because in this case,
the international community, the global community has kind of come
together to try to alleviate a really overlooked problem literally
and figuratively overlooked problem land mines.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, and has been This isn't like a brand new effort, No,
but it's a little daunting to say the least, and
depressing it is.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
There's something like I saw, there's all these really, like
you say, depressing statistics all over the place when you
look into land mines. Fortunately, although they are daunting, they're
not so daunting that people are just like, forget it,
We're not even going to do this, right, But I
saw something like it would take eleven hundred years at
the current pace of progress to remove all the land
(02:53):
mines on Earth right now that are buried on Earth,
if not another single one is laid.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Well, part of the problem though, was the number they're
laying land mines twenty five times faster. Yes, then we're
gathering up old land mines. Yes, yeah, that's the issue.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, it's funny like between two and a half million
and five million land mines are laid every year new ones.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And more than one hundred million in over seventy countries
around the world.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, that's a lot in places where there's no war
conflict going on any longer. That's the big problem with
land mines. Well, there's a couple of problems. One, they're indiscriminate.
They don't recognize whether you're a civilian or a soldier. Yeah,
they stick around long after the conflict is over, and
(03:45):
they still manage to kill and mame thousands of people
every year around the world. And apparently it's on an
upswing thanks to the conflicts in Yemen and Syria and
some of the work of isis as well.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Just so depressing, it really is.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
There's nothing really more that like kind of embodies like
just the mute, killing, maiming aspect of war than a landmine.
It's just a dumb lump of explosive that you step
on and it blows you up, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, and especially the year's later effect, which is maybe
there hasn't been war for two decades and a little
kid can still come along and say, oh, what's this thing?
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And then they don't have legs?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yeah, and the kids thing is is real. So apparently
landmines kill disproportionately kill civilians way more than soldiers because
of their ability to be left over after a war,
and the most recent statistics from twenty sixteen, the majority
of the civilians killed were children. Yeah, I was, I was,
(04:54):
Actually I was talking to Yumi about it. She grew
up on Okinawa and there's a lot of World War
two unexploded ordinance around there, and she was telling me
that they used to watch like educational films, saying like,
if you see something metal in the woods, stay away,
go tell an adult. Yeah, I'm sure it's like the
movies they were taught you know.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, when you're raised in an area where and we're
talking about landmines specifically, but in a lot of cases
they're just unexploded bombs and things like that too.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, I know, like they find something like one hundred
tons of it in Belgium alone every year, most of
it from World War One. Still. Wow. So but we
are talking specifically about land mines, which seem to kind
of bear the focus of the international efforts to get
rid of them, because they are probably the biggest problem
(05:44):
of unexploded ordinance today.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah. Well, should we go back in time here and
talk about the history?
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah? I think so.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, this one was interesting because I don't think a
lot of people when they hear about landmines know that
they started in like legit started during the American Civil War.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
No, I thought world War two at the earliest.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So in the American Civil War they were called torpedoes
or subterra shells. There was a man, a North Carolinian
named Gabriel Rains, who initially fought for the Union, but
then said, wait a minute, I'm from North Carolina. I'm
not actually sure how that switch happened.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
He's like North Carolina's with the South ay ya Yai.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
But he was the first person to.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Sort of play around with these and eventually get a
patent called the Rains Patent on what essentially was a
very sort of early crude but effective land mine.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah, and so this is at a time when like
pitched battles are still the norm. Sure, where like your
infantry meets my infantry in a field and like you
do a bunch of shooting, and then we do a
bunch of shooting, and then there's advancement under tree and
cannons and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Is it our turn to shoot or their turn? I forgot?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
I mean pretty much right, there's people like picnicking watching
the battle, like that's how that's how staged they were. Yeah,
and the Confederacy didn't necessarily play by those rules. They
did in many battles for sure, but they also definitely
had a gorilla facet to them as well. And this
definitely screams guerrilla warfare because the Union Army was taken
(07:27):
totally off guard by the early land mines that they encountered.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, and it was not something that was readily accepted
into warfare. The generals were, well, everyone was scared first
of all, once they got wind of what these things
were there all of a sudden, like what like I
can like we're literally just walking through the woods and
now we can just die.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Right and with no enemy nearby.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
And apparently Gabriel Reins himself was one of the first
to lay a bunch of these from the road to
Richmond after the defeat of a battle, and that's when
they first the Union army first encountered these things.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Well, yeah, so not only were they scared, but then
the the you know, the hierarchy, the generals were pretty
ticked off. They were like this is you know, one
of the quotes is the rebels have been guilty of
the most murderous and barbarous conduct. So they were not
welcomed into warfare. They thought it was sort of a
cheap trick and a dirty, a dirty, rotten thing to do.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Yeah, and like you said, it scared the troops, it
upset the generals. And these were not just like land
mines like we think of them now. They were like
booby trapped, like they put them in flower sacks, so
when you reached into a flower sack, boom that blew up.
They put them around like if the if the Confederates
abandoned like an outpost, they would put them around the well,
(08:48):
around the water like places they knew the Union troops
were going to go, and you could either set them
off by stepping on them, like a modern land mine,
or they would attach things like tools to them with
like a string, so you would bend down and pick
up the tool and set off this land mine that
was buried nearby. And at first the Confederates too, some
of the Confederate higher ups were like, I don't know
(09:10):
if this is okay, yea, even in a civil war,
and we're you know, the Confederacy were in some ways
a gorilla army. I'm not sure we should be using these.
And then finally after a while they're like, okay, we
kind of need every tool we can get in the toolbox.
And they acquiesced and started using them, and they spread
them all over the South apparently.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, and they don't have any figures on the soldiers
that were killed, but they do know that total between
the Union and the Confederates thirty five. Well, actually that's
not true. Thirty five Union ships went down. One Confederate
ship went.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Down, which I'm taking was an accident.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
I don't know, maybe yeah, But remarkably it says here
in this article you sent that they found them they
were still finding them in the nineteen sixties and alibi.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Yeah, which makes you wonder, I wonder, like, how many
are there still out there, like in around Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
You know, I don't know, I mean, surely none. Right.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Well, you would hope also that after this time the
explosives would have decayed enough after being exposed to whether
for this long. One of the articles that we used
said that that land mines, modern land mines have a
useful life of over fifty years. Surely by now whatever
they had attached to the Confederate land mines are no
(10:33):
longer useful, even if you did find them in the woods,
I would think so, which is not to say you
should do like a belly flop on it to test
it out. You find something that even vaguely resembles a
landmine in the woods of the southeastern United States, run
and tell somebody, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
That is the.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Worst way to test out whether or not a landmine
is still capable of working.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Agreed, is the belly flop method. Yep. So the Civil
Wars where they got their start, and they came into
use pretty quickly after they were invented, but it was
World War One and then really World War Two where
they really came into focus. And our article from how
Stuff Works says that the land mines for World War
(11:16):
one and two were invented to prevent people from picking
up the land mines that were originally invented to blow
up tanks.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, I mean, there were certain they realized that there
were a few uses. They could either lay a minefield
to keep a group of troops and or tanks from
going to a certain place. Sometimes it was to reroute
a group of people in tanks to a different area
because they're like, oh, well, we know that's minefield, so
we got to go this way, which might play right
(11:49):
into the plans of the opposition.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And then sometimes it's.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Just to slow everybody down until they can get reinforcements.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So, I mean, there is a use for this besides
just blowing somebody up. There's a larger strategic use.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
For me.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
I hadn't really thought about it. I always thought it
was just, you know, a nasty way of blowing somebody
up by chance, you know, But it really does send
a message too. Which is don't keep going straight, right,
You're gonna have to go one way or another. Yeah,
because obviously this place is mined. And really there's only
one way to find out whether a place is mine too,
especially during warfare. Like it's not like the enemy posts
(12:27):
sign that says we've mined this field. Suckers, like you
find out because one of them goes off, either on
a tank or one of your soldiers.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
You know, well, yeah, and if one of them goes off,
it's there. I don't think they were using like random
rogue land mines. It was more likely a minefield, right.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
So World War two is where they really kind of
came into play. One of the things I saw is
that one of so I guess by the numbers, the
most mind place in the world as far as countries go,
is Egypt. Oh really, it's like what I mean, by
a long shot, Egypt has something like I think two
(13:05):
hundred and thirty million no, sorry, twenty three million minds
unexploded around Egypt. Egypt's not that big, right, Holy cow.
I think they have like sixty per square kilometer square
miles something like that. So they've got twenty three million minds.
And I was like why Egypt, And it was the
Nazis during the North African theater fighting in World War Two.
(13:30):
The Nazis mined all over around there, but apparently Egypt
got the brunt of it. And there's still twenty three
million unexploded minds by they estimate in Egypt from World
War two.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah's all right, We'll take a break and we'll come
back and we'll talk about the two main types of
land mines that we're going to cover today right after.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
This definitely large hous of Egypt.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Sk as w S k AS good you.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Should all right, so, uh, for the purposes of this,
and you know, there are more than three hundred and
fifty types of minds, so that would be exhaustive.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
To go through all those. But the way our article.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Breaks it down, which makes sense to me, or in
the two main groups, which are anti personnel minds and
anti tank minds, they both do about the same thing,
which is explode after pressure is put on them. But
in the cases of a tank, of course, they're going
to be bigger with more boom and require more weight
(14:47):
in order to make it go boom, right, more pressure.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, So the the the anti anti personnel minds. Those
are much lighter, much smaller, much cheaper, and I think
found in much greater abundance around the world. For sure.
There's one that this article covers called the M fourteen
blast mind, And we should say there's actually a few
(15:11):
different types of minds, especially as far as anti personnel
minds go.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, so there's this the standard blast mind, which is
you step on it, it goes boom and bad things
happen to you as a result. There's the bounding mind
or bouncing mind. Basically it means the same thing where
you step on the mind, a fuses lit that ignites
(15:38):
a propeller charge which shoots the mind upward from under
the ground just barely covered over by the ground up
to about chester head height, which then the mine explodes.
So it's designed to do even worse damage.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, those are called bouncing Betty's or german S minds,
either for spring or shrapnel, and those I think I've
seen those movies before. That stuff is just nuts.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Man.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
You step on something and all of a sudden it
bounces up in the air to about your chest.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
And makes a horrible whizzing sound too. If I remember correctly.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, I mean talk about like just sheer intimidation factor too.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Sure, And so the bouncing mind or the bounding mind
is meant clearly to kill. The blast mind is meant
to maim. It's probably it may not kill you, although
you could die of like your injuries later on from
like an infection or something like that, or you could
bleed out if it if it got enough of your
femoral artery, you would be in big trouble there. But
(16:38):
it's it's designed mainly just to maim you, take you
out of commission. Whereas a bounding mind is meant to
blow you up and kill you. Then there's a fragmentation mind.
That's the third type of anti personnel mind. And I
don't I mean, like for those of you out here,
you can't see me and chuck, but our fingers are
kind of like digging into the tabletop.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, it's all unnerving.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
This is just so grim and gruesome. You know, it's
not we're not even talking about shooting somebody. It's talking
about these things designed to blow somebody up or blow
their leg off, you know.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, And I think what's most disconcerting about like a
minefield of blast minds. Is the purpose to lay a
minefield of blast minds is to almost certainly re route
somebody or to keep somebody from going somewhere. So it's
not like they're saying, we're going to put down three
hundred minds here because we want to blow off three hundred.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Feet of soldiers. They just have to scatter them.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
So a couple of people get their feet blown off
and they go, holy cower in a minefield.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
We got to go a different direction.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
But the residual effect is there's still two hundred and
ninety eight of those things out there. You know, it's
like a numbers game. So it's just it's like the
lowest common denominator of strategy almost Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Yeah, but it's effective, which is why they keep using them.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
And I think also like if the army, the army
that was retreating laying those mines in their wake, if
they got three hundred feet blown off, they'd be fine
with that. Even though that, like you say, that's not
the that's not the ultimate aim of it. It's to
redirect people or to stall them until reinforcements can come
for you.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Well yeah, and you don't keep going like after it
happens a couple of times or maybe even once. You
don't think, well, man, let's just press on and see
what happens.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Right, Maybe that was a fluke, Maybe that was a
geothermal spring, right, and you talked about someone's foot being
blown off. Supposedly, the nickname for the M fourteen blast mind,
which we'll talk about in a second, those are called toepoppers,
which kind of under sells it to me, I think.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
So the last one, the last type of anti personnel
mind is a fragmentation mind, and that's meant to get
a bunch of guys all at once, all around, and
it may not it may not take off their leg,
it may not kill anybody, but it's certainly going to
slow down several soldiers at once because these blow up
(19:10):
and they shoot fragments everywhere.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, like a pretty long way, right.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
So the Claymore mine is an example of a fragmentation
grenade or a fragmentation mine. And then so too are
cluster mines, which kind of fall into a different category
because they're dropped out of bombs, typically drop from aircraft.
They fall out of cylinders, hundreds of them, and then
(19:35):
when they hit the ground they blow up. And shoot
hundreds of fragments. So each of those hundreds of small
mines shoots out hundreds of fragments. The reason they become
de facto land mines is because not all of them
blow up, and so they can be found later and
then blow up when they're being handled by a kid
or a curious civilian or something.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Play more with claymore. Remember that from The Simpsons. No,
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Well, it was a long time ago, but I think
that was like a poster in the shop of like
an army navy.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Store or something like that guy the guy missing an
arm Oh maybe so, Yeah, I remember that was like
one of the first season ones. I'll bet it was
old for sure. I forgot about him.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Oh and by the way, our buddy Kevin Pollack just
guessed it on The Simpsons. After that many years, I
would have thought he would have been on by now.
But he did like two or three voices this past week.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I did not know that. I got to see that one.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
How did he do did he crack under pressure?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
He did a great job. I'm sure he did.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
All right.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
So the M fourteen is these are small like it
fits in the palm of your hand. It's about an
inch and a half one point six inches tall and
about two point two inches in diameter. And we developed
this here in the US in the nineteen fifties and
it has been sort of a go to around the
world since then.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
This one is not a very big.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Boom, but it does cause damage with these little these
little silver bebes that.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
It shoots out.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
That's the toepopper one. Yeah, so, oh, it does have
bebes that it shoots out. I thought it was just
a straight up blast mine.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Oh, I thought this one had bbs.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Maybe I don't know. I know that this I don't know.
Possibly it could be modified. But it is small and
it looks like a mean little hockey puck basically, yeah,
the meanest the whole the And one of the things
that you're going to find in minds throughout the world
is something that's called a Belleville spring, and it's basically
(21:35):
like a washer that you put on, well a bolt.
You know, what else are you going to put a
washer on, you weirdo? So it's a washer, but it's
kind of popped upward on one side, so the Belleville
spring holds up the firing pin. But when you put
enough pressure on it and you overcome the pressure, the
upward pressure being exerted by the Belleville spring, it kind
(21:58):
of pops downward and when it does that, it taps
that firing pin which shoots down into the detonator. It's
really cheap, really easy to use, and really effective, and
it's found through in minds of all different types and varieties.
It's usually the thing holding everything in place, and then
that's what pressure overcomes, is a Belleville spring, and they're
(22:19):
found in the M fourteen minds as well.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah, it's sort of like the hand grenade. It's not
a very sophisticated piece of gear. It's very kind of rudimentary.
On all of them, there's some sort of safety clip,
just like a grenade. You remove the clip and usually
there's some sort of switch that either says I mean,
it doesn't say this, but basically it says either boom
(22:42):
or no boom, and you switch it to boom and
set it down and walk away, yeah backwards, I assume.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yeah, slowly, and yeah, you cover it up me with
some leaves, a little bit of dirt, just enough so
that it can't be seen, but not enough that you
would dampen the blast at all or make it so
that any of the pressures damp them. And all it
takes is like twenty pounds or nine kilograms of pressure
from say somebody stepping on it, and that sets off
the I think it's got something like how many grams of.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Tetral third thirty one in the fourteen.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
So that's again that's not very much, but it's enough
that you will, say, lose your foot, or if you're
stepping directly on it, you may lose part of your leg,
and not necessarily right then, but you may have to
have it amputated later on, which makes it even nastier.
I understand the point of this. It's like there's one
soldier who's not fighting anymore. He's over there sapping the
healthcare resources of the medical core. I mean, that's that's
(23:40):
a that's a lifelong entry. That's a nasty thing to
put down as a three dollar a three dollars weapon
that's just left behind under the dirt, by the hundreds,
by the thousands, by the millions apparently every year.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, imagine that setting these is a little unnerving too,
Like I know that technically, even for these small ones.
It takes, however, many pounds of pressure. But it's still
probably a little bit unnerving when you flip that thing
to on and keep a little dirt on top of it.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah, I mean you don't want to like throw a
dirt chunk on it or anything like that. Yeah. Or
what about being the guy who drives the truck that
has crates full of those things in the back. Yeah,
you're just hoping that all of them have the safety
in Yeah. So that's the M fourteen. That's the one
that's probably the most common throughout the world, mostly because
it's the cheapest. Like I said, it costs about three
(24:32):
US dollars to make one of those things, although supposedly
it costs about one thousand dollars to remove one man. Well,
that's part of the problem too, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
So the M sixteen is another kind.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
This is one of the bounding or fragmentation minds that
we're talking about that pop up from the ground, and
that has three main components, the mind fuse propelling charge
to lift it out, like you said, and then this
cast iron housing.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
And it is it is bigger.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
It's about almost eight inches tall and about five inches
in diameter. And it has about a little over one
pounds of T and T inside, so that's quite a
bit of boom going on.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
Yes, and again when you either step on the thing
and you overcome the pressure from the Bellville spring or
I think these things can also be booby trapped, so
like a wire can be attached to the firing pin.
Either way, the firing pin shoots down, ignites that percussion cap,
which sends the thing upward, and then a second detonator
(25:36):
that's been on a delay fuse explodes once it reaches
about three feet or a meter into the air.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I think one of the scariest parts of this one
too is, at least in the movies, there's like that
split second where you're a soldier and you see that
thing pop up in the air and you know what's
coming right.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, With a regular old blast mine, it's like step boom.
You know, you probably don't have much of a chance
to register that you just stepped on something. Whereas yeah,
that fragmentation mine, and again, like the sound that it
makes is just horrifically unnerving. Yeah, well, I should say,
at least from the movies.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, yeah, when movies are always right, yeah, speaking of
movies though, like in the hurt Locker I know, and
I've seen in other movies like I think, generally step
on it and once that pressure is released is when
the boom happens. So I remember episodes of maybe Mash
and other like war movies I've seen there have been
(26:36):
like soldiers would step on one and hear the click
and then be like, well, I've got to stand on
this thing now until we figure it out.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Right. I was under that impression too, But nowhere in
my research did I find that to be the case.
Oh really, Yeah. For me, everything I saw was once
you step on it and that pressure overcomes the Belleville spring,
the firing pin is shot downward into the debt cap,
and then once that happens, or the detonator I should say,
once that happens, the whole thing explodes. There's not like
(27:07):
a once you lift up, then the pressure or the
firing pin has dropped.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
My guess is that they did not completely create that
out of whole cloth, and out of the three hundred
and fifty types of land mines that some of them
probably do that.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm just saying I didn't run
across any that had that, and I noticed that as well.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So next up we have the tank mines that we
were talking about with the arrival of tanks, basically is
when we started getting these anti tank mines. And they're
much much larger and they require at least like three
hundred plus pounds of pressure. So unless you're a big
boy soldier, then you're not going to detonate them by
(27:47):
stepping on them. It's still probably Again, I don't think
you would give that a try and say, only Wig
two seventy five, let me show what happens.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah, but those are built to disable a tank.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Sometimes it can have so much boom that it can
it can kill people around it, but generally it's to
blow the tracks off of the tank.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Right and yeah, and so once the tank is disabled,
that's a big Yeah, that's a big win. So again,
they started making those, from what I can understand as
far as World War One goes, they made those first,
and then they made the anti personnel ones to keep
people from just going up and picking up the mines
and removing them.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah, so like they'll surround an anti tank mine with
several anti personnel.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Mines, right, and you said it has a big boom
to it. It's this thing is it has twenty to
almost twenty three pounds, so over ten kilograms of composition
B yeah, which is TNT and RDX.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, that's a lot of boom.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
It is a lot of boom. And if you have
ever seen anybody removing anti tank mine, you get the
impression that, yes, it would, it would tear a tank
up pretty pretty well. Yeah, and you want to take
another break and then come back and talk about removing
some of these things, Yeah, let's do it. Okay, definitely
should know, Chlo.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Sk As why why s k.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
You should know? Okay, Chuck. So we talked about what's
out there and how many are out there. There are
people who are dedicated to removing these things. Yes, as
a matter of fact, the group formed the an International
Landmine Treaty BAND treaty to basically outlaw those things, and
(29:55):
there's one hundred and sixty four countries that have signed it.
Most of those, I think one hundred si have ratified it,
and it basically says that we are not going to produce,
stockpile or transfer any mines any longer, land mines of
any kind any longer, and we're also going to work
toward removing old minds and getting rid of them, and
(30:18):
then financially and medically assisting the survivors or victims of
land mines, casualties of land mines specifically, I think civilians
who have undergone who have been blown up by a landmine,
and they I think they formed in like nineteen ninety
five and within two years they won the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, this is an interesting one because the US and
Cuba are one of the only two Western countries that
have not signed on to this. However, the US is
also probably the leading country in the world at pouring
money into land mine eradication and support. And for their money,
they say listen, I mean, this is what they say.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
At least they say.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
The only reason that we're not signing on to this
is because of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and
South Korea. We need that line of defense so North
Korea cannot march in there and attack our ally in
South Korea.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
I don't know whether to believe that.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
I know the Obama administration came close to signing on,
but he never did. It's virtually guaranteed that the Trump
administration won't sign on, there's like a zero percent chance
of that happening. But the more and more nuclear capable
North Korea gets, the less and less reason that you're
going to have to have those land mines scattered throughout
(31:38):
the DMZ there, right, So I don't know whether to
buy that or not, but they say that that's the reason,
and to their credit, they do spend more money and
time and efforts trying to clear the world of land
mines in any other country.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
I think, yeah, yeah, they're definitely a leader in reality,
but they're still criticized that the US is still criticized
by for not having signed on to this treaty. Sure,
because there's a lot of other states that may actually
follow suit if the United States did. They're in the
company of Iran, Israel, Azerbaijan, a lot of Russia, Yeah, Russia,
(32:14):
a lot of former Soviet satellite states, China, some pretty
big players in as far as global militaries go, right,
or militaries around the world go. So if the United
States did that, it would exert some pressure on some
of the other ones. But like you said, the Trump
administration is not huge on international treaties, and this I
(32:34):
think it was the New York Times Editorial Board that
said there's a zero percent chance of assigning it right,
but we are still one of the leaders in actually
removing minds. The United States military stockpile is pretty small.
I think it's around three million right now, and as
far as I know, we're not deploying anymore. And we
(32:54):
really have it since I think two thousand and three
in Iraq when we have invaded Rock. That was the
last time we laid landmines as far as the US goes.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Right, yeah, and three million sounds like a lot, and
it is, but compared to like a Russia, which has
like between twenty and thirty million, it's not as many.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
So one thing that like, I thought that was pretty
odd too. I was like, the DMZ, that's what that's
why we're not signing onto this landmine treaty. That's weird.
And then I started looking up cluster bombs and there's
another treaty kind of like a corollary treaty to the
International Landmine Treaty to ban cluster bombs as well, and
(33:35):
that has some it's much newer, but it has I
think a pretty decent amount, like one hundred and twenty
countries already signed on to it, but with cluster bombs.
I was looking up the Pentagon's reasoning for not signing
on to this treaty. So back in I think two
thousand and eight, the Bush administration said, the US will
(33:55):
sign this, this cluster bomb ban treaty if we have
not done developed cluster bombs that have a failure rate
of one percent or less, meaning only one out of
every hundred of those little bomblets that comes out of
the cluster bomb cylinder doesn't explode upon contact. Right, And
apparently just within the last few days, the Pentagon said, well,
(34:17):
the deadline's twenty nineteen. We haven't developed cluster bombs that
have that low of a failure rate, so we're just
going to ignore that and keep using cluster bombs. And
the report said it's because they want to reserve the
right to use them in case of a ground war
with North Korea. So I'm like, what do you guys
(34:37):
know that we don't know, Like it's is it really
that eminent a ground war with Korea that we need
to reserve the right to use cluster bombs and land mines?
Still that like, is it are we that close to
the knife edge. And if so, then this, the whole,
the whole nuclear thing makes me even more nervous than
it did before.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah, it should, I'll make you nervous.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
It does. So I'll tell you one thing that makes
everybody nervous, chuck, and that's being out in a minefield
removing land mines.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
So this is this has many many problems to root out.
First of all, finding the minds. Like you said earlier,
they're not in marked. They don't say here's a minefield
and here's where they're all located. So finding these things,
millions of them around the world is really tough. And
(35:28):
even when you find the minefield, it's tough. So, like
the first thing is to find the minefield, then it's
it depends on how you do it. And we're going
to talk about all the ways that they're trying to
do this, some of which are very rudimentary, which the
very first one you can do is called probing the ground.
That means walking around with a stick or a bayonet
(35:51):
and poking around.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Lightly, very lightly, oh so lightly.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Yeah, I get the feeling that this is I'm sure
it's still done in some parts of the world, but
they're certainly not one of the more advanced operations.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Any longer.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
I get the impression that that's what soldiers do when
they're like, Nope, we can't go around, we have to
keep going straight. Probably, so that that's what because they
use sticks or bayonets typically, and they're trained to kind
of do it very very lightly. So I think that's
who does that.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
All right. So you've also got trained dogs.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
This is horrifying when you think about a dog getting
blown up, but they are trained to sniff out these
explosive vapors and the bomb ingredients.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
I also saw rats have been trained by a company
called a Popo.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Oh yeah, rats and bees.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Oh I didn't see bees. That makes sense though.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah, bees are trained, and that was one of the
things you sent over to me.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
The bees were How did I miss that?
Speaker 1 (36:46):
I don't know, because you're all about bees.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
I love bees.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, the bees.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Apparently, it said the hard part is not training them
to find these things, but tracking them once you release
the honey bee. So they're trained with sugar coated TNT
and then of course they can find the That's how
they find the tn T, but it has no sugar
on it.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Right, One of the I guess I think. So that
to me is a big step up from poking with
a stick. Yes, in between those two is using a
good old fashioned metal detector. Yeah, it works, but the
problem is twofold one. Metal detectors send a signal back
(37:31):
for anything that has any metal to it whatsoever. So
you get a hit and you are very like gingerly
searching the area to see if there is a mine there. Nope,
it's a it's an old roaman coin, or it's like
an old butterfly top to a Miller beer can. It's
anything metal, right, So that's one part of the problem.
(37:52):
And then the second part of the problem is that
you you actually may miss metal because some types of
the three hundred and fifty different varieties of minds use
very little metal. Some of them are almost entirely plastics.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
So not only are you picking up stuff that's not
a landmine and then wasting time seeing if it is
a landmine, you're actually potentially missing land mines as well.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
So that's a problem because that was my first thought
is like, I remember when I was a kid, my
dad was all over that metal.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Detector on the beach.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Oh yeah, so just get a lot of my dads
out there or dudes like my dad and just tell
them to go wild.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Yeah, they can coordinate over CB while they're driving their
jeep sides of the minefield. They totally would.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Some more promising newer technology, specifically being developed at Ohio
State University, and I think they're actually using this now,
is called GPR, or ground penetrating radar. This uses magic
leprechauns inside a machine.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Who exert no pressure to tell.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
You where these things are underground.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, it's actually it's pretty sweet. It's like a metal
detector ground penet penetrating radar combo. So the ground penetrating
radar can show you if it's an anomaly. But then
the radar also interacts with explosives and the electrical properties
unique to explosives, so it can actually tell you there's
something we're down there, and the amazing Creskin here thinks
(39:23):
that it's TNT.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, and this is crazy.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Once they find these landmines with the GPR device, it
shoots chemical agents, two of them into the ground that
actually solidifies the triggering mechanism at first along with the soil,
and then a second chemical agent that solidifies all of
the mind in the soil, so they can just be
scooped up.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Right. Well, I don't understand that. What is it? I
just I don't know. Is it cement?
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I don't know if it was proprietary or what. But
I couldn't find what those chemical agents were. But they
sound pretty awesome. Yeah, and not something you want to
get on your hand.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
No, you know, no wash hands, flush eyes.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
So that's actually that's that's like you said, that's in use.
That's a huge innovation because it shows you you get
like the hits that you get from a metal detector,
but you also don't get the misses. And then it
also shows you if something is roughly the size or
shape of a landmine, so you don't waste time digging
up old old butterfly bottle caps. Right, Yeah, I like it.
(40:28):
That's my favorite, and it came from the Ohio State University.
This article gets it wrong. It calls it scientists at
Ohio State University the shame.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Yeah, my favorite are these big heavy machines. So if
you and I didn't ever think I was a kid
who liked I never played with like Tonka trucks and
stuff much, I was obviously you know, we talked about
the Evil can Eevil and stuff like that, model model cars.
But for some reason, as an adult, heavy machinery really
(41:00):
really turns my crank. So go look up on your
Google images the Panther and the ard Vark tank or
mind removal machines and just delight in these huge things
that are part Bobcat, part hum v h.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
And they're they're just so rudimentary.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Like literally one of them, the Ardvark has these It
has like a spinning thing that sits out in front
of it that just spins chains and like whips the
ground with big metal chains. H. I mean, it's so
brain dead and rudimentary. That said, let's just get a
big heavy thing out there that smashes the ground with
(41:47):
chains and.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
The point is to just set off a landmine encounters right,
so it's like and the Ardvark just takes it. It's
a huge anti tank. Mines just blowing up right underneath
these chains that are whipping up the ground the front
part of the Ardvark. And I saw a video of
a guy in one who I guess hit a mine
(42:08):
and they show him in the cab and he barely
is jostled by the explosion, this huge explosion that they
show like eighty times because it's I think on the
Military Channel or something like that, and it's like, why
don't you just make everything out of whatever you're making the.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Art bark out, Why isn't the tank made of that?
Speaker 3 (42:25):
It's that same joke as like, you know, why don't
you make the whole plane out of the black box?
If black box is the one thing that's always about.
But it's true and I'm sure I think with M
wraps like mine. I can't remember what it stands for,
but you remember the IEDs that were killing so many
American soldiers at the beginning of the Iraq War, and
then they figured out a way to armor plate humviies
(42:50):
so that they were kind of impervious to IEDs. I
think it's basically the same technology on the Ardvark.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah, So that one, like you said, has a dude
in it. Then there's the Panther, and that is a
sixty ton remote controlled thing. So this has somebody on
the side with a joystick operating this thing through a minefield.
This has big metal rollers to set off These set
off the mines, and then they are regular tanks that
(43:19):
you can sort of retrofit with a plow that sort
of plows along and gently pushes these mines out of
the dirt in the path. Then someone can come along
and I don't know, I guess collect them in a
pink basket.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Yeah. No, there's there's a there's another machine called a
burm processing assembly. It just goes down through these these
mounds of dirt that have mines in them and shakes
the mines out of the dirt and sets them off
to the side so they're exposed, so they can be
picked up and detonated.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
We mentioned bees and rats and dogs. Very sadly, elephants
can sniff out mines. They're pretty good at it. They
don't use elephants to do this because that just doesn't
make much sense, but they have killed and injured a
bunch of elephants.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
My favorite new machine that they're using, and this makes
total sense, are drones. The mine Kifon drone k A
f O N. This is a drone basically that I
was developed by a guy named Masud Hassani and it's
a drone that does the work of the human It's
a drone with metal detectors attached to it.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
So it just flies really low over.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
The ground and detects these land mines with nobody walking
on the ground or no machine on the ground.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Makes total sense.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
It really does. It's great. And then what does it
do is it market on like GPS or something like that.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, it marks it on a GPS and then can
even come back and place a detonator, drop a detonator
on it, basically fly away and it explodes itself.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
And they're only like five grand compared to robots and
stuff like that can go from eighty to half a
million bucks.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Yeah, the art VARC looks extremely expensive for sure.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Imagine it's not cheap.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
So we talked about the International band Treaty, the campaign
to ban land mines that won the Nobel Prize in
nineteen ninety seven. Their work actually had a huge impact
in I think nineteen ninety nine there's a peak of
casualties worldwide from land mines of nine two hundred and
(45:37):
twenty eight. By twenty thirteen they'd gotten that down to
thirty four hundred and fifty and it really looked like
the work of this group and like the international treaty
that it created, and all these countries signed was having
a real genuine impact on landmine casualties. Apparently the tide
(45:59):
turned in two thousand and sixteen and the numbers have
started to go back up. So the low was thirty
four fifty in twenty thirteen. In twenty sixteen it was
up to eighty six hundred and five, which has got
to be really demoralizing.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Yeah, and I think you said very early on a
lot of this is because of what's going on at
Yemen and Syria right now, right right, so.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Sad I saw Also, remember I said Egypt has a
lot of old minds from World War Two. Apparently Isis
is taken to digging those up and replanting them. And
we should say, you know, land mines and IEDs are
virtually one and the same. It's just land mines are
mass produced, whereas IEDs are made by insurgent bomb makers.
(46:49):
They're usually not commercially produced. Right, there's no contract that
ISIS has out with somebody.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Did you ever see hurt Locker? The hurt Locker?
Speaker 3 (46:56):
No, I haven't seen that one.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Man, that's a good movie. Talk about tens.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
I can imagine it. I mean that's what they do, right,
They go and remove mines right or bombs.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Any IED's bombs, anything like any unexploded thing.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Jeremy Renners in it.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
And these it's just amazing, Like they just wear these
like big heavy suits basically like anti blast suits and
then work very carefully and slowly.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
Yeah. Oh one other thing, chuck, Yes, Princess Diana.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, we have to mention her. I mean some of
the probably her most important work she did as princess
was in the final years of her life working to
try and raise awareness to eradicate land mines around the world.
Just amazing stuff. And she wasn't. She took a lot
of heat, sometimes from within her own country. Yeah, sometimes
(47:51):
they didn't. They thought she was just not being super helpful.
Some people would bag on her for just doing like
photo ops and stuff like that, but by all accounts
she was. I mean, she did what she could. She
had a lot of things that happened off the cameras.
She would go and visit these hospitals where these children
(48:12):
were affected, and it was a humanitarian effort to really
kind of shine a light and raise awareness more than like, hey,
I can create policy as the princess.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
She knew she couldn't do that. But she did a
lot of great work to raise.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Awareness, and when she died it was a very sad
day and they obviously for many reasons. But Nobel Prize
winning whinner Jody Williams said the death of Princess Diana
meant that the anti landmine activist lost their most visible advocate,
So that was very sad.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
She did great work.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Yeah, I mean, it takes a certain kind of person
to say, well, the global spotlight is on me right now.
I'm going to walk over here to this underserved population
of people who are being blown up by left over
land minds that people don't really know about, and now
the spotlight's on them. Yeah, that says quite a bit
(49:05):
about somebody to do that. Pretty amazing. So you got
anything else?
Speaker 1 (49:09):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
If you want to know more about land minds, you
can type those words in the search bar at houstuffworks
dot com. And since I said landmine, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I'm going to call this brother and Sister listening pair.
I was never a good headline writer on newspaper staff.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
By the way, it's tough.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Hey, guys, finally feel like I have something to write about.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
My brother introduced me to your show over Christmas just
this year, and I've been slowly working my way through
from dB Cooper to ex Murders to Winchester Mystery House
to Jellyfish. I love them all. So first of all,
thanks to my brother Michael, who lives in Savannah, for
the introduction. He actually plays a role in why I'm writing.
I just finished listening to the Vampire Hannix episode and
(49:57):
at the beginning you talked about coming upon dead bodies. Well,
growing up, a dead body was discovered in the ravine
behind our neighbor's house and they had to pull it
up the hill.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
So my brother and I got.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Out our spy gear took pictures of the policemen in
paramedics pulling up the dead body and carrying it away.
It's a lot of excitement and at the time we
didn't really think about it, but when the photos came
back developed, it really finally hit home how creepy it
was that we had seen a dead body.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Anyway, thanks for providing interesting and entertaining episodes.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
I teach kindergarten. It's funny.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
She talked about being drawn to the darker episodes as
a kindergarten teacher. She says, sometimes you just need a
break from boogers and Paul Patrol and here grown ups
talk about cool and interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
That is from Melissa.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
She's going to be at our DC show and Michael
and Savannah is upset because he can't go.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Yeah, well he should fly up to DC. There are
such things as.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Airplane's greater chances of that happening than us going to
Savannah for a show.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
And or there is always room for boogers, Melissa, don't
be mistaken.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
There is room for boogers. By Josh Clark.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Thanks for writing in. Hey to you both, and thanks
for listening, and send us those pictures. If you want
to get in touch with us, you can send us
an email. The Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and
has always hang out with us at our home on
the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Chuck here on Saturday with an important show to curate
here on this select Saturday. It was an important episode,
a pretty depressing one though, because it's about the history
of land mines and it's from April tenth, twenty eighteen.
Wide land mines are the deadliest legacy of war. Welcome
(00:24):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland. Back
together again at last, Just like last week.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I was about to say, what are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You know what I'm talking about, willis what you're talking about.
Oh that was a pretty good one, subtle, understated. So Chuck,
how are you feeling today?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I'm kind of tired of this weather.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Yeah, it's pretty nasty. Huh Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
I mean it's almost April in Atlanta and it's still
cold at night.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
It's during the day for that.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
It usually like the way that Atlanta is for those
who don't know, it'll be cold, cold, cold, like really
cold down in the freezing. Sometimes it'll snow and then
it'll start to warm up, and then at the end
of February boom, one more snow out of nowhere and
then spring. That's not how it's going this time. No, No,
it's been like real gloomy and dismal. Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, I got the sads.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It's okay, it'll clear up soon enough. Easters on its way,
Peter Rabbit's gonna bring us some sunshine and.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Springtime good and poison eggs.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Poison eggs. No, you're thinking of Halloween candy. Oh right,
so today, Chuck, we're not talking about Halloween or easter
or even the weather. We're talking about something that has
been come kind of an international global issue, rightfully, so
(02:06):
in like the best way possible because in this case,
the international community, the global community has kind of come
together to try to alleviate a really overlooked problem literally
and figuratively overlooked problem land mines.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, and has been This isn't like a brand new effort, No,
but it's a little daunting to say the least, and
depressing it is.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
There's something like I saw, there's all these really, like
you say, depressing statistics all over the place when you
look into land mines. Fortunately, although they are daunting, they're
not so daunting that people are just like, forget it,
We're not even going to do this, right, But I
saw something like it would take eleven hundred years at
the current pace of progress to remove all the land
(02:53):
mines on Earth right now that are buried on Earth,
if not another single one is laid.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Well, part of the problem though, was the number they're
laying land mines twenty five times faster. Yes, then we're
gathering up old land mines. Yes, yeah, that's the issue.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, it's funny like between two and a half million
and five million land mines are laid every year new ones.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And more than one hundred million in over seventy countries
around the world.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, that's a lot in places where there's no war
conflict going on any longer. That's the big problem with
land mines. Well, there's a couple of problems. One, they're indiscriminate.
They don't recognize whether you're a civilian or a soldier. Yeah,
they stick around long after the conflict is over, and
(03:45):
they still manage to kill and mame thousands of people
every year around the world. And apparently it's on an
upswing thanks to the conflicts in Yemen and Syria and
some of the work of isis as well.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Just so depressing, it really is.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
There's nothing really more that like kind of embodies like
just the mute, killing, maiming aspect of war than a landmine.
It's just a dumb lump of explosive that you step
on and it blows you up, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, and especially the year's later effect, which is maybe
there hasn't been war for two decades and a little
kid can still come along and say, oh, what's this thing?
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And then they don't have legs?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yeah, and the kids thing is is real. So apparently
landmines kill disproportionately kill civilians way more than soldiers because
of their ability to be left over after a war,
and the most recent statistics from twenty sixteen, the majority
of the civilians killed were children. Yeah, I was, I was,
(04:54):
Actually I was talking to Yumi about it. She grew
up on Okinawa and there's a lot of World War
two unexploded ordinance around there, and she was telling me
that they used to watch like educational films, saying like,
if you see something metal in the woods, stay away,
go tell an adult. Yeah, I'm sure it's like the
movies they were taught you know.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, when you're raised in an area where and we're
talking about landmines specifically, but in a lot of cases
they're just unexploded bombs and things like that too.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, I know, like they find something like one hundred
tons of it in Belgium alone every year, most of
it from World War One. Still. Wow. So but we
are talking specifically about land mines, which seem to kind
of bear the focus of the international efforts to get
rid of them, because they are probably the biggest problem
(05:44):
of unexploded ordinance today.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah. Well, should we go back in time here and
talk about the history?
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah? I think so.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, this one was interesting because I don't think a
lot of people when they hear about landmines know that
they started in like legit started during the American Civil War.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
No, I thought world War two at the earliest.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So in the American Civil War they were called torpedoes
or subterra shells. There was a man, a North Carolinian
named Gabriel Rains, who initially fought for the Union, but
then said, wait a minute, I'm from North Carolina. I'm
not actually sure how that switch happened.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
He's like North Carolina's with the South ay ya Yai.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
But he was the first person to.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Sort of play around with these and eventually get a
patent called the Rains Patent on what essentially was a
very sort of early crude but effective land mine.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah, and so this is at a time when like
pitched battles are still the norm. Sure, where like your
infantry meets my infantry in a field and like you
do a bunch of shooting, and then we do a
bunch of shooting, and then there's advancement under tree and
cannons and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Is it our turn to shoot or their turn? I forgot?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
I mean pretty much right, there's people like picnicking watching
the battle, like that's how that's how staged they were. Yeah,
and the Confederacy didn't necessarily play by those rules. They
did in many battles for sure, but they also definitely
had a gorilla facet to them as well. And this
definitely screams guerrilla warfare because the Union Army was taken
(07:27):
totally off guard by the early land mines that they encountered.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, and it was not something that was readily accepted
into warfare. The generals were, well, everyone was scared first
of all, once they got wind of what these things
were there all of a sudden, like what like I
can like we're literally just walking through the woods and
now we can just die.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Right and with no enemy nearby.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
And apparently Gabriel Reins himself was one of the first
to lay a bunch of these from the road to
Richmond after the defeat of a battle, and that's when
they first the Union army first encountered these things.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Well, yeah, so not only were they scared, but then
the the you know, the hierarchy, the generals were pretty
ticked off. They were like this is you know, one
of the quotes is the rebels have been guilty of
the most murderous and barbarous conduct. So they were not
welcomed into warfare. They thought it was sort of a
cheap trick and a dirty, a dirty, rotten thing to do.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Yeah, and like you said, it scared the troops, it
upset the generals. And these were not just like land
mines like we think of them now. They were like
booby trapped, like they put them in flower sacks, so
when you reached into a flower sack, boom that blew up.
They put them around like if the if the Confederates
abandoned like an outpost, they would put them around the well,
(08:48):
around the water like places they knew the Union troops
were going to go, and you could either set them
off by stepping on them, like a modern land mine,
or they would attach things like tools to them with
like a string, so you would bend down and pick
up the tool and set off this land mine that
was buried nearby. And at first the Confederates too, some
of the Confederate higher ups were like, I don't know
(09:10):
if this is okay, yea, even in a civil war,
and we're you know, the Confederacy were in some ways
a gorilla army. I'm not sure we should be using these.
And then finally after a while they're like, okay, we
kind of need every tool we can get in the toolbox.
And they acquiesced and started using them, and they spread
them all over the South apparently.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, and they don't have any figures on the soldiers
that were killed, but they do know that total between
the Union and the Confederates thirty five. Well, actually that's
not true. Thirty five Union ships went down. One Confederate
ship went.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Down, which I'm taking was an accident.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
I don't know, maybe yeah, But remarkably it says here
in this article you sent that they found them they
were still finding them in the nineteen sixties and alibi.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Yeah, which makes you wonder, I wonder, like, how many
are there still out there, like in around Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
You know, I don't know, I mean, surely none. Right.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Well, you would hope also that after this time the
explosives would have decayed enough after being exposed to whether
for this long. One of the articles that we used
said that that land mines, modern land mines have a
useful life of over fifty years. Surely by now whatever
they had attached to the Confederate land mines are no
(10:33):
longer useful, even if you did find them in the woods,
I would think so, which is not to say you
should do like a belly flop on it to test
it out. You find something that even vaguely resembles a
landmine in the woods of the southeastern United States, run
and tell somebody, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
That is the.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Worst way to test out whether or not a landmine
is still capable of working.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Agreed, is the belly flop method. Yep. So the Civil
Wars where they got their start, and they came into
use pretty quickly after they were invented, but it was
World War One and then really World War Two where
they really came into focus. And our article from how
Stuff Works says that the land mines for World War
(11:16):
one and two were invented to prevent people from picking
up the land mines that were originally invented to blow
up tanks.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, I mean, there were certain they realized that there
were a few uses. They could either lay a minefield
to keep a group of troops and or tanks from
going to a certain place. Sometimes it was to reroute
a group of people in tanks to a different area
because they're like, oh, well, we know that's minefield, so
we got to go this way, which might play right
(11:49):
into the plans of the opposition.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And then sometimes it's.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Just to slow everybody down until they can get reinforcements.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So, I mean, there is a use for this besides
just blowing somebody up. There's a larger strategic use.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
For me.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
I hadn't really thought about it. I always thought it
was just, you know, a nasty way of blowing somebody
up by chance, you know, But it really does send
a message too. Which is don't keep going straight, right,
You're gonna have to go one way or another. Yeah,
because obviously this place is mined. And really there's only
one way to find out whether a place is mine too,
especially during warfare. Like it's not like the enemy posts
(12:27):
sign that says we've mined this field. Suckers, like you
find out because one of them goes off, either on
a tank or one of your soldiers.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
You know, well, yeah, and if one of them goes off,
it's there. I don't think they were using like random
rogue land mines. It was more likely a minefield, right.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
So World War two is where they really kind of
came into play. One of the things I saw is
that one of so I guess by the numbers, the
most mind place in the world as far as countries go,
is Egypt. Oh really, it's like what I mean, by
a long shot, Egypt has something like I think two
(13:05):
hundred and thirty million no, sorry, twenty three million minds
unexploded around Egypt. Egypt's not that big, right, Holy cow.
I think they have like sixty per square kilometer square
miles something like that. So they've got twenty three million minds.
And I was like why Egypt, And it was the
Nazis during the North African theater fighting in World War Two.
(13:30):
The Nazis mined all over around there, but apparently Egypt
got the brunt of it. And there's still twenty three
million unexploded minds by they estimate in Egypt from World
War two.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah's all right, We'll take a break and we'll come
back and we'll talk about the two main types of
land mines that we're going to cover today right after.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
This definitely large hous of Egypt.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Sk as w S k AS good you.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Should all right, so, uh, for the purposes of this,
and you know, there are more than three hundred and
fifty types of minds, so that would be exhaustive.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
To go through all those. But the way our article.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Breaks it down, which makes sense to me, or in
the two main groups, which are anti personnel minds and
anti tank minds, they both do about the same thing,
which is explode after pressure is put on them. But
in the cases of a tank, of course, they're going
to be bigger with more boom and require more weight
(14:47):
in order to make it go boom, right, more pressure.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, So the the the anti anti personnel minds. Those
are much lighter, much smaller, much cheaper, and I think
found in much greater abundance around the world. For sure.
There's one that this article covers called the M fourteen
blast mind, And we should say there's actually a few
(15:11):
different types of minds, especially as far as anti personnel
minds go.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, so there's this the standard blast mind, which is
you step on it, it goes boom and bad things
happen to you as a result. There's the bounding mind
or bouncing mind. Basically it means the same thing where
you step on the mind, a fuses lit that ignites
(15:38):
a propeller charge which shoots the mind upward from under
the ground just barely covered over by the ground up
to about chester head height, which then the mine explodes.
So it's designed to do even worse damage.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, those are called bouncing Betty's or german S minds,
either for spring or shrapnel, and those I think I've
seen those movies before. That stuff is just nuts.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Man.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
You step on something and all of a sudden it
bounces up in the air to about your chest.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
And makes a horrible whizzing sound too. If I remember correctly.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, I mean talk about like just sheer intimidation factor too.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Sure, And so the bouncing mind or the bounding mind
is meant clearly to kill. The blast mind is meant
to maim. It's probably it may not kill you, although
you could die of like your injuries later on from
like an infection or something like that, or you could
bleed out if it if it got enough of your
femoral artery, you would be in big trouble there. But
(16:38):
it's it's designed mainly just to maim you, take you
out of commission. Whereas a bounding mind is meant to
blow you up and kill you. Then there's a fragmentation mind.
That's the third type of anti personnel mind. And I
don't I mean, like for those of you out here,
you can't see me and chuck, but our fingers are
kind of like digging into the tabletop.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, it's all unnerving.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
This is just so grim and gruesome. You know, it's
not we're not even talking about shooting somebody. It's talking
about these things designed to blow somebody up or blow
their leg off, you know.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, And I think what's most disconcerting about like a
minefield of blast minds. Is the purpose to lay a
minefield of blast minds is to almost certainly re route
somebody or to keep somebody from going somewhere. So it's
not like they're saying, we're going to put down three
hundred minds here because we want to blow off three hundred.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Feet of soldiers. They just have to scatter them.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
So a couple of people get their feet blown off
and they go, holy cower in a minefield.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
We got to go a different direction.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
But the residual effect is there's still two hundred and
ninety eight of those things out there. You know, it's
like a numbers game. So it's just it's like the
lowest common denominator of strategy almost Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Yeah, but it's effective, which is why they keep using them.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
And I think also like if the army, the army
that was retreating laying those mines in their wake, if
they got three hundred feet blown off, they'd be fine
with that. Even though that, like you say, that's not
the that's not the ultimate aim of it. It's to
redirect people or to stall them until reinforcements can come
for you.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Well yeah, and you don't keep going like after it
happens a couple of times or maybe even once. You
don't think, well, man, let's just press on and see
what happens.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Right, Maybe that was a fluke, Maybe that was a
geothermal spring, right, and you talked about someone's foot being
blown off. Supposedly, the nickname for the M fourteen blast mind,
which we'll talk about in a second, those are called toepoppers,
which kind of under sells it to me, I think.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
So the last one, the last type of anti personnel
mind is a fragmentation mind, and that's meant to get
a bunch of guys all at once, all around, and
it may not it may not take off their leg,
it may not kill anybody, but it's certainly going to
slow down several soldiers at once because these blow up
(19:10):
and they shoot fragments everywhere.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, like a pretty long way, right.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
So the Claymore mine is an example of a fragmentation
grenade or a fragmentation mine. And then so too are
cluster mines, which kind of fall into a different category
because they're dropped out of bombs, typically drop from aircraft.
They fall out of cylinders, hundreds of them, and then
(19:35):
when they hit the ground they blow up. And shoot
hundreds of fragments. So each of those hundreds of small
mines shoots out hundreds of fragments. The reason they become
de facto land mines is because not all of them
blow up, and so they can be found later and
then blow up when they're being handled by a kid
or a curious civilian or something.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Play more with claymore. Remember that from The Simpsons. No,
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Well, it was a long time ago, but I think
that was like a poster in the shop of like
an army navy.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Store or something like that guy the guy missing an
arm Oh maybe so, Yeah, I remember that was like
one of the first season ones. I'll bet it was
old for sure. I forgot about him.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Oh and by the way, our buddy Kevin Pollack just
guessed it on The Simpsons. After that many years, I
would have thought he would have been on by now.
But he did like two or three voices this past week.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I did not know that. I got to see that one.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
How did he do did he crack under pressure?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
He did a great job. I'm sure he did.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
All right.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
So the M fourteen is these are small like it
fits in the palm of your hand. It's about an
inch and a half one point six inches tall and
about two point two inches in diameter. And we developed
this here in the US in the nineteen fifties and
it has been sort of a go to around the
world since then.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
This one is not a very big.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Boom, but it does cause damage with these little these
little silver bebes that.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
It shoots out.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
That's the toepopper one. Yeah, so, oh, it does have
bebes that it shoots out. I thought it was just
a straight up blast mine.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Oh, I thought this one had bbs.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Maybe I don't know. I know that this I don't know.
Possibly it could be modified. But it is small and
it looks like a mean little hockey puck basically, yeah,
the meanest the whole the And one of the things
that you're going to find in minds throughout the world
is something that's called a Belleville spring, and it's basically
(21:35):
like a washer that you put on, well a bolt.
You know, what else are you going to put a
washer on, you weirdo? So it's a washer, but it's
kind of popped upward on one side, so the Belleville
spring holds up the firing pin. But when you put
enough pressure on it and you overcome the pressure, the
upward pressure being exerted by the Belleville spring, it kind
(21:58):
of pops downward and when it does that, it taps
that firing pin which shoots down into the detonator. It's
really cheap, really easy to use, and really effective, and
it's found through in minds of all different types and varieties.
It's usually the thing holding everything in place, and then
that's what pressure overcomes, is a Belleville spring, and they're
(22:19):
found in the M fourteen minds as well.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah, it's sort of like the hand grenade. It's not
a very sophisticated piece of gear. It's very kind of rudimentary.
On all of them, there's some sort of safety clip,
just like a grenade. You remove the clip and usually
there's some sort of switch that either says I mean,
it doesn't say this, but basically it says either boom
(22:42):
or no boom, and you switch it to boom and
set it down and walk away, yeah backwards, I assume.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yeah, slowly, and yeah, you cover it up me with
some leaves, a little bit of dirt, just enough so
that it can't be seen, but not enough that you
would dampen the blast at all or make it so
that any of the pressures damp them. And all it
takes is like twenty pounds or nine kilograms of pressure
from say somebody stepping on it, and that sets off
the I think it's got something like how many grams of.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Tetral third thirty one in the fourteen.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
So that's again that's not very much, but it's enough
that you will, say, lose your foot, or if you're
stepping directly on it, you may lose part of your leg,
and not necessarily right then, but you may have to
have it amputated later on, which makes it even nastier.
I understand the point of this. It's like there's one
soldier who's not fighting anymore. He's over there sapping the
healthcare resources of the medical core. I mean, that's that's
(23:40):
a that's a lifelong entry. That's a nasty thing to
put down as a three dollar a three dollars weapon
that's just left behind under the dirt, by the hundreds,
by the thousands, by the millions apparently every year.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, imagine that setting these is a little unnerving too,
Like I know that technically, even for these small ones.
It takes, however, many pounds of pressure. But it's still
probably a little bit unnerving when you flip that thing
to on and keep a little dirt on top of it.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah, I mean you don't want to like throw a
dirt chunk on it or anything like that. Yeah. Or
what about being the guy who drives the truck that
has crates full of those things in the back. Yeah,
you're just hoping that all of them have the safety
in Yeah. So that's the M fourteen. That's the one
that's probably the most common throughout the world, mostly because
it's the cheapest. Like I said, it costs about three
(24:32):
US dollars to make one of those things, although supposedly
it costs about one thousand dollars to remove one man. Well,
that's part of the problem too, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
So the M sixteen is another kind.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
This is one of the bounding or fragmentation minds that
we're talking about that pop up from the ground, and
that has three main components, the mind fuse propelling charge
to lift it out, like you said, and then this
cast iron housing.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
And it is it is bigger.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
It's about almost eight inches tall and about five inches
in diameter. And it has about a little over one
pounds of T and T inside, so that's quite a
bit of boom going on.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
Yes, and again when you either step on the thing
and you overcome the pressure from the Bellville spring or
I think these things can also be booby trapped, so
like a wire can be attached to the firing pin.
Either way, the firing pin shoots down, ignites that percussion cap,
which sends the thing upward, and then a second detonator
(25:36):
that's been on a delay fuse explodes once it reaches
about three feet or a meter into the air.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I think one of the scariest parts of this one
too is, at least in the movies, there's like that
split second where you're a soldier and you see that
thing pop up in the air and you know what's
coming right.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, With a regular old blast mine, it's like step boom.
You know, you probably don't have much of a chance
to register that you just stepped on something. Whereas yeah,
that fragmentation mine, and again, like the sound that it
makes is just horrifically unnerving. Yeah, well, I should say,
at least from the movies.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, yeah, when movies are always right, yeah, speaking of
movies though, like in the hurt Locker I know, and
I've seen in other movies like I think, generally step
on it and once that pressure is released is when
the boom happens. So I remember episodes of maybe Mash
and other like war movies I've seen there have been
(26:36):
like soldiers would step on one and hear the click
and then be like, well, I've got to stand on
this thing now until we figure it out.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Right. I was under that impression too, But nowhere in
my research did I find that to be the case.
Oh really, Yeah. For me, everything I saw was once
you step on it and that pressure overcomes the Belleville spring,
the firing pin is shot downward into the debt cap,
and then once that happens, or the detonator I should say,
once that happens, the whole thing explodes. There's not like
(27:07):
a once you lift up, then the pressure or the
firing pin has dropped.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
My guess is that they did not completely create that
out of whole cloth, and out of the three hundred
and fifty types of land mines that some of them
probably do that.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm just saying I didn't run
across any that had that, and I noticed that as well.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So next up we have the tank mines that we
were talking about with the arrival of tanks, basically is
when we started getting these anti tank mines. And they're
much much larger and they require at least like three
hundred plus pounds of pressure. So unless you're a big
boy soldier, then you're not going to detonate them by
(27:47):
stepping on them. It's still probably Again, I don't think
you would give that a try and say, only Wig
two seventy five, let me show what happens.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah, but those are built to disable a tank.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Sometimes it can have so much boom that it can
it can kill people around it, but generally it's to
blow the tracks off of the tank.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Right and yeah, and so once the tank is disabled,
that's a big Yeah, that's a big win. So again,
they started making those, from what I can understand as
far as World War One goes, they made those first,
and then they made the anti personnel ones to keep
people from just going up and picking up the mines
and removing them.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah, so like they'll surround an anti tank mine with
several anti personnel.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Mines, right, and you said it has a big boom
to it. It's this thing is it has twenty to
almost twenty three pounds, so over ten kilograms of composition
B yeah, which is TNT and RDX.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, that's a lot of boom.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
It is a lot of boom. And if you have
ever seen anybody removing anti tank mine, you get the
impression that, yes, it would, it would tear a tank
up pretty pretty well. Yeah, and you want to take
another break and then come back and talk about removing
some of these things, Yeah, let's do it. Okay, definitely
should know, Chlo.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Sk As why why s k.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
You should know? Okay, Chuck. So we talked about what's
out there and how many are out there. There are
people who are dedicated to removing these things. Yes, as
a matter of fact, the group formed the an International
Landmine Treaty BAND treaty to basically outlaw those things, and
(29:55):
there's one hundred and sixty four countries that have signed it.
Most of those, I think one hundred si have ratified it,
and it basically says that we are not going to produce,
stockpile or transfer any mines any longer, land mines of
any kind any longer, and we're also going to work
toward removing old minds and getting rid of them, and
(30:18):
then financially and medically assisting the survivors or victims of
land mines, casualties of land mines specifically, I think civilians
who have undergone who have been blown up by a landmine,
and they I think they formed in like nineteen ninety
five and within two years they won the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, this is an interesting one because the US and
Cuba are one of the only two Western countries that
have not signed on to this. However, the US is
also probably the leading country in the world at pouring
money into land mine eradication and support. And for their money,
they say listen, I mean, this is what they say.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
At least they say.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
The only reason that we're not signing on to this
is because of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and
South Korea. We need that line of defense so North
Korea cannot march in there and attack our ally in
South Korea.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
I don't know whether to believe that.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
I know the Obama administration came close to signing on,
but he never did. It's virtually guaranteed that the Trump
administration won't sign on, there's like a zero percent chance
of that happening. But the more and more nuclear capable
North Korea gets, the less and less reason that you're
going to have to have those land mines scattered throughout
(31:38):
the DMZ there, right, So I don't know whether to
buy that or not, but they say that that's the reason,
and to their credit, they do spend more money and
time and efforts trying to clear the world of land
mines in any other country.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
I think, yeah, yeah, they're definitely a leader in reality,
but they're still criticized that the US is still criticized
by for not having signed on to this treaty. Sure,
because there's a lot of other states that may actually
follow suit if the United States did. They're in the
company of Iran, Israel, Azerbaijan, a lot of Russia, Yeah, Russia,
(32:14):
a lot of former Soviet satellite states, China, some pretty
big players in as far as global militaries go, right,
or militaries around the world go. So if the United
States did that, it would exert some pressure on some
of the other ones. But like you said, the Trump
administration is not huge on international treaties, and this I
(32:34):
think it was the New York Times Editorial Board that
said there's a zero percent chance of assigning it right,
but we are still one of the leaders in actually
removing minds. The United States military stockpile is pretty small.
I think it's around three million right now, and as
far as I know, we're not deploying anymore. And we
(32:54):
really have it since I think two thousand and three
in Iraq when we have invaded Rock. That was the
last time we laid landmines as far as the US goes.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Right, yeah, and three million sounds like a lot, and
it is, but compared to like a Russia, which has
like between twenty and thirty million, it's not as many.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
So one thing that like, I thought that was pretty
odd too. I was like, the DMZ, that's what that's
why we're not signing onto this landmine treaty. That's weird.
And then I started looking up cluster bombs and there's
another treaty kind of like a corollary treaty to the
International Landmine Treaty to ban cluster bombs as well, and
(33:35):
that has some it's much newer, but it has I
think a pretty decent amount, like one hundred and twenty
countries already signed on to it, but with cluster bombs.
I was looking up the Pentagon's reasoning for not signing
on to this treaty. So back in I think two
thousand and eight, the Bush administration said, the US will
(33:55):
sign this, this cluster bomb ban treaty if we have
not done developed cluster bombs that have a failure rate
of one percent or less, meaning only one out of
every hundred of those little bomblets that comes out of
the cluster bomb cylinder doesn't explode upon contact. Right, And
apparently just within the last few days, the Pentagon said, well,
(34:17):
the deadline's twenty nineteen. We haven't developed cluster bombs that
have that low of a failure rate, so we're just
going to ignore that and keep using cluster bombs. And
the report said it's because they want to reserve the
right to use them in case of a ground war
with North Korea. So I'm like, what do you guys
(34:37):
know that we don't know, Like it's is it really
that eminent a ground war with Korea that we need
to reserve the right to use cluster bombs and land mines?
Still that like, is it are we that close to
the knife edge. And if so, then this, the whole,
the whole nuclear thing makes me even more nervous than
it did before.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah, it should, I'll make you nervous.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
It does. So I'll tell you one thing that makes
everybody nervous, chuck, and that's being out in a minefield
removing land mines.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
So this is this has many many problems to root out.
First of all, finding the minds. Like you said earlier,
they're not in marked. They don't say here's a minefield
and here's where they're all located. So finding these things,
millions of them around the world is really tough. And
(35:28):
even when you find the minefield, it's tough. So, like
the first thing is to find the minefield, then it's
it depends on how you do it. And we're going
to talk about all the ways that they're trying to
do this, some of which are very rudimentary, which the
very first one you can do is called probing the ground.
That means walking around with a stick or a bayonet
(35:51):
and poking around.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Lightly, very lightly, oh so lightly.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Yeah, I get the feeling that this is I'm sure
it's still done in some parts of the world, but
they're certainly not one of the more advanced operations.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Any longer.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
I get the impression that that's what soldiers do when
they're like, Nope, we can't go around, we have to
keep going straight. Probably, so that that's what because they
use sticks or bayonets typically, and they're trained to kind
of do it very very lightly. So I think that's
who does that.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
All right. So you've also got trained dogs.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
This is horrifying when you think about a dog getting
blown up, but they are trained to sniff out these
explosive vapors and the bomb ingredients.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
I also saw rats have been trained by a company
called a Popo.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Oh yeah, rats and bees.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Oh I didn't see bees. That makes sense though.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah, bees are trained, and that was one of the
things you sent over to me.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
The bees were How did I miss that?
Speaker 1 (36:46):
I don't know, because you're all about bees.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
I love bees.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, the bees.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Apparently, it said the hard part is not training them
to find these things, but tracking them once you release
the honey bee. So they're trained with sugar coated TNT
and then of course they can find the That's how
they find the tn T, but it has no sugar
on it.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Right, One of the I guess I think. So that
to me is a big step up from poking with
a stick. Yes, in between those two is using a
good old fashioned metal detector. Yeah, it works, but the
problem is twofold one. Metal detectors send a signal back
(37:31):
for anything that has any metal to it whatsoever. So
you get a hit and you are very like gingerly
searching the area to see if there is a mine there. Nope,
it's a it's an old roaman coin, or it's like
an old butterfly top to a Miller beer can. It's
anything metal, right, So that's one part of the problem.
(37:52):
And then the second part of the problem is that
you you actually may miss metal because some types of
the three hundred and fifty different varieties of minds use
very little metal. Some of them are almost entirely plastics.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
So not only are you picking up stuff that's not
a landmine and then wasting time seeing if it is
a landmine, you're actually potentially missing land mines as well.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
So that's a problem because that was my first thought
is like, I remember when I was a kid, my
dad was all over that metal.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Detector on the beach.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Oh yeah, so just get a lot of my dads
out there or dudes like my dad and just tell
them to go wild.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Yeah, they can coordinate over CB while they're driving their
jeep sides of the minefield. They totally would.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Some more promising newer technology, specifically being developed at Ohio
State University, and I think they're actually using this now,
is called GPR, or ground penetrating radar. This uses magic
leprechauns inside a machine.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Who exert no pressure to tell.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
You where these things are underground.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, it's actually it's pretty sweet. It's like a metal
detector ground penet penetrating radar combo. So the ground penetrating
radar can show you if it's an anomaly. But then
the radar also interacts with explosives and the electrical properties
unique to explosives, so it can actually tell you there's
something we're down there, and the amazing Creskin here thinks
(39:23):
that it's TNT.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, and this is crazy.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Once they find these landmines with the GPR device, it
shoots chemical agents, two of them into the ground that
actually solidifies the triggering mechanism at first along with the soil,
and then a second chemical agent that solidifies all of
the mind in the soil, so they can just be
scooped up.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Right. Well, I don't understand that. What is it? I
just I don't know. Is it cement?
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I don't know if it was proprietary or what. But
I couldn't find what those chemical agents were. But they
sound pretty awesome. Yeah, and not something you want to
get on your hand.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
No, you know, no wash hands, flush eyes.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
So that's actually that's that's like you said, that's in use.
That's a huge innovation because it shows you you get
like the hits that you get from a metal detector,
but you also don't get the misses. And then it
also shows you if something is roughly the size or
shape of a landmine, so you don't waste time digging
up old old butterfly bottle caps. Right, Yeah, I like it.
(40:28):
That's my favorite, and it came from the Ohio State University.
This article gets it wrong. It calls it scientists at
Ohio State University the shame.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Yeah, my favorite are these big heavy machines. So if
you and I didn't ever think I was a kid
who liked I never played with like Tonka trucks and
stuff much, I was obviously you know, we talked about
the Evil can Eevil and stuff like that, model model cars.
But for some reason, as an adult, heavy machinery really
(41:00):
really turns my crank. So go look up on your
Google images the Panther and the ard Vark tank or
mind removal machines and just delight in these huge things
that are part Bobcat, part hum v h.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
And they're they're just so rudimentary.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Like literally one of them, the Ardvark has these It
has like a spinning thing that sits out in front
of it that just spins chains and like whips the
ground with big metal chains. H. I mean, it's so
brain dead and rudimentary. That said, let's just get a
big heavy thing out there that smashes the ground with
(41:47):
chains and.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
The point is to just set off a landmine encounters right,
so it's like and the Ardvark just takes it. It's
a huge anti tank. Mines just blowing up right underneath
these chains that are whipping up the ground the front
part of the Ardvark. And I saw a video of
a guy in one who I guess hit a mine
(42:08):
and they show him in the cab and he barely
is jostled by the explosion, this huge explosion that they
show like eighty times because it's I think on the
Military Channel or something like that, and it's like, why
don't you just make everything out of whatever you're making the.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Art bark out, Why isn't the tank made of that?
Speaker 3 (42:25):
It's that same joke as like, you know, why don't
you make the whole plane out of the black box?
If black box is the one thing that's always about.
But it's true and I'm sure I think with M
wraps like mine. I can't remember what it stands for,
but you remember the IEDs that were killing so many
American soldiers at the beginning of the Iraq War, and
then they figured out a way to armor plate humviies
(42:50):
so that they were kind of impervious to IEDs. I
think it's basically the same technology on the Ardvark.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah, So that one, like you said, has a dude
in it. Then there's the Panther, and that is a
sixty ton remote controlled thing. So this has somebody on
the side with a joystick operating this thing through a minefield.
This has big metal rollers to set off These set
off the mines, and then they are regular tanks that
(43:19):
you can sort of retrofit with a plow that sort
of plows along and gently pushes these mines out of
the dirt in the path. Then someone can come along
and I don't know, I guess collect them in a
pink basket.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Yeah. No, there's there's a there's another machine called a
burm processing assembly. It just goes down through these these
mounds of dirt that have mines in them and shakes
the mines out of the dirt and sets them off
to the side so they're exposed, so they can be
picked up and detonated.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
We mentioned bees and rats and dogs. Very sadly, elephants
can sniff out mines. They're pretty good at it. They
don't use elephants to do this because that just doesn't
make much sense, but they have killed and injured a
bunch of elephants.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
My favorite new machine that they're using, and this makes
total sense, are drones. The mine Kifon drone k A
f O N. This is a drone basically that I
was developed by a guy named Masud Hassani and it's
a drone that does the work of the human It's
a drone with metal detectors attached to it.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
So it just flies really low over.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
The ground and detects these land mines with nobody walking
on the ground or no machine on the ground.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Makes total sense.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
It really does. It's great. And then what does it
do is it market on like GPS or something like that.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, it marks it on a GPS and then can
even come back and place a detonator, drop a detonator
on it, basically fly away and it explodes itself.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
And they're only like five grand compared to robots and
stuff like that can go from eighty to half a
million bucks.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Yeah, the art VARC looks extremely expensive for sure.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Imagine it's not cheap.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
So we talked about the International band Treaty, the campaign
to ban land mines that won the Nobel Prize in
nineteen ninety seven. Their work actually had a huge impact
in I think nineteen ninety nine there's a peak of
casualties worldwide from land mines of nine two hundred and
(45:37):
twenty eight. By twenty thirteen they'd gotten that down to
thirty four hundred and fifty and it really looked like
the work of this group and like the international treaty
that it created, and all these countries signed was having
a real genuine impact on landmine casualties. Apparently the tide
(45:59):
turned in two thousand and sixteen and the numbers have
started to go back up. So the low was thirty
four fifty in twenty thirteen. In twenty sixteen it was
up to eighty six hundred and five, which has got
to be really demoralizing.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Yeah, and I think you said very early on a
lot of this is because of what's going on at
Yemen and Syria right now, right right, so.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Sad I saw Also, remember I said Egypt has a
lot of old minds from World War Two. Apparently Isis
is taken to digging those up and replanting them. And
we should say, you know, land mines and IEDs are
virtually one and the same. It's just land mines are
mass produced, whereas IEDs are made by insurgent bomb makers.
(46:49):
They're usually not commercially produced. Right, there's no contract that
ISIS has out with somebody.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Did you ever see hurt Locker? The hurt Locker?
Speaker 3 (46:56):
No, I haven't seen that one.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Man, that's a good movie. Talk about tens.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
I can imagine it. I mean that's what they do, right,
They go and remove mines right or bombs.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Any IED's bombs, anything like any unexploded thing.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Jeremy Renners in it.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
And these it's just amazing, Like they just wear these
like big heavy suits basically like anti blast suits and
then work very carefully and slowly.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
Yeah. Oh one other thing, chuck, Yes, Princess Diana.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, we have to mention her. I mean some of
the probably her most important work she did as princess
was in the final years of her life working to
try and raise awareness to eradicate land mines around the world.
Just amazing stuff. And she wasn't. She took a lot
of heat, sometimes from within her own country. Yeah, sometimes
(47:51):
they didn't. They thought she was just not being super helpful.
Some people would bag on her for just doing like
photo ops and stuff like that, but by all accounts
she was. I mean, she did what she could. She
had a lot of things that happened off the cameras.
She would go and visit these hospitals where these children
(48:12):
were affected, and it was a humanitarian effort to really
kind of shine a light and raise awareness more than like, hey,
I can create policy as the princess.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
She knew she couldn't do that. But she did a
lot of great work to raise.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Awareness, and when she died it was a very sad
day and they obviously for many reasons. But Nobel Prize
winning whinner Jody Williams said the death of Princess Diana
meant that the anti landmine activist lost their most visible advocate,
So that was very sad.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
She did great work.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Yeah, I mean, it takes a certain kind of person
to say, well, the global spotlight is on me right now.
I'm going to walk over here to this underserved population
of people who are being blown up by left over
land minds that people don't really know about, and now
the spotlight's on them. Yeah, that says quite a bit
(49:05):
about somebody to do that. Pretty amazing. So you got
anything else?
Speaker 1 (49:09):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
If you want to know more about land minds, you
can type those words in the search bar at houstuffworks
dot com. And since I said landmine, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I'm going to call this brother and Sister listening pair.
I was never a good headline writer on newspaper staff.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
By the way, it's tough.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Hey, guys, finally feel like I have something to write about.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
My brother introduced me to your show over Christmas just
this year, and I've been slowly working my way through
from dB Cooper to ex Murders to Winchester Mystery House
to Jellyfish. I love them all. So first of all,
thanks to my brother Michael, who lives in Savannah, for
the introduction. He actually plays a role in why I'm writing.
I just finished listening to the Vampire Hannix episode and
(49:57):
at the beginning you talked about coming upon dead bodies. Well,
growing up, a dead body was discovered in the ravine
behind our neighbor's house and they had to pull it
up the hill.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
So my brother and I got.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Out our spy gear took pictures of the policemen in
paramedics pulling up the dead body and carrying it away.
It's a lot of excitement and at the time we
didn't really think about it, but when the photos came
back developed, it really finally hit home how creepy it
was that we had seen a dead body.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Anyway, thanks for providing interesting and entertaining episodes.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
I teach kindergarten. It's funny.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
She talked about being drawn to the darker episodes as
a kindergarten teacher. She says, sometimes you just need a
break from boogers and Paul Patrol and here grown ups
talk about cool and interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
That is from Melissa.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
She's going to be at our DC show and Michael
and Savannah is upset because he can't go.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Yeah, well he should fly up to DC. There are
such things as.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Airplane's greater chances of that happening than us going to
Savannah for a show.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
And or there is always room for boogers, Melissa, don't
be mistaken.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
There is room for boogers. By Josh Clark.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Thanks for writing in. Hey to you both, and thanks
for listening, and send us those pictures. If you want
to get in touch with us, you can send us
an email. The Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and
has always hang out with us at our home on
the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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