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Networked Landmines Work Together
crazedpilot writes "New landmines will soon communicate via a radio network, and move from place to place in order to be most effective." Termed the "self-healing minefield", the individual mines are capable of detecting an enemy breach and then moving to seal the gap.
This is the list of the 40 countries that have not signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty as of 26 Apr 06. The 3 that have signed the treaty but not ratified are show in bold.
These signatory states have made a political commitment to joining the treaty, and they have a legal obligation not to take actions that would violate the treaty.
1. Armenia
2. Azerbaijan
3. Bahrain
4. Burma
5. China
6. Cuba
7. Egypt
8. Finland
9. Georgia
10. India
11. Indonesia
12. Iran
13. Iraq
14. Israel
15. Kazakhstan
16. Korea, North
17. Korea, South
18. Kuwait
19. Kyrgyzstan
20. Lao PDR
21. Lebanon
22. Libya
23. Marshall Islands
24. Micronesia
25. Mongolia
26. Morocco
27. Nepal
28. Oman
29. Pakistan
30. Palau
31. Poland
32. Russian Federation
33. Saudi Arabia
34. Singapore
35. Somalia
36. Sri Lanka
37. Syria
38. Tonga
39. Tuvalu
40. United Arab Emirates
41. United States
42. Uzbekistan
43. Vietnam
reads like a whos who of third world countries and banana republics, what good company USA keeps
In addition to the mines communicating with each other, the field commanders can communicate with the landmines to detonate them remotely once they are no longer needed.
The goal of a minefield is not to be secret. It's supposed to be an obstacle which requires you know where it is.
I wrote about half the code for these mines (and we're slashdotted 5 years later...). I'm sure you'll be tickled to know they use Linux.
The British Army are, I believe, required to mark out where minefields are and clean them up when they leave the area.
W W2 style flail tanks</a>, which look like so much fun they should be illegal) and so being able to remotley disable them makes a great deal of sense. The chance of an enemy being able to discover a 256bit AES key is essentially zero and certainly a preferable option to accidentally immolating a bunch of your own sappers in almost all circumstances.
Obviously removing mines is a nervous business (unless you have one of the awesome <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_tank">
Beep beep.
Self terminating mines already exist in a much simpler version - a timed deactivation mechanism preset for the estimated end of conflict. The problem is that the failure rate, i.e., the failure to deactivate, is around 5%-10%. This makes it almost as good as nothing - would you want to plow a field knowing that "only" 10% of the original mines are still active? Cluster bomb bomblets, basically small touch-sensitive tactical mines, are even worse with an estimated failure-to-explode rate around 25%-30%. The only safe minefield is a non-existant one.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The problem is that even driving a car or tank (remotely) over large areas, back and forth so you get 100% coverage, is pretty effort-intensive. Certainly it requires a lot more effort than planting the minefield in the first place.
There's really no "easy way" to clean up mines, except maybe by carpet-bombing the whole area from the air.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There is a machine to clear a landmine field. There's a picture in this article, and if you catch it, an episode of Modern Marvels or something on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel about it.
It doesn't really contradict what you say about there being no easy way, though; this is the "easiest" but I still wouldn't call it easy. It's reasonably safe compared to any other technique, but still dangerous.
Then someone else put a gun on an offensive plane to shoot down the defensive planes. Then someone else said "To hell with reconnaisance; let's drop bombs on the enemy." ...and so on.
While your point is well taken, I'd like to pick a little nit: Bombs were dropped on people long before the airplane. People used tethered balloons.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
There seems to be a lot of confusion here about types of landmines and how they work. Let's clear some of this up.
There are two types of landmines: antipersonnel and antitank. The type of mine discussed in TFA is an ANTITANK mine.
Antipersonnel mines are the ones you hear about killing and maiming civilians. These are nasty little devices designed to inflict injury to people. They do this by throwing shards of metal. Some pop out of the ground and explode. In general, they really hurt unarmed targets (i.e. people) and don't do much damage to an armored vehicle. This type of landmine is banned by the treaty everyone is talking about, because they injure a lot of civilians.
Antitank mines are activated by high pressure, and are specifically designed to blow up when a TANK runs over them. When properly designed, they do not explode when people walk over them. Many are also deployed with some anti-tamper mechanism, so that they explode when handled (so they are still potentially dangerous to an unwitting civilian who picks one up). This type of mine is NOT banned by the landmine treaty.
Again, the mine discussed in TFA is an ANTITANK mine. What makes it unique is that it can still be effective with NO anti-tamper mechanism. Even if you were to pick up and move one of these new mines, the others will move to take its place. You can't just pick up a few and make a gap; you have to pick them all up. Since it's time-consuming to clear them, they don't need to be dangerous to move.
Sure, antipersonnel mines are bad. Deploying these new antitank mines (which are incidentally LESS dangerous to civilians) means that we don't have to use antipersonnel mines anymore. This is a very good thing.
So please don't go spouting off lines like, "OMG land mines are bad and evil and they maim and kill people so why are we designing new ones??"
Congratulations, we have real progress!
As of 1996, the US at least is using only self-destructing mines everywhere except for in some training situation and the Korean Peninsula. These new mines typically have a 4hr to 15 day lifespan.
For more information about our mine arsenal, check out
http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/mines.htm
Some countries have more reasons to be equipped with land mines than others. Here in Finland we have more than 1000km of land border with a former superpower, which has a long history of dropping by for a visit to their neighbouring countries. The landmines here are kept in storage during peacetime, and deployed ONLY if an invasion seems imminent, and even then maps are made about the minefield locations, so that they can be cleared later when the hassle is over.
Compare this to the method of just dropping landmines from a plane to random locations.
Hitting one police officer with a taser, or indeed a gluing net, would almost certainly provoke (ie, authorize) them to use lethal force. Again, great in concept, but not quite what you were looking for.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Sorry, close, but wrong!
t ml
That's the Spider Mines, dropped by Terran Vultures. http://www.battle.net/scc/terran/uv.shtml
Scarabs are fired by Protoss Reavers. http://www.battle.net/scc/protoss/units/reaver.sh
I thought it was the fact that N. Korea is primarily made up of starving dirt-farmers, while S. Korea is a wealthy and populous nation backed by the most powerful government on the planet.
Could be the mines tho. Or maybe this bananna I've got stuck in my ear.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Whoa? They're not the same thing?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Just as a quick clarification, mines designed to wound (e.g., minelets that just blow your foot off) aren't designed so for humane reasons, but because they do much more damage that way. If you killed a poor bastard, his mates will just chuck him in a hole and push some dirt over him. That's it. Score: 1 man down. If you blow his leg off, you took not only him out, but also made some buggers carry him, some medics patch him up, etc. Plus he still needs food, clothing, etc.
And they can actually be pretty well calibrated to that end, since they only need to blow someone's foot off. E.g., the Soviets scattered tons and tons of small pebbles, afaik made of rubber, that exploded when someone stepped on them. Think your childhood's water bombs made of a glove finger filled with water. Now think that with nitroglycerin instead, and it looks like a pebble on a mountain road. Almost no shrapnel effect (a piece of rubber won't cause too deep a wound). In fact, the taliban had fun picking those up and throwing them against the ground. That safe unless it's under your foot. But if you do step on it, you're almost _guaranteed_ to be alive, but without that foot.
At any rate, there was exactly _zero_ humanity and compassion in designing such things. It's just a cold blooded return-on-investment calculation. Those cause more damage to the enemy. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"It's a joke FFS!"
Only it isn't a joke.
"If we come to a minefield, our infantry attacks exactly as it were not there." -- Marshall Georgy K. Zhukov to President Roosevelt.
Makes it funnier if anything, though.
From the Geneva Convention Ammended Mine Protocol:
4. International signs for minefields and mined areas
Signs similar to the example attached and as specified below shall be utilized in the marking of minefields and mined areas to ensure their visibility and recognition by the civilian population:
(a) size and shape: a triangle or square no smaller than 28 centimetres (11 inches) by 20 centimetres (7.9 inches) for a triangle, and 15 centimetres (6 inches) per side for a square;
(b) colour: red or orange with a yellow reflecting border;
(c) symbol: the symbol illustrated in the Attachment, or an alternative readily recognizable in the area in which the sign is to be displayed as identifying a dangerous area;
(d) language: the sign should contain the word "mines" in one of the six official languages of the Convention (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and the language or languages prevalent in that area; and
(e) spacing: signs should be placed around the minefield or mined area at a distance sufficient to ensure their visibility at any point by a civilian approaching the area."
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
Based on some other light reading you could even tell or time the mine to deactivate and release a feeding solution that would encourage the breakdown of the explosive to non-toxic components or to release a colorant to facilitate detection. Either could be timed or activated by chemical means rather than depending on the electronics thus making the mine somewhat biodegradable.
s px/
Sweden FOI issues an annual report, one of the detection methods mentioned in the 2003 report is the breakdown of explosive by bacteria. They are also working on environmentally friendly explosives. I merely couple these two ideas into one.
http://www.foi.se/FOI/templates/startpage____96.a
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
In the army (swiss army, btw) i was teached as a "Minenzeichner". My task was to plan the layout of minefields. (Of course, only antitank mines are used).
The location of every single mine is registered on a map.
Our mines self-deactivate after a certain time. When it is deactivated, it pushes out an antenna which can be seen from a few meters away. This makes it easier to find it. If a mine does not self-deactivate properly, no antenna goes up. With a little help from the map, these mines can be spotted and manually deactivated.
It is completely safe to handle active antitank mines since they only react on very large metallic structures.