Why Landmines Are The Deadliest Legacy Of War

tired of this weather. Yeah, it's pretty nasty. Huh. Yeah. I mean it's almost April in Atlanta and it's still cold at night, it's um and during the day for that, but it's 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,

it's been like real gloomy and dismal. Huh. It's okay, it'll it'll clear up soon enough. Easter is on its way. Peter Rabbit's gonna bring us some sunshine and springtime and poison eggs. Poison eggs. Now, you're you're thinking of Halloween candy. So um today, Chuck, we're not talking about Halloween or

Easter or even the weather. We're talking about something, um that has become kind of a international global issue, rightfully so, and 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, um land mines. 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. Um. There's something like I saw. There's all these really, like you said, 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 gonna do this. But I saw something like it would take eleven hundred years at the current pace of progress to remove all the land mines on Earth right now that are buried on Earth.

If not another single one is laid yeah. Well, part of the problem though, was the number of they're laying land mines twenty five times faster than we're gathering up old land mines. Yes, yeah, that's the issue. Yeah, it's like I saw us between two and a half million and five million land mines are laid every year new ones and more than a hundred million and over seventy countries around the world. Uh, 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 they don't recognize whether you're a civilian or um a soldier. They stick around long after the conflict is over, and they still managed to kill in maim thousands of people every year around the world, which and apparently it's on an upswing thanks to um the conflicts in Yemen, in Syria and in some of the work of ice is as well.

It really is. There's like there's nothing that 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, And especially the the years 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? And then they don't have legs? Yeah, and the kids thing

is is real. So apparently land mines kill disproportionately kills civilians way more than soldiers because of their ability to be left over after war, and the most recent statistics from two thousand sixteen, the majority of the civilians killed were children. Yeah, I was, I was, actually I was

talking to you me 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. She was like the movies they were they were taught you know. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, when you're raised in an area where and we're talking about landmine specifically, but in a lot of cases they're just unexploded bombs

and things like that too. Yeah, I know, like they find something like a 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 seemed to kind of bear the focus of the international efforts to to get rid of them, because they are probably the biggest problem of unexploded ordinance today. Yeah. Well, should we go back in time here and talk about

the history? Yeah? I think so. Yeah, this one was interesting because I don't think a lot of people when they hear about land mines know that they started in like legit started during the American Civil War. No, I thought world War two at the earliest. Yeah. So, uh. In the American Civil War they were called torpedoes or sub terra shells. That was a man, a North Carolinian named Gabriel Raynes, who initially fought for the Union but then said, wait a minute, I'm from North Carolina and

that X be sure how that switch happened. He's like

North Carolina's with the South. I Yi, yeah, uh. But he was the first person to um sort of play around with ease and eventually get a patent called the Rains Patent on what essentially was a very sort of early crude but effective land mine yeah, and so this is at a time when like pitched battles are still the norm, where like your 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 and retreats and cannons and stuff like that. It turned to shoot or their turn, I forgot, I mean pretty much right, there's people like picnicking watching the battle. Like that's how that's how staged they were. And and the Confederacy didn't necessarily play by those rules. They did in many battles for sure, but they also definitely had

a guerrilla facet to them as well. And this definitely screams guerrilla warfare because the the Union Army was taken totally off guard by the early um Land minds that they encountered. Yeah, and it was not something that was

readily accepted into warfare. The generals were, um 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 right and with no enemy nearby 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. Well, yeah, so not only were they scared, but then the the you know, the the hierarchy, the generals, we're 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. 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 and when you reached into a flower sack, boom that blew up and put them around like if the if the Confederates abandoned like an outpost, they would put them

around the well, around the water like places. They knew the Union troops were gonna 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. Um. And at first the Confederates, to some of the Confederate higher ups, were like, I don't know if this is okay, even even in a civil war, and we're you know, the Confederacy were in some ways a guerrilla army. I'm not sure we should be using these. And then finally after a while they're like, okay, we 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. 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 down, which I'm taking was an accident. Mm hmmm, I don't know. Maybe, yeah.

But remarkably it says here in this article you said that they found them, they were still finding them in the nineteen sixties and Alabama, Yeah, which makes you wonder. I wonder, like, how many are they're still out there, like in around Atlanta. You know, I don't know, I mean, surely none. Right well, you would hope also that after this time the explosives would have decayed enough after being

exposed the weather for this long. One of the articles that we used said that the um 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 longer useful even if you did find him 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 land mine in the woods of the southeastern United States, run and tell somebody that is the worst way to test out whether or not a land mine is still capable of working, agreed, is the belly flop method. So the Civil Wars where they got their start, and 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 Um says that the land mines for World War One and two were invented to prevent people from picking up the land minds that were originally invented to blow up tanks. Yeah, I mean there were certain they realized that there were a few uses. They could either uh lay a minefield to keep a group of troops and or tanks from

going to a certain place. Uh. Sometimes it was too reroute a group of people in tanks to a different area because they're like, oh, well, we know that's minefield, so we gotta go this way, which might play right into the plans of the opposition. Uh. And then sometimes it's just to slow slow everybody down until they can get reinforcements. Right. So, I mean there is a use for this besides just blowing somebody up. There's a larger

strategic use For me. I hadn't really thought about. 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 to which is don't keep going straight. You're gonna have to go one way or another because obviously this place's mind and and really there's only one way to find out whether a place's mind too, especially during warfare. Like it's not like the the enemy

posts a 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. 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. So, um, 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, I was like, what I mean by a long shot, Egypt has something like, um, I think two hundred and thirty million No, sorry, twenty three million minds unexploded around Egypt. Egypt is not that big, right, I think they have like sixty per square kilometer square miles something like that. So they've got twenty three million miles And I was like, why Egypt? And it was the Nazis during the North

African theater fighting in World War two. The Nazis mind all over around there. But apparently Egypt got the brunt of it, and there's still twenty three million unexploded minds they estimate in Egypt from World War two. Should we take a break? 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 this definite should I sk as watched by SKO should know? All right? So, uh, for the

purposes of this. And you know, there are more than three hundred and fifty types of mind so that would be ex austi to go through all those. But the way our article breaks it down, which makes sense to me. Or and the two main groups, which are anti personnel minds and anti tank minds. Um, 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 in order to make it go boom, right, more pressure. Yeah, So 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. Um, there's there's one that this article covers called the M fourteen blast mind. And we should say there's actually a few different types of minds, especially as far as anti

personnel minds go. Right. Yeah, So, um, there's this the standard blast mind, which as you step on it it goes boom um and bad things happen to you as a result. There's the bounding mind or bouncing mind. Um. Basically it means the same thing where you step on the mind, Uh, a fuses lit that that ignites a propeller charge which shoots the mind upward from under under the ground just barely covered over by the ground up to about chester head height, which then the mind explodes.

So it's designed to do even worse damage. Yeah. Those are called bouncing betties or German s minds um, either for spring or shrapnel, and those I think I've seen those in movies before. Uh that stuff is just nuts, man. You step on something and all of a sudden it it bounces up in the air to about your chest and makes a horrible whizzing sound too, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I mean talk about like just sheer intimidation factor too. Sure. Um, And so the bouncing mind or the bounding mind is

is meant clearly to kill. The blast mind is meant to maime. 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. Um or you could bleed out if it, if it, if it got enough of your femoral artery, you would be in big trouble there. But it's it's designed mainly just to maim you, take you out of commission. Whereas a bounding mine is meant to to to blow you up and kill you.

Then there's a fragmentation mind. That's the third type of anti personnel mine. And 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. Now, this is just so grim and gruesome, you know, it's not 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. Yeah.

And I think what's most disconcerting about like like a mine field of blast minds is the purpose to lay a mine field of blast minds is to almost certainly reroute somebody or to keep somebody from going somewhere. So it's not like they're saying, we're gonna put down three hundred minds here because we want to blow off three hundred feet of soldiers. Uh, they just have to scatter them. So a couple of people get their feet blown off and they go, holy cower in a minefield. We've got

to go a different direction. But the residual effect is there's still two d 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 of strategy almost. Yeah, but it's effective, which is why they keep using them. Yeah. 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 to redirect people or to stall them in till reinforcements can come for you. 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, well let's just press on and see what happens, right, Maybe that was a fluke, maybe that was a geothermal spring, and um,

you talked about someone's foot being blown off. Supposedly the nickname for the m Fort Team blast mine, which we'll talk about in a second, those are called toe poppers, which is kind of undersells it to me, I think. So. Um, the last one, the last type of anti personnel mine um is a fragmentation mind and that's meant to get a bunch of guys all at once, all around you.

And it may not, um, it may not take off their leg, it may not kill anybody, but it's certainly going to slow down several, um several soldiers at once because these blow up and they shoot fragments everywhere like a pretty long way, right. So the Claymore mind is an example of a fragmentation grenade or a fragmentation um my. And then so too are cluster minds, which kind of fall into a different category because there dropped out of bombs,

typically dropped from aircraft. They fall out of cylinders, hundreds of them, and then 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. Play more with claymore. Remember that from The Simpsons, No,

I think it was. It was a long time ago, but I think that was like a poster in the shop of like an army Navy store or something like the 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. Oh and by the way, our buddy Kevin Pollock just guessed it on The Simpsons after that many years. Would have thought he would have been on by now. But he did it like two or three voices this past week.

I did not know that. I gotta see that one. Yeah, it was good. How do you do? Did he cracker under pressure? He did a great job. I'm sure he did all right. So the M fourteen is um These are small like it fits in the palm of your hand. It's about an inch and a half one 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. Uh, this one is not a very big boom um, but it does cause damage with these little, these little silver beabies that it shoots out. That's the toe popper one. So oh, it does have babies that it shoots out. I thought it was just a straight up blast mine and I thought this one had babies. Maybe not. I don't know. Um, I 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 the whole the and one of the things that you're gonna find, um in minds throughout the world is something that's called a Belleville spring, and it's basically like a washer that you put on, um, well, a bolt. You know what else You're gonna 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 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 to use, and really effective, and it's 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 as a belleville spring, and they're found in the m Fort team minds as well. Yeah, it's sort of like, uh, like the hand grenade. It's not a very sophisticated piece of gear. Um, it's very kind of rudimentary. And 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 doesn't say this, but basically it says either boom or no boom, and you switch it to boom and set it down and walk away yeah backwards, yeah slowly. Um. And yeah, you cover it up maybe 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 pressure is damp them. And all it takes is like twenty pounds or nine kg of pressure from say somebody stepping on it, and that sets off the I think it's got something like, uh, how many grams of tetra in the M fourteen, 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 mean, I understand the point of this. It's like there's one soldier who's not fighting anymore. He's over there, so sapping the healthcare resources of the the the medical medical core. I mean, that's that's a that's a lifelong injury. That's a nasty thing to put down as a three dollar um, a three dollar weapon that's just left behind under the dirt, by the hundreds, by the thousands, by

the millions apparently every year. Yeah, imagine that setting these is a little unnerving to like, I know that technically, even for these small ones, it takes, however many pounds of pressure, but it's it's still probably a little bit unnerving when you flip that thing to on and stoop a little dirt on top of it. 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. 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 U s dollars to make one of those things, although supposedly it costs about a thousand dollars to remove one man not well, that's part of the problem too, Yeah for sure. So the

M sixteen is another account. This is one of the bounding uh our fragmentation minds that we're talking about that pop up from the ground. Uh. And that has three main components the mind fuse propelling charge to lift it out like you said, uh, and then this cast iron housing. And it is it is bigger. It's about almost eight inches tall and about five inches in diameter, and it has about a little over one pounds of TNT inside,

So that's that's quite a bit of boom going on. Yes, and again when you when you either step on the thing and you overcome the upward pressure from the Belleville spring or I think these things can also be booby trap, so like, uh, a wire can be attached to uh the firing pin. Either way, the firing pin shoots down, ignites that um that percussion cap, which sends the thing upward, and then a second detonator that's been on a delay fuse explodes once it reaches about three ft or a

meter into the air. Yeah. I think one of the scariest parts of this one too is, at least in the movies, there's like that split second, uh where you're a soldier and you see that thing pop up in the air and you know what's coming right. Yeah, with a 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've just stepped on something. Whereas yeah, that fragmentation mine and and again, like the sound that

it makes is just horrifically unnerving. Yeah, well, I should say, at least from the movies, Yeah, when movies are always right. Yeah. Um, speaking of movies though, like in the hurt Locker I know, and I've seen in other movie is like, um, 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 like soldiers would step on one and hear the click and then be like, well, I've gotta stand on this thing now until we figure it out. Right. I was under that impression too, But nowhere in my

research did I find that to be the case. 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 detonation cap, and then once that happens, or the detonator I should say, once that happens, the whole thing explodes. There's not like a once you lift up then the pressure or the firing

pin has dropped. My guess is that they did not completely create that out of hull cloth, and out of the three and fifty types of land mines that some of them probably do that. Yeah, you're probably right. I'm just saying I didn't run across any had that, and I noticed that as well. So next up we have the tank mines that we were talking about. Um, 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 plus pounds of pressure. So unless you're a big boy soldier, then you're not going to detonate them by stepping on them. It's still probably again, I don't think you would give that a try and say not only way to seventy five. Let me say what happens, but those are built too uh

disabled a tank. Sometimes they 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, right and yeah, and so once the tank is disabled, that's a yeah, that's a big win. So um 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. Yeah, so like they'll surround an anti tank mine with several anti personnel mines right, and you said it has a big boom to it. It's this thing is um has twenty two almost twenty three pounds, so over ten km of composition B which is T N T and R d X. It is a lot of boom um. 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, Okay, definitely large sky wandk 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. As a matter of fact, a group formed the uh AN International Land Mine Treaty Band Treaty UM to basically outlaw those things, and there's a hundred and sixty four countries

that have signed it. Most of those, I think a hundred and sixty three have ratified it, and it basically says that we are not going to produce stockpile or transfer any minds 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 then financially and medically assisting the survi iver's or victims of land

mines casualties of land mines. UH. Specifically, I think civilians who have undergone who have been blown up by a land mine, and they I think they formed in within two years they won the Nobel Prize. Yeah, this is an interesting one because the U. S And Cuba are one of the only two Western countries that have not signed onto this UM. However, the US is also probably the leading country in the world at pouring money into

land mine eradication and support. UH. And for their money, they say, listen the I mean, this is what they say. At least they say. The only reason that we're not signing onto this is because of the demilitary zone between North Korea and South Korea. We need that line of defense so North Korea cannot march in there and attack our ally and South Korea. UM. I don't know whether to believe that. I know the Obama administration came close

to signing on, but he never did. UH. It's virtually guaranteed that the Trump administration won't sign on, like a zero percent chance of that happening. But the more and more nuclear capable North Korea gets, the less and less the reason that you're going to have to have those land mines um scattered throughout the d m Z there.

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 minds in any other country. I think, yeah, yeah, they're definitely a leader in reality, but they're still criticized or the US is still criticized by for not having signed on to this treaty, because there's a lot of other states that may actually follow

suit if the United States did. They're in the company of um Iran, uh Israel, um Azerbaijan, a lot of form Yeah, Russia, a lot of former Soviet satellite states, UM China. It's some pretty big players in uh 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 a huge on international treaties and um this I 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 and 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 really haven't since I think two thousand three uh in a rock

when we have invaded a rock. That was the last time we laid land mines UM as far as the US goes, 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. So one thing that that like, I thought that was pretty odd too. I was like, the d m Z, that's what that's why we're not signing onto this land my 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 UM to ban cluster bombs as well, and that has some it's much newer, but it has I think a pretty decent amount, like a hundred and twenty countries already signed onto it, but um with cluster bombs. I was looking up the Pentagon's

reasoning for not signing onto this treaty. So back in I think two thousand eight, the Bush administration said, the US will sign this, this cluster bomb band Treaty if we have not 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 bombs cylinder doesn't explode upon contact, right um.

And apparently just within the last few days, the Pentagon said, well, the deadlines two, we haven't developed cluster bombs that have that low of a fail your rate, So we're just gonna 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 know

that we don't know, Like it's is it? Is it really that eminent a ground war with Korea that we we need to reserve the right to use cluster bombs and land mines? Still that like, is it 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. It should all make you nervous. 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. Yeah, so this is uh this has many many um problems to root out. First of all, finding the mines. Like you said earlier, they're not marked. They don't say here's a minefield and here's where they're all located. Uh So finding these things, millions of them around the world is really tough, um. And 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 gonna talk about all the ways that they're trying to do this, um, 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 and poking around lightly, very lightly so lightly. Yeah, I get the feeling that this is I'm sure it's still done in some parts of the world, but it's there's certainly not one of the more advanced operations any longer.

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. Um, so I think that's who does that, all right. So you've also got trained dogs. This is horrifying when you think about a dog getting blown up. Um, but they are trained to

sniff out these explosive vapors and the bomb ingredients. I also saw rats have been trained by a company called a Popo. Oh yeah, rats and bees. Oh I didn't see bees. That makes sense though, Yeah, bees are trained and uh that was one of the things you sent over to me. The bees were How did I miss that? I don't know, because you're all about bees. I love bees. Yeah, the bees apparently, um said. The hard part is not training them to find these things, but tracking them once

you release the honey bees. So they're trained with sugar coated t and t uh and then of course they can find the that's how they find the TNT. But it has no sugar on it um 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 ashen um metal detector. It works, but the problem is twofold one um metal detectors send a signal back 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. No, if it's a it's an old Roman coin, or it's like an old um butterfly top to a Miller beer can. Um, it's anything metal, right, So that's one part of the problem. And then the second part of the problem is that you um, you actually may miss metal because some types of the three fifty different varieties of minds use very

little metal. Some of them are almost entirely plastic. So so not only are you picking up stuff that's not a landline and then wasting time seeing if it is a landmine, you're actually potentially missing land mines as well. Yeah, so that's that's a problem because that was my first thought is like i'mber. When I was a kid, my dad was all over that metal detector on the beach. So just get a lot of my dad's out there or dudes like my dad, and just tell them to

go wild. Yeah, they could coordinate over CEB while they're driving their jeepsides of the minefield. They would. Uh. Some more promising newer technology UM specifically being developed at Ohio State University, and I think they're actually using this now, is called GPR, or ground penetrating Radar UM. This uses magic lepricns inside a machine who exerts no pressure to tell you where these things are underground. Yeah, it's actually

it's pretty sweet. It's like a metal detector ground penetrating 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 the electrical properties unique to explosives, so it can actually tell you there's something weirdre down there, and uh, the amazing creskin here thinks that it's t NT. Yeah,

and this is crazy. Once they find these land mines 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 mine and the soil so they can just be scooped up. Right, I don't understand that. What is it? I just I don't know. Is it cement? 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 and not something you want to get on your hands, you know, wash hands, flush eyes. So that's actually that's that's like you said, that's in use. That's a huge innovation because it shows you, um, 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 land mine, so you don't wait time digging up old old butterfly bottle caps. Right, Yeah, I

like it. 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. My favorite are these uh, these big heavy machines. So if you and I didn't ever think I was a kid who liked UH, I never played with like Tonka trucks and stuff much. I was obviously, you know, we talked about the evil Kinevil and stuff like that, model model cars. But for some reason, as an adult heavy machinery, really

it really turns my crank. So go look up on your Google images the Panther and the art vark um tank or mind removal machines and just delight in these huge things that are part of Bobcat part hum v uh and there they're just so rudimentary, Like literally one of them, the art Vark has these. It has like a spinning uh thing that sits out in front of it that just spins chains and like whips the ground with big metal chains. 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 chains and the point is to just set off a land mind encounters, right, So it's like and the art Vark just takes it. It's a huge anti tank minds just blown up right underneath these chains that are whipping up the ground the

front part of the art Vark. And I saw a video of a guy um in one who I guess hit a mind 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 UM, it's like, why don't you just make everything out of whatever you're making the r park out? Why isn't the tank made of that? It's it's that same joke, is like, you know, why don't you make the whole plane out

of the black box? If the black box is the one thing that's always found. But it's true and I'm sure I think um with M wraps like mine. I can't remember that what that stands for. But remember the I E. D s that we're killing so many American soldiers at the beginning of the Iraq War. Um, and then they figured out a way to armor plate humvees so that they were kind of impervious to I E. D. S. I think it's basically the same technology on the ard Park. Yeah,

so that one, like you said, has a dude in it. Uh. 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 uh, set off the mines. And then there are regular tanks that you can sort of retrofit with a plow that sort of plows along and gently pushes these minds out of

the dirt in the path. Then someone can come along and I don't know, I guess collect them in a in a pink basket. Yeah. No, there's there's a there's another machine called a burm processing assembly that just goes down through these these mounds of dirt that have minds in them and shakes the minds out of the dirt and sets them off to the side so they're exposed that they can be picked up and detonated. Uh. We mentioned bees and rats and dogs. Very sadly, elephants can

sniff out mindes. Uh. They're they're pretty good at it. They don't use elephants uh to do this because that just doesn't make much sense. But they have killed and injured a bunch of elephants. Um. My favorite new machine that they're using, and this makes total sense, are drones. The mind Cafon Drome k fo N. This is a drone basically that I was developed by guy named massud Hasani, And it's a drone that does the work of the human.

It's a drone with metal detectors attached to it, so it just flies really low over the ground and detects these land mines with nobody walking on the ground or no machine on the ground. Right, makes total sense, it really does. It's great. And then what does it do is it market on like GPS or something like that. Yeah, it marks it on a GPS. Uh, and then can even come back and place a detonator, drop a detonator on it, basically fly away and it explodes itself. That's

pretty awesome. And they're only like five grand compared to UM robots and stuff like that can go from eighty to half a million bucks. Yeah, the art Vark looks extremely expensive for sure. Imagine it's not cheap so UM we talked about the International band Treaty UM, the campaign to band land mines that won the Nobel Prize in UM our work actually had a huge impact, and I think nineteen ninety nine there's a peak of casualties worldwide from UM from land mines of nine thousand, two hundred

and twenty eight. By two thousand 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 that it created and and all these countries signed, was having a real genuine impact on landmine casualties. Apparently the tide turned in two thousand and sixteen and

the numbers have started to go back up. So the lowest thirty four fifty and two thousand thirteen, in two thousand and sixteen it was up to UM eight thousand, six hundred and five, which has got to be really demoralizing. Yeah, and and I think you said very early on a lot of this is because of what's going on it Yemen in Syria right now, right right, so sad I saw Also remember I said Egypt has a lot of old mines from World War Two. Apparently ISIS is taken

to digging those up and replanting them. And we should say, you know, the land mines and I E. D S are virtually one and the same. It's just land mines are mass produced, um, whereas I E. D S are made by insurgent bomb makers. They're usually not commercially produced. There's no contract that ICES has out with somebody. Did you ever see hurt Locker? The hurt Locker? Now, I haven't seen that one man, that's a good movie. Talk

about tents, I can imagine. I mean that's what they do, right, They go and remove minds, right, or bombs or any i e. D. S bombs, anything like any unexploded thing. Jeremy renters in it. And these it's just amazing. Like they just wear these like big heavy suits basically um like anti blast suits and then work very carefully and slowly. Oh one other thing, chuck, Yes, Uh, Princess Diana, Yeah,

we have to mention her. I mean some of the probably her most important work she did as Princess was and the 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. Uh. Sometimes they didn't. They thought she was just not being super helpful. Some people would um 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 she had a lot of things that happened off the cameras. She would go and visit these hospitals where these children 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 as the princess she knew she couldn't that, but she did a lot of great work to raise awareness and when she uh when she died, it was a

very sad day and they obviously for many reasons. But um Nobel Prize winning winner Jody Williams said, the death of Princess Diana meant that the anti land mine activists lost their most visible advocate, So that was very sad. She did great work. Yeah, I mean it takes a certain kind of person to say, well, the global spotlight

is on me right now. I'm gonna walk over here to this um under under under served population of people who are being blown up by leftover land minds that people don't really know about, and now the spotlights on them. That says quite a bit about somebody to do that. Pretty So you got anything else and nothing else. If you want to know more about land minds, you can type those words in the search bar how stuff works dot com. And since I said land mine. It's time

for listener mail. I'm gonna call this brother and Sister listening pair. I was never a good headline writer on newspaper staff. By the way, it's tough. Hey, guys, finally feel like I have something to write about. My brother introduced me to your show over Christmas just this year, and I've been slowly working my way through from DV Cooper to X 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 Hannock's episode and 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. So my brother and I got 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 find the hit home. How creepy it was that we had seen a dead body. Anyway, Thanks for providing inner, interesting and entertaining episodes. I teach kindergarten. It's funny. 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 uh and here grown ups talk about cool and interesting stuff. That is from Melissa and she's going to be at our DC show and Michael and Savannah is upset because he can't go. Yeah, well he should fly up to d C. There are such things as airplane. It's it's greater chances of that happening than us going to Savannah for our show. And there are there is always room for boogers, Melissa,

don't be mistaken. There is room for boogers. By Josh Clark. Thanks for writing in. Hey do you both, Um and thanks for listening and send us those pictures. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at Josh um Clark and s y SK podcast on Facebook at facebook dot com, Slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com and is always hanging out with us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know

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