35 Facts About Land mines

Use of land mines is controversial because of their potential as indiscriminate weapons.

Normally, Land mines are mass-produced and placed in groups, while booby traps are improvised and deployed one at a time.

Remotely delivered Land mines are dropped from aircraft or carried by devices such as artillery shells or rockets.

Land mines's forces were besieging Vercingetorix, the leader of the Gauls, but Vercingetorix managed to send for reinforcements.

One of the greatest limitations of early land mines was the unreliable fuses and their susceptibility to dampness.

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Victim-activated Land mines were unreliable because they relied on a flintlock to ignite the explosive.

The naval Land mines were far more effective, destroying several battleships.

Nevertheless, antipersonnel Land mines were not a big factor in the war because machine guns, barbed wire and rapid-fire artillery were far more effective defenses.

Tens of millions of Land mines were laid in the Second World War, particularly in the deserts of North Africa and the steppes of Eastern Europe, where the open ground favored tanks.

However, Land mines were poorly recorded and marked, often becoming as much a hazard to allies as enemies.

Tripwire-operated Land mines were not defended by pressure Land mines; the Chinese were often able to disable them and reuse them against UN forces.

Wide area anti-personnel Land mines were small steel spheres that discharged tripwires when they hit the ground; each dispenser held 540 Land mines.

Over 37 million Gravel Land mines were produced between 1967 and 1968, and when they were dropped in places like Vietnam their locations were unmarked and unrecorded.

The British had a project, codenamed Blue Peacock, to develop nuclear Land mines to be buried in Germany; the project was cancelled in 1958.

Advanced Land mines are able to sense the difference between friendly and enemy types of vehicles by way of a built-in signature catalog.

Many Land mines combine the main trigger with a touch or tilt trigger to prevent enemy engineers from defusing it.

Land mine designs tend to use as little metal as possible to make searching with a metal detector more difficult; land mines made mostly of plastic have the added advantage of being very inexpensive.

Some types of modern Land mines are designed to self-destruct, or chemically render themselves inert after a period of weeks or months to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties at the conflict's end.

Anti-tank Land mines were created not long after the invention of the tank in the First World War.

Anti-tank Land mines are typically larger than anti-personnel Land mines and require more pressure to detonate.

Anti-personnel Land mines are designed primarily to kill or injure people, as opposed to vehicles.

Land mines are currently used in large quantities mostly for this first purpose, thus their widespread use in the demilitarized zones of likely flashpoints such as Cyprus, Afghanistan and Korea.

Since combat engineers with mine-clearing equipment can clear a path through a minefield relatively quickly, Land mines are usually considered effective only if covered by fire.

Artillery and aircraft scatterable Land mines allow minefields to be placed in front of moving formations of enemy units, including the reinforcement of minefields or other obstacles that have been breached by enemy engineers.

Land mines were commonly deployed by insurgents during the South African Border War, leading directly to the development of the first dedicated mine-protected armoured vehicles in South Africa.

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Namibian insurgents used anti-tank Land mines to throw South African military convoys into disarray before attacking them.

Anti-tank minefields can be scattered with anti-personnel Land mines to make clearing them manually more time-consuming; and anti-personnel minefields are scattered with anti-tank Land mines to prevent the use of armored vehicles to clear them quickly.

Multiple anti-tank Land mines have been buried in stacks of two or three with the bottom mine fuzed, to multiply the penetrating power.

Since the Land mines are buried, the ground directs the energy of the blast in a single direction—through the bottom of the target vehicle or on the track.

Land mines's invention, known as the Polish mine detector, was used by the Allies alongside mechanical methods, to clear the German mine fields during the Second Battle of El Alamein when 500 units were shipped to Field Marshal Montgomery's Eighth Army.

Whereas the placing and arming of Land mines is relatively inexpensive and simple, the process of detecting and removing them is typically expensive, slow, and dangerous.

Anti-personnel Land mines are most difficult to find, due to their small size and the fact that many are made almost entirely of non-metallic materials specifically to escape detection.

Use of land mines is controversial because they are indiscriminate weapons, harming soldier and civilian alike.

From a study by Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, land degradation caused by land mines "can be classified into five groups: access denial, loss of biodiversity, micro-relief disruption, chemical composition, and loss of productivity".

Near Land mines that have exploded or decayed, soils tend to be contaminated, particularly with heavy metals.