As long as the outcome is not calamitous, unexpected finding of unexploded WWII bombs by hapless gardeners, especially in the UK, always makes good local or even national media coverage.
As long as the outcome is not calamitous, unexpected finding of unexploded WWII bombs by hapless gardeners, especially in the UK, always makes good local or even national media coverage. For example, a story that made it to the BBC News last year told how Lulu Cirillo was digging in her garden in Weymouth, Dorset when her spade struck a solid object. Assuming it to be a stone of some sort, she threw it across the lawn for her pet Shih Tzu dog to play with. Later she took it into the kitchen and scrubbed off the mud with a Brillo scouring pad to get a closer look. The curious Ms Cirillo then had the presence of mind to inquire on Facebook for ideas about what she had unearthed. She was apparently ‘absolutely horrified’ to discover she may be hosting a bomb. By 9 p.m. the same evening, army sappers had detonated the offending device under controlled conditions on a local beach.
Fortunately for Britain and most other developed countries, encounters with the detritus of past military conflict are few and most times but not always resolved without fatal results. That is not the case for the horrendous number of countries where munitions and explosives of concern (MEC), explosive remnants of war (ERW) and landmines present a real and present danger.
How geoscience can help to mitigate this egregious subsurface threat to so many communities around the world was touched upon at last month’s online 1st Munitions Response Meeting in conjunction with the SAGEEP meeting, co-organized by EAGE. Most of the programme was focused on technology and case studies in the US. Since 2001 there has been a Military Munitions Response Program (MMRP) within the US Department of Defence (DoD) with the mission to protect the public from the potential hazards from military operations, both legacy and present.
According to one US agency, in 2015, unexploded ordnance (UXO) and discarded military munitions may be present at over 5200 former ranges and former munitions facilities throughout the US. Nearly half of these sites require a munitions response, at an estimated cost of $14 billion and a completion date many decades in the future.
Dealing with unexploded ordnance (UXO) has an obvious call upon the expertise of the near surface business community. The Munitions Response Meeting agenda mainly provided technology updates and case studies in the US. Focus has been on the development of ‘smart’ survey reconnaissance strategies for contaminated areas, notably increasingly sophisticated software using artificial intelligence prediction technology, the potential of drone capabilities and satellite imagery, especially to carry out larger scale coverage more cost effectively.
Only one brief session was devoted to International Demining and UXO. The topic undoubtedly deserves many forums of its own in terms of the human havoc that landmines continue to wreak on communities around the world. In 2019, at least 5,554 casualties of mines/ERW were recorded: 2,170 people were killed, 3,357 people were injured. The vast majority of recorded landmine/ERW casualties were civilians (80%), with children accounting for 43%.
Reporting this grim roll-call, the Landmine Monitor 2020 published by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) notes the highest number of casualties was now being caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), typically deployed by non-state armed groups (NSAGS). This is particularly problematic in terms of the international efforts to curb the use of landmines.
There are currently 164 signatories to the 1997 Ottawa Convention, including all NATO countries apart from the US, on the prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and on their destruction. A separate treaty in 2010 on banning the use of cluster bombs, which leave life-threatening debris, currently has 123 signatories.
Laudable as these may be, there is a question about the value of these essentially humanitarian conventions. Politically critics argue that the mine and cluster munitions ban treaties can be seen as a challenge to the sovereignty of states and their right to defend themselves. This is because the agreements were largely driven by non-government organizations (NGOs) rather than working through the multi-lateral disarmament forum of the UN Conference on Disarmament. Also, practically speaking, the mine ban treaty places no restriction on deeper buried anti-vehicle landmines that can, for example, blow up civilian trucks and school buses.
US, China and Russia are among the 33 UN states that have not ratified the mine ban treaty, mostly on the grounds of keeping their options open. Many of the abstaining countries actually comply with the provisions. The US is a case in point. In 2014 the Obama Administration said it would officially stop the production and acquisition of anti-personnel mines, accelerate the destruction of stockpiles, and ban use of such weapons except on the Korean Peninsula. At that point US had not actually laid anti-personnel mines anywhere since 1991 and had not exported any since 1992. The US is also the world’s largest individual contributor to mine clearance efforts.
To ensure ‘our forces are able to defend against any and all threats’, President Trump ordered a change of policy in 2020. It permitted the US to develop, produce and use landmines anywhere in the world as long as they are ‘non-persistent’ that is, equipped with self-destruct and self-deactivation features, thereby abandoning the previous constraints. US landmines are said to self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours.
The Landmine Monitor believes 11 states can be classified as producers of anti-personnel mines, namely China, Cuba, India, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam. Most of these countries are not believed to be actively producing mines but reserve the right to do so.
The scale of the problem and the cost of remediation are daunting. Estimated number of landmines per country is: Egypt (23 million, mostly in border regions); Angola (9-15 million); Iran (16 million); Afghanistan (about 10 million); Iraq (10 million); China (10 million); Cambodia (up to 10 million); Mozambique (about 2 million); Bosnia (2-3 million); Croatia (2 million); Somalia (up to 2 million in the North); Eritrea (1 million); and Sudan (1 million). About 100,000 mines are removed, while two million more areplanted each year. Mines cost between $3 and $30, but the price of removing them is $300-1000 (this latter could be an underestimate if all factors in the demining process are taken into account.
When it comes to demining contaminated areas there is a clear divide. For military operations, an 80% area clearance (called breaching) can be acceptable. Armies have the budget and resources to deploy large armoured vehicles, usually built on a tank-type chassis to create safe pathways through mined areas under combat conditions. The machines can include ploughs, flails, mine clearing line charge (rocket launched) equipment and magnetic field generation.
The military do not have to deal with the post-combat need to reinstate territory impacted by ground hostilities or military defence. All too often that becomes a humanitarian mission, led by mine clearance organizations such as the UK-based Halo Trust, Norwegian People’s Aid, Swiss Foundation for Mine Action and Demira (Germany). Halo, began working in Afghanistan in 1988 after the withdrawal of Russian troops, and now has 8500 deminers active in 26 programmes around the world with a turnover of £75 million in 2018-19. International funding of humanitarian mine clearance comes primarily from United States (US), the European Union (EU), Japan, Norway, and the Netherlands with Germany, the UK, and Denmark also significant donors.
This effective outsourcing of responsibility and underfunding means slow advance in anti-personnel mine clearance technology still reliant on decades old geoscience, based on metal detection and GPR searching for difficult to detect non-metallic modern mines. The problem is that clearance for civilian use of land has to be nothing less than 100%. That makes for extremely painstaking work fraught with danger and liable to time consuming false alarms. As one commentator put it, ‘mine detection boils down to rows of nervous people wearing blast-resistant clothing and creeping laboriously across a field, prodding the ground ahead to check for buried objects’.
That’s not how it should be according to arms control and peacekeeping specialist Walter Dorn, professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) and the Canadian Forces College (CFC). In his 2019 paper ‘Eliminating Hidden Killers: How Can Technology Help Humanitarian Demining?’ published in Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, he states: ‘Each phase of the physical demining process (i.e., vegetation clearance, mine detection, and removal) can benefit from the development of demining technologies. However, even with the prospect of ‘smart’ demining technology, the human aspect of supervision remains a crucial challenge … The prioritization of military operations, a lack of coordination between governments and humanitarian actors, a tendency towards secrecy, and an underlying lack of funding are just some of the roadblocks’.
Wikipedia reminds us that a great variety of methods for detecting landmines have already been studied. These include ‘electromagnetic methods, one of which (ground penetrating radar) has been employed in tandem with metal detectors. Acoustic methods can sense the cavity created by mine casings. Sensors have been developed to detect vapor leaking from landmines. Animals such as rats and mongooses can safely move over a minefield and detect mines, and animals can also be used to screen air samples over potential minefields. Bees, plants and bacteria are also potentially useful. Explosives in landmines can also be detected directly using nuclear quadrupole resonance and neutron probes’.
Meanwhile as Paul Jefferson, reputedly one of the earliest humanitarian deminers, said: ‘a landmine is the perfect soldier: Ever courageous, never sleeps, never misses’.
‘The human aspect of supervision remains a crucial challenge.’
‘When it comes to demining contaminated areas there is a clear divide.’
