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A landmine is a type of mine which is placed on the ground and explodes when triggered by a vehicle or person. Landmines are used to secure disputed borders and to restrict enemy movement in times of war. Because of this, and also because not all types are designed to be buried in the ground, and to avoid using the word landmine, they are sometimes called area denial munitions, serving a tactical purpose similar to barbed wire or concrete "dragon's teeth" vehicle barriers — that is, channeling the movement of the attacking troops in ways that permit the defenders to ambush them more easily, or attack them with artillery bombardments planned in advance to cover a certain area.
From a military perspective, landmines serve as force multipliers, allowing an organized force to overcome a larger enemy.
A landmine can be triggered by a number of things including pressure, movement, sound, magnetism and vibration. Anti-personnel mines commonly use the pressure of a person's foot as a trigger, but tripwire is also frequently encountered. Most modern anti-vehicle mines use a magnetic trigger, to enable it to detonate even if the tyres or tracks did not touch it. Advanced mines are able to sense the difference between friendly and enemy types of vehicles by way of a built-in signature catalog. This will theoretically enable friendly forces to use the mined area while denying the enemy access.
Many mines combine the main trigger with a touch or tilt trigger, to prevent enemy engineers from defusing it. Also, landmine designs tend to use as little metal as possible to make searching with a metal detector more difficult. Also, landmines made mostly of plastic are very inexpensive.
The Chinese Type 72, which is according to some sources the world's most popular landmine, costs only $3 apiece if bought in large quantities. It is mostly plastic, only about the size of the palm of a man's hand, and contains just enough TNT to blow off a foot.
An antipersonnel mine that is used within a building or with some sort of psychological bait is called a booby trap. The term booby trap also implies that the device is improvised, perhaps from an artillery shell or a grenade, rather than manufactured for this specific purpose.
Mines used by the U.S. Army and many other forces are designed to self-destruct after a period of weeks or months to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties at the conflict's end, though many mines laid historically have not.
Minefields may be laid by several means. Mine-laying shells may be fired by artillery from a distance of several tens of kilometers, ejected from cruise missiles, or dropped from helicopters or airplanes. Armored fighting vehicles equipped to lay mines have also been built. However, if time allows, the preferred way is to place them into the ground by hand or with relatively simple tools, since this will make the mines practically invisible and reduce the number of mines needed to deny the enemy of an area.
Often anti-tank minefields are scattered with anti-personnel mines to make its clearing more difficult and time-consuming by disabling or destroying mine clearning vehicles.
While placing and arming landmines is relatively inexpensive and simple, the reverse of detecting and removing them is typically expensive, slow and dangerous.
Various means to detect landmines include:
Anti-personnel landmines or APLs are widely considered to be ethically problematic weapons because their victims are commonly civilians, who are often maimed long after war activities have ceased. According to anti-landmine campaigners, in Cambodia alone, mines have resulted in 35,000 amputees after the cessation of hostilities. Removal of landmines is dangerous, slow and costly. Some countries maintain that landmines are necessary to protect their soldiers in war.
The use, production, stockpiling and trade in anti-personnel landmines was outlawed by the Ottawa Treaty in 1999 which was signed by 141 countries, of which 120 ratified it. The biggest countries not to sign the treaty were the People's Republic of China, India, the USA and Russia. The treaty was the result of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, launched in 1992, whose web site at http://www.icbl.org has the treaty text and the complete list of signatories. The campaign won the Nobel peace prize in 1997 for its efforts; the prize was shared with its leader, Jody Williams.
The Ottawa Treaty does not include anti-tank mines or cluster bombs.
The legal export of anti-personnel landmines has ceased as of 1999. Anti-personnel landmines continue to be produced in the following countries:
Some have claimed that despite the 1999 ban, the People's Republic of China and Russia have continued to mass-produce landmines for export around the world.
(see ).
The Soviet Union has been accused of using specifically designed mines looking like toys, to target children, in the conflict with Afghanistan. Some of the Soviet mines used were small, green, made from plastic and winged so that they could be deployed from planes, with the result that children often mistook them for toys, but others were allegedly manufactured of red and white plastic in the shape of toy trucks.
Unexploded bomblets from cluster bombs have also the danger of landmines; this is probably in some cases a design feature, intended to pin down the military force upon which they are dropped and discourage it from moving. Although they are not designed to be hidden, they may be, due to soft soil or vegetation. In addition, again, children could possibly mistake them for toys.
The current trend in design of cluster bombs is the use of smart munitions, such as those incorporated into the CBU97 used by the US Air Force and US Navy; the smart munitions are very large, themselves approximately the size of smallish artillery shells, and have guidance circuitry allowing them to seek out and destroy armored vehicles, and self-destruct upon reaching the ground if they do not achieve target lock before reaching the ground. This innovation seems likely to reduce the humanitarian cost of using cluster bombs though the CBU97 and other weapons in its class, such as the Russian RBK500, are extremely expensive.
The basic concept appeared through out human history in various forms. In Europe in the early 18th century, often going by the French term fougasse, improvised landmines or booby traps were constructed in the form of bombs buried in shallow wells in the earth and covered with scrap metal and/or gravel to serve as shrapnel. The term is sometimes still used in the present day to describe such devices. The technique was used in several European wars of the 18th Century, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Some sources report that Zhuge Liang, of the kingdom of Shu of China, invented a landmine type device in the third century AD. Similar in concept to the modern landmine, small foot-sized holes dug in the ground with a sharpened spike, and then covered, were used by forces of ancient Rome. In the Middle Ages in Europe, small, 4-pronged spiked devices called caltrops or Crows feet could be scattered on the ground.
The first modern mechanically fused high explosive antipersonnel landmines were created in Imperial Germany, circa 1912, and were copied and manufactured by all major participants in the First World War. In World War I, landmines were used notably at the start of the battle of Passchendale. Well before the war was over, the British were manufacturing landmines that contained poison gas instead of explosives. Poison gas landmines were manufactured at least until the 1980s in the Soviet Union and the United States was also known to have at least experimented with the concept in the 1950s.
Nuclear mines have also been developed, both landmines and naval mines. An example is the British Blue Peacock project.
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