April 10, 2018 • 51 mins
One of the worst legacies of war are the millions of landmines left behind. They hide for decades after a conflict is over, exploding beneath unsuspecting civilians and children. To many, removing mines and banning new ones is of paramount importance.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Rowland. Back
together again at last, Just like last week. I was
(00:22):
about to say, what are you talking about? You know
what I'm talking about? Oilis what you're talking about. Um oh,
that's a pretty good one. Subtle, understated. Um So, Chuck,
how are you feeling today? Mm hmm, 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
(00:44):
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,
(01:07):
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.
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:11):
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.
(02:33):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:18):
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.
(03:38):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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,
(05:13):
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
(05:33):
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
(05:56):
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
(06:19):
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
(06:41):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:25):
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,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:17):
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.
(09:40):
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
(10:01):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:45):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:50):
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,
(12:13):
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
(12:33):
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
(12:53):
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
(13:15):
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
(13:40):
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
(14:02):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:45):
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.
(15:08):
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
(15:29):
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,
(15:54):
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
(16:15):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:19):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:00):
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,
(18:23):
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
(18:46):
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,
(19:07):
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
(19:28):
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.
(19:50):
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
(20:11):
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
(20:34):
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,
(20:58):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:06):
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,
(22:26):
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,
(22:48):
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,
(23:11):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:51):
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
(24:14):
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.
(24:36):
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,
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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,
(25:42):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:07):
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
(27:29):
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,
(27:50):
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
(28:14):
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,
(28:37):
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
(29:11):
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
(29:32):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:15):
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.
(30:37):
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
(31:00):
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,
(31:21):
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
(31:43):
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,
(32:04):
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
(32:27):
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
(32:47):
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
(33:10):
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
(33:32):
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,
(33:55):
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
(34:15):
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
(34:37):
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
(34:57):
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
(35:20):
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.
(35:41):
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
(36:04):
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,
(36:28):
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
(36:51):
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
(37:12):
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
(37:35):
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
(37:58):
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
(38:20):
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
(38:42):
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
(39:05):
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.
(39:27):
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
(39:49):
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
(40:11):
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.
(40:33):
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
(40:59):
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
(41:19):
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
(41:40):
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
(42:01):
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
(42:22):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:07):
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
(43:27):
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
(43:47):
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.
(44:09):
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
(44:32):
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
(44:54):
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
(45:18):
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
(45:40):
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
(46:04):
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.
(46:28):
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
(46:49):
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
(47:13):
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
(47:37):
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
(47:58):
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.
(48:20):
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.
(48:41):
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
(49:06):
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.
(49:27):
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
(49:48):
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.
(50:09):
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
(50:31):
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
(50:53):
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
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
(51:14):
visit how stuff Works dot com. H
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Rowland. Back
together again at last, Just like last week. I was
(00:22):
about to say, what are you talking about? You know
what I'm talking about? Oilis what you're talking about. Um oh,
that's a pretty good one. Subtle, understated. Um So, Chuck,
how are you feeling today? Mm hmm, 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
(00:44):
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,
(01:07):
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.
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:11):
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.
(02:33):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:18):
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.
(03:38):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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,
(05:13):
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
(05:33):
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
(05:56):
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
(06:19):
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
(06:41):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:25):
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,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:17):
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.
(09:40):
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
(10:01):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:45):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:50):
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,
(12:13):
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
(12:33):
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
(12:53):
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
(13:15):
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
(13:40):
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
(14:02):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:45):
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.
(15:08):
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
(15:29):
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,
(15:54):
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
(16:15):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:19):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:00):
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,
(18:23):
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
(18:46):
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,
(19:07):
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
(19:28):
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.
(19:50):
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
(20:11):
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
(20:34):
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,
(20:58):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:06):
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,
(22:26):
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,
(22:48):
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,
(23:11):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:51):
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
(24:14):
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.
(24:36):
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,
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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,
(25:42):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:07):
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
(27:29):
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,
(27:50):
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
(28:14):
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,
(28:37):
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
(29:11):
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
(29:32):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:15):
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.
(30:37):
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
(31:00):
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,
(31:21):
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
(31:43):
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,
(32:04):
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
(32:27):
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
(32:47):
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
(33:10):
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
(33:32):
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,
(33:55):
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
(34:15):
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
(34:37):
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
(34:57):
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
(35:20):
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.
(35:41):
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
(36:04):
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,
(36:28):
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
(36:51):
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
(37:12):
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
(37:35):
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
(37:58):
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
(38:20):
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
(38:42):
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
(39:05):
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.
(39:27):
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
(39:49):
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
(40:11):
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.
(40:33):
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
(40:59):
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
(41:19):
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
(41:40):
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
(42:01):
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
(42:22):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:07):
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
(43:27):
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
(43:47):
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.
(44:09):
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
(44:32):
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
(44:54):
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
(45:18):
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
(45:40):
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
(46:04):
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.
(46:28):
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
(46:49):
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
(47:13):
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
(47:37):
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
(47:58):
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.
(48:20):
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.
(48:41):
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
(49:06):
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.
(49:27):
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
(49:48):
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.
(50:09):
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
(50:31):
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
(50:53):
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
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
(51:14):
visit how stuff Works dot com. H
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