"Tell it to countries which have a long land border with a an aggressive neighbour."

Your proposed use for landmines - border defense - is wide of the mark. Land mines are a strategic weapon, not a tactical one. They were designed to be deployed not to prevent an enemy from crossing into a territory, like a fence. Rather, landmines are intended to expose the enemy to attack by forcing them to delay, clearing a path through the minefield which bottlenecks their movement, or bypass the area altogether, which forces them to use a path more advantageous to the landmine deployer.
In other words, not only are landmines not intended to prevent border crossings - they couldn't. Any country sufficiently worried about an invading army to want to deploy landmines against them is facing an enemy that has the capability of bypassing them.
In short, your defense of them is misguided.

http://www.icbl.org/treaty

Posted by: ocmpoma | May 6, 2006 1:16 PM

The real problem with landmines is that they are indiscriminate. A fence, say, with barbed wire and machine guns is easy for civilians and neutral parties to steer clear of; a landmine kills anyone who steps on it, and because they are by nature hidden, people who are not party to the conflict cannot avoid them. Worse, landmines are nearly impossible to remove after the cessation of hostilities, and can still be maiming and killing innocent people decades later.

Posted by: Ebonmuse | May 6, 2006 2:57 PM

Unless you're proposing mapping the locations of mines down to the inch, which I doubt any state that has laid mines has ever done, even with a map de-mining a swath of land is an incredibly difficult, slow and dangerous job. Mines are explosive devices, you realize - they're not meant to be removed. If memory serves, the international organizations attempting to de-mine land can clear a few square meters per day on a good day.

Posted by: Ebonmuse | May 6, 2006 4:57 PM

1. Insert into each mine a cryptographic device which disables the mine when a signal is sent with the password. Each mine has its own password (set by the manufacturer). They can be as long as you wish. Send a signal. Presto -- you have a field of dead mines.

2. Insert a clock. After a year after production, the mine is dead and the clock needs to be "reset" by radio transmission.

You can do it when you want it. There is no way a country like South Korea will give up landmines. Also Poland, for that matter.

Posted by: Roman Werpachowski | May 7, 2006 3:06 AM

Yeah, and Dr. Gatling thought he would prevent all wars with his invention, too. How's that working for us?

Posted by: pseudolus | May 7, 2006 4:43 PM

I posted a comment on this answer over at Living the Scientific life, but see you've provided more context. http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2006/05/mothership_question_1.php

Ocmpoma is right and so is Roman W. Weapon systems ultimately get used any way they can prove effective, and with land mines, it's an either/or. If the enemy knows they will be slowed and attacked at a vulnerable place, they try to figure out a way around that. And the other side figures a counter to that. And so on. Theoretically, any weapon can be gotten around, but practically it will add to the deterrent effect.

Mine technology was huge area of development in the 1980s when the West was figuring out how to deal with the threat of Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap. I knew guys who did nothing but work on this stuff, and I assure you it was more complex than this discussion will ever get into.

Posted by: Charlie Quimby | May 8, 2006 9:25 PM

Incidents of child abuse, domestic violence, property crime and identity theft can often be traced back to one root cause: crystal meth. In lieu of hard numbers, you can take a hard look at the human toll this particular invention of ours is taking by visiting http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/body/faces.html

Posted by: Sean Storrs | May 11, 2006 4:02 AM