Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Why Landmines Are The Deadliest Legacy Of War

Episode Date: October 26, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to the Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody. 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 landmines. And it's from April 10th, 2018.

Why landmines are the deadliest legacy of war. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. 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. Yeah, I was about to say what are you talking about? You don't I'm talking about Willis What you're talking about? Oh That was a pretty good one subtle understated

So Chuck how you feeling today? I'm kind of 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. And during the day for that matter. 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,'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? Yeah. I got the sads. It's okay.

It'll clear up soon enough. Easter's on its way. Peter Rabbit's going to bring us some sunshine in springtime. Good. And poison eggs. 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 become kind of an international global issue,

rightfully so, 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, landmines. 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. There's something like, I saw, there's all these really, like you say, depressing statistics all over the place when you look into landmines. 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. But I saw something like it would take 1,100 years at the current pace of progress to remove all the landmines 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 their laying landmines 25 times faster than were gathering up old landmines. Yes. Yeah. That's the issue. Yeah. It's something like, I saw between two and a half million and five million landmines are laid every year, new ones.

And more than a hundred million in over 70 countries around the world. Yeah, that's a lot. In places where there's no war or conflict going on any longer, that's the big problem with landmines. Well, there's a couple of problems. One, they're indiscriminate. They don't recognize whether you're a civilian or a soldier, they stick around long after the conflict is over, and they still manage to kill and maim 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. It's so depressing. It really is. There's nothing that really more, 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? Yeah, and especially 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 kid's thing is real. So apparently landmines disproportionately kill civilians way more than soldiers because of their ability to be left over after a war.

And the most recent statistics from 2016, the majority of the civilians killed were children. Yeah. I was actually, I was talking to Yumi about it. She grew up on Okinawa, and there's a lot of World War II unexploded ordnance around there. And she was telling me that they used to watch educational films saying, like, if you see something metal in the woods, stay away.

Go tell an adult. That was like the movies they were taught, you know? Matthew Feeney Oh, I'm sure. 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. Yeah. I know they find something like 100 tons of it in Belgium alone every year.

Most of it from World War I still. Wow. But we are talking specifically about landmines, which seem to kind of bear the focus of the international efforts to get rid of them because they are probably the biggest problem of unexploded ordinance today. Matthew Feeney Yeah. Well, should we go back in time here and talk about the history? Jared Ranere Yeah, I think so.

Matthew Feeney 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. Matthew Feeney Now, I thought World War II at the earliest. Matthew Feeney Yeah. So, in the American Civil War, they were called torpedoes or subterrashells. 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 from North Carolina. I'm not actually sure how that switch happened. He's like, North Carolina's with the South? Ay, ay, ay. But he was the first person to sort of play around with these and eventually get a patent called the Reins patent on what essentially was a very sort of early crude but effective landmine. 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 and retreats and cannons and stuff like that. Matthew 10 Is it our turn to shoot or their turn? I forgot. Matthew 11 I mean, pretty much, right? There's people like picnicking, watching the battle.

That's how staged they were. 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 Union Army was taken totally off guard by the early land mines that they encountered. 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, they're all of a sudden like, what? Like we're literally just walking through the woods and now we can just die with no enemy nearby? Matthew McLaughlin And apparently Gabriel Raines 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 the Union Army first encountered these things. Well, yeah.

So not only were they scared, but then 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 rotten thing to do. Yeah. And like you said, it scared the troops. It upset the generals. And these were not just like landmines like we think of them now. They were like booby-trapped. Like they'd

put them in flower sacks. So, when you reached into a flower sack, boom, that blew up. They put them around, like 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 landmine, 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 landmine that was buried nearby. And at first the Confederates too, some of the Confederate higher ups were like, I don't know if this is okay. Even in a civil war, and we're, you know, the Confederacy, we're 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 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. Matthew Feeney 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, 35, well, actually that's not true, 35 Union ships went down, one Confederate ship went down.

Matthew F. Kennedy- Which I'm taking was an accident? Matthew Feeney- I don't know. Maybe. But remarkably, it says here in this article you sent that they found them, they were still finding them in the 1960s in Alabama. Matthew Feene Alabama. Yeah. Which makes you wonder, I wonder, like, how many are there 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 to the weather for this long. One of the articles that we used said that the, that landmines, modern landmines have a useful life of over 50 years. Surely by now, whatever they had attached to the Confederate landmines are no 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, that is the worst way to test out whether or not a landmine is still capable of working. Agreed. Is the belly flop method. Yep.

So, the Civil War is where they got their start. And they came into use pretty quickly after they were invented. But it was World War I and then really World War II where they really came into focus. And our article from How Stuff Works says that the landmines for World War I and II were invented to prevent people from picking up the landmines 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 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 and 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 into the plans of the opposition. And then sometimes it's just to 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 it. 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. You're going to have to go one way or another because obviously this place is mine. And really, there's only one way to find out whether a place is mineed too, especially during warfare. Like it's not like 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, I don't think they were using like random rogue land mines. It was more likely a minefield. Right. So World War II 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 mined 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, I think 230 million, no, sorry, 23 million

mines unexploded around Egypt. Egypt's not that big, right? Holy cow. I think they have like 60 per square kilometer or square mile, something like that. So they've got 23 million minds. And I was like, why Egypt? And it was the Nazis during the North African theater fighting in World War II, the Nazis mined all over around there.

But apparently Egypt got the brunt of it and there's still 23 million unexploded minds, they estimate, in Egypt from World War II. Should we take a break? Yeah, let'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. Once again, we find ourselves in an unprecedented election.

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bring on an awesome guest to get their take on the things that you bring us. While we may be unlicensed to advise, we're gonna do it anyway. Listen to Call It What It Is on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So for the purposes of this, and there are more than 350 types of mine, so that would

be exhaustive to go through all those. But the way our article breaks it down, which makes sense to me, and the two main groups, which are anti-personnel mines and anti-tank mines, 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 anti-personnel mines, 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 M14 blast mine, and we should say there's actually a few different types of mines, especially as far

as anti-personnel mines go, right? Yeah. So there's the standard blast mine, 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 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 mine explodes? Yeah, it's designed to do even worse damage. Yeah, those are called bouncing Betty's or German s mines Either for spring or shrapnel and those I think I've seen those in movies before That stuff is just nuts, man. You step on something and all of a sudden it bounces up in the air 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. And so the bouncing mind or the bounding mind is meant clearly to kill. The blast mind is meant to maim. It may not kill you, although you could die of your injuries later on, say from an infection or something like that. Or you could bleed out if it got enough of your femoral artery, you would be in big trouble there. But 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 table top right now. It's all unnerving. 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? Matthew Feeney-Sproat Yeah, and I think what's most disconcerting

about like, like a minefield of blast mines is the purpose to lay a minefield of blast mines is to almost certainly reroute somebody or to keep somebody from going somewhere. So it's not like they're saying, we're going to put down 300 mines here because we want to blow off 300 feet of soldiers. They just have to scatter them. So a couple of people get their feet blown off and they go, holy cow, we're in a minefield, we've got to go a different direction. But the residual effect is there's still 298 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. Yeah, but it's effective, which is why they keep using them. And I think also, like, if the army that was retreating, laying those mines in their wake, if they got 300 feet blown off, they'd be fine with that, even though, like you say, that's not the ultimate aim of it. It's to redirect people or to stall them until 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, let's just press on and see what happens. Right. Maybe that was a fluke. Maybe that was a geothermal spring. And you talked about someone's foot being blown off. Supposedly, the nickname for the M14 blast mine,

which we'll talk about in a second, those are called toe poppers, which kind of undersells it to me, I think. Yeah. So the last type of anti-personnel mine is a fragmentation mine, and that's meant to get a bunch of guys all at once, all around you,

and 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 and they shoot fragments everywhere. Yeah, it's like a pretty long way. Right. 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 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. So each of those hundreds of small mines shoots out hundreds of fragments. The reason they become de facto landmines 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. Matthew Feeney-Seth-Lioumane Playmore with Claymore. Remember that from The Simpsons? Matthew Feeney-Seth-Lioumane No. Matthew Feeney-Seth-Lioumane I think it was, well, 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. 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, I 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 got to see that one. Yeah, it was good. How did he do? Did he crack under pressure? Yeah, he did a great job. I'm sure he did. All right, so the M14 is, these are small.

Like it fits in the palm of your hand. It's about an inch and a half, 1.6 inches tall and about 2.2 inches in diameter. And we developed this here in the U.S. in the 1950s and it has been sort of a go-to around the world since then. This one is not a very big boom, but it does cause damage with these little silver BBs that it shoots out. That's the tow-popper one. Yeah. So, oh, it does have BBs that it shoots out.

I thought it was just a straight up blast mine. Oh, I thought this one had BBs. Maybe not. 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.

And one of the things that you're gonna find in mines throughout the world is something that's called a Belleville Spring. And it's basically like a washer that you put on, well, a bolt. What else are you 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 use, and really effective.

And it's found in mines 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 found in the M14 mines as well. Yeah, it's sort of like the hand grenade. It's not a very sophisticated piece of gear. 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 it 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 I assume. Slowly. 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 dampened. And all it takes is like 20 pounds or 9 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 tetral in it? There are 31 grams in the M14. 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. 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. There's one soldier who's not fighting anymore. He's over there sapping the healthcare resources of the medical corps. I mean, that's a lifelong entry. That's a nasty thing to put down as a $3 weapon that's just left behind under the dirt by

the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions apparently every year. Matthew Feeney Yeah, I imagine that setting these is a little unnerving too. Like, I know that technically, even for 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 scoop 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? Yeah. You're just hoping that all of them have the safety in.

Yeah. So that's the M14. 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 US dollars to make one of those things, although supposedly it costs about $1,000 to remove one. Man, not while that's part of the problem, too. Yeah, for sure.

So, the M16 is another kind. This is one of the bounding fragmentation mines that we're talking about that pop up from the ground. And that has three main components. The mine fuse, propelling charge to lift it out like you said, and then this cast iron housing. And it is bigger. It's about almost eight inches tall and about five cast iron housing. And 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 quite a bit of boom going on. Yes, and again, 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 traps. 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 that's been on a delay fuse explodes once it reaches about three feet 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 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 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. No. Whereas, yeah, that fragmentation, and again, like the sound that it makes is just horrifically unnerving. Yeah, well.

I should say at least from the movies. Yeah, and 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 generallyurt 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

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. 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 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 is dropped. My guess is that they did not completely create that

out of whole cloth, and out of the 350 types of landmines, that some of them probably do that. Yeah, you're probably right. I'm just saying I didn't run across any that had that, and I noticed that as well. 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 300 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, I only weigh 275. Let me see what happens. But those are built to disable a tank. Sometimes they can have so much boom that it can kill people around it, but generally it's to blow the tracks off of the tank. Right. And yeah, so once the tank is disabled, that's a big win. That's a win.

Yeah, that's a big win. So again, they started making those, from what I can understand as far as World War I goes, they made those first and then they made the the anti Personnel ones to keep people from just going up and picking up the 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. This thing has 22, almost 23 pounds, so over 10 kilograms of composition B, which is TNT and RDX. Yeah, that's a lot of boom. 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 tear a tank up 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.

Once again, we find ourselves in an unprecedented election. And with all that's happening in the lead up to the big day, a weekly podcast just won't cut it. Get a better grasp of where we stand as a nation every weekday on the MPR Politics podcast. Here our seasoned reporters dig into the issues that are shaping voters' decisions and understand how the latest updates play into the issues that are shaping voters' decisions and understand how the latest updates play into the bigger picture. Listen to the NPR Politics podcast

on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon-wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez-Rejon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. Season two, season two. Are we recording? Are we good?

Oh, we push record, right? Okay. And this season we're taking a bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Saying that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba and the Piñu Colada from Puerto Rico. So all of these things. We thank Latin culture.

There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the 9th century BC. BC? I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Kultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey friends! I'm Jessica Capshaw. And this is Camilla Luddington. And we have a new podcast, call it What It Is. You may know us from Graceland Memorial, but did you know that we are actually besties in real life? And as all besties do, we navigate the highs and lows of life together. And what does that look like? A thousand pep talks. A million I've got yous. Some very urgent I'm coming offers.

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I'm Maria Konikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Both Nate and I are journalists who moonlight as poker players. We've both won, and I have to say lost, hundreds of thousands of dollars playing poker. And poker is a lens that we're going to use to approach this entire show because poker isn't just about playing cards. It's actually about how to make good decisions.

It's an entire framework for thinking about the world. In addition to poker, we'll be talking about the wide world of gambling, so sports betting, for example, plus the news, politics, it is an election year, and personal decisions too. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. Tune into Risky Business every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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, a group formed an international landmine treaty, ban treaty, to basically outlaw those things.

And there's 164 countries that have signed it. Most of those, I think 163 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 mines and getting rid of them. And then financially and medically assisting the survivors or victims of landmines, casualties

of landmines, specifically I think civilians who have undergone, who have been blown up by a landmine. And I think they formed in like 1995 and within two years they won the Nobel Prize. Matthew Feeney Yeah, this is an interesting one because the US and Cuba are one of the only two Western countries that have not signed onto this. However, the US is also probably the leading country in the world at pouring money into landmine eradication and support. For their money, they say, listen, I mean, this is what they say at least.

They say 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. I don't know whether to believe that. 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 landmines scattered throughout the DMZ 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 landmines than 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 for not having signed on to this treaty. Sure. Rightfully. Because there's a lot of other states that may actually follow suit if the United States did. Yeah. They're in the company of Iran, Israel, Azerbaijan, a lot of- Russia.

Yeah, Russia, 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's not huge on international treaties. And this, I think it was the New York Times editorial board

that said there's a 0% chance of assigning it, right? But we are still one of the leaders in actually removing mines. The United States military stockpile is pretty small. I think it's around 3 million right now. And as far as I know, we're not deploying anymore. And we really haven't since, I think, 2003 in Iraq when we invaded Iraq. That was the last time we laid landmines 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 20 and 30 million, it's not as many. So one thing that, like I thought that was pretty odd too. I was like the DMZ, that's why we're not signing on to this landmine treaty? That's weird. And then I started looking up cluster bombs. There's another treaty, kind of like a corollary treaty to the International Landmine Treaty to ban cluster bombs as well.

And that has some, it's much newer, but it has, I think, a pretty decent amount, like 120 countries already signed on to it. But with cluster bombs, I was looking up the Pentagon's reasoning for not signing onto this treaty. So back in, I think, 2008, the Bush administration said, the US will sign this cluster bomb ban treaty if we have not developed cluster bombs that have a failure rate of 1% 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. And apparently just within the last few days, the Pentagon said, well, the deadline's 2019. We haven't developed cluster bombs that have that low of a failure rate, so we're just gonna ignore that and keep using cluster bombs and the the 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?

Yeah Like it's there is it is it really that eminent a ground war with Korea, that we need to reserve the right to use cluster bombs and landmines still? Are we that close to the knife's edge? And if so, then the whole nuclear thing makes me even more nervous than it did before. Yeah. 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 landmines. Yeah. So, this has many, many 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. So finding these things, millions of them around the world, is really tough. 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 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 and poking around. Matthew Foskowski Lightly. Matthew O'Reilly Very lightly. Matthew Foskowski Oh, so lightly.

Matthew O'Reilly Yeah, I get the feeling that this is, I'm sure it's still done in some parts of the world, but it'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'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. All right. So you've also got trained dogs. 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. I also saw rats have been trained by a company called Apopo. Oh yeah, rats and bees.

Oh, I didn't see bees. That makes sense though. Yeah, bees are trained and that wasn't 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, so the hard part is not training them to find these things but tracking them once you release the honey bees.

That makes sense. them once you release the honeybees. So they're trained with sugar-coated TNT, and then, of course, they can find the, that's how they find the TNT, but it has no sugar on it. 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 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 an old Roman coin, or it's like an old butterfly topped to a Miller beer can. It's anything metal, right? So that's one part of the problem. And then the second part of the problem is

that you actually may miss metal because some types of the 350 different varieties of mines use very little metal. Some of them are almost entirely plastics. 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 landmines as well. Yeah. So that's a problem because that was my first thought is like, I remember I was a kid my dad was all over that metal detector on the beach.

So just get a lot of my dads out there or dudes like my dad and just tell them to go wild. Yeah, they can coordinate over CB while they're driving their jeeps out to the mine field. They totally would. Some more promising newer technology specifically being developed at Ohio State University. I think they're actually using this now. It's called GPR, or ground penetrating radar. This uses magic leprechauns inside a machine. Who exert no pressure.

To tell you where these things are underground. Yeah, it's actually pretty sweet. It's like a metal detector ground 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 weird down there and the amazing Kreskin here thinks that it's TNT.

Yeah, and this is crazy. 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 mine in the soil so they can just be scooped up. Right. Well, I don't understand that. What is it?

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. No. You know? No. Wash hands, flush eyes. So that's actually, 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 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. 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 Evel Knievel and stuff like that and model cars. But for some reason as an adult heavy machinery really turns my crank. So go look up in your Google images the

Panther and the Aardvark tank or mine removal machines and just delight in these huge things that are part Bobcat, part Humvee. And they're just so rudimentary. Like literally one of them, the aardvark 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. 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 landmine on the counters, right? So it's like, and the aardvark just takes it. It's huge, anti-tank mines just blowing up right underneath these chains that are whipping up the ground, the front part of the aardvark. And I saw a video of a guy in one who, I guess, hit a mine and they show him in the cab and he barely is jostled by the explosion, this huge explosion that they show like 80 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 aardvark out of? Why isn't the art bark out of? Why isn't the tank made of that? It's the same joke as 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 with MRAPs like mine, I can't remember what that 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 Humvees so that they were kind of impervious to IEDs. I think it's basically the same technology on the Aardvark. Yeah. So that one, like you said, has a dude in it. Then there's the Panther, and that is a 60-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 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 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? Yeah, no, there's another machine called a berm processing assembly that just goes down through 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.

Matthew Feeney 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. My favorite new machine that they're using, and this makes total sense, are drones. The mine Kaifon drone, K-A-F-O-N, this is a drone basically that was developed by a guy named Masoud Hassani.

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 landmines with nobody walking on the ground or no machine on the ground. It makes total sense. and detects these landmines 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 mark it on like GPS or something like that? 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. That's pretty awesome. And they're only like five grand compared to robots and stuff like that can go from 80 to half a million bucks.

Yeah, the aardvark looks extremely expensive for sure. I imagine it's not cheap. So we talked about the International Ban Treaty, the campaign to ban landmines that won the Nobel Prize in 1997. Their work actually had a huge impact. And I think 1999, there was a peak of casualties worldwide from landmines of 9,228.

By 2013, they'd gotten that down to 3,450. 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 turned in 2016 and the numbers have started to go back up. So the low was 3 to go back up. So the low is 3450 in 2013. In 2016, it was up to 8605, which has got to be really demoralizing. Matthew Feeney 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 sad. I saw also, remember I said Egypt has a lot of old mines from World War II. Apparently ISIS has taken to digging those up and replanting them. And we should say, you know, landmines and IEDs are virtually one in the same. It's just land mines are mass produced, whereas IEDs are made by insurgent bomb makers. They're usually not commercially produced.

There's no contract that ISIS has out with somebody. Did you ever see Hurt Locker, the Hurt Locker? No, 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 mines, right? Or bombs or IEDs?

Yeah, IEDs, bombs, anything like any unexploded thing. Jeremy Renner's in it 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. Yeah. Oh, one other thing, Chuck. Yes.

Princess Diana. 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 landmines around the world. Just amazing stuff. And she wasn't, she took a lot of heat sometimes from within her own country. Sometimes 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 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. She knew she couldn't do that. But she did a lot of great work to raise awareness. And when she died, it was a very sad day, and they, well, obviously for many reasons, but Nobel Prize-winning winner Jodie Williams said the death of Princess Diana meant that

the anti-landmine activists lost their most visible advocate. So that was very sad. She did great work. Matthew Feeney 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 leftover landmines that people don't really know about, and now the spotlight's on them.

That says quite a bit about somebody to do that. Pretty amazing. So, you got anything else? I got nothing else. If you wanna know more about landmines, you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com, and since I said landmine, it's time for listener mail.

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