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Why the land mine, a persistent killer of civilians, is coming back under Trump
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post
Posted: February 9th, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/02/01/...
The Trump administrations decision this week to expand the use of land mines has baffled and angered humans rights and arms control groups, which say the decision further imperils anyone who may encounter the weapons. In 2018, nearly 20 civilians were killed or injured every day by land mines and other unexploded ordnance remnants, such as cluster munitions. Children represented 40 percent of the casualties. Land mine use and production are banned by 164 countries. The United States is not one of them, but Obama-era restrictions only allowed anti-personnel land mines to be used in defense of the Korean Peninsula. The new Trump policy reverses those regulations. Most land mines that menace civilians are dumb or persistent. They can remain dangerous indefinitely until someone commonly a child or farmer encounters one. The United States does not have any of these land mines in its inventory, defense officials said. In recent decades, the United States has produced smart or nonpersistent mines that can be set to self-destruct in a certain number of minutes, hours or days after they are deployed. Nearly 120,000 smart, nonpersistent mines were used in the Gulf War. Even though the Pentagon suggested a low dud rate, anti-personnel and antitank weapons that failed to self-detonate littered Kuwait, a 2002 Government Accountability Office report said. Nearly 2,000 duds were uncovered by contractors working in one sector alone out of seven, the GAO report concluded.
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