New Ideas on Clearing Land Mines?

LaoK asks: "Afghanistan's millions of land mines continue to pose a threat to civilians, and a potential hazard for international forces mobilizing to strike the terrorist suspects and their Taliban protectors. After reading the recent comments brainstorming the idea of hydrogen fuel for jetliners, a discussion of practical (and hopefully inexpensive) ideas for clearing mines seems like another good topic for this technically-minded gathering. One of the most useful things the international community can do to aid the Afghan people in a post-Taliban era is to finish cleaning up this mess." Such techniques would find ready use all over the world. Has anyone heard of safer techniques in mine removal, or is it still a large and dangerous guessing game?

Comments

Minerats

[ktakki]

Hacker/genius John Walker (founder of Autodesk) proposes the construction of minerats, autonomous mine-clearing robots.

k., Lego Minestorms?

Here are some links

[ksheff]

Howstuffworks has a page about clearing landmines and here is another page that describes how it can be done. The US Army even has a page about different ways to detect and remove mines. There is a UK company/charity that is developing an anti-mine robot. During the Gulf War, the military used small rockets to shoot lengths of explosive cord into a mine field. When the cord exploded, it would detonate the mines near the surface. Detonation of fuel-air bombs is another technique that I've heard about. Unfortnately, most of the land mine resources on the web that I've found appear to be charity/activist pages about the need to get rid of land mines, but very little on how to actually do it.