Land mine

• 1. Introduction

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  A land mine waits. It does nothing until a foot presses down or a vehicle rolls over it, and then it destroys or disables whatever passed near. The weapon is patient in a way that makes it uniquely cruel. A conflict can end, the soldiers can go home, and the mine remains in the ground, still armed, still waiting. There is a common myth that mines go inert after a few years. They do not. They can stay dangerous for decades. That single fact is why this weapon became one of the most controversial in modern warfare. So how did a buried explosive grow from sharpened Roman stakes into a device that 164 nations would sign a treaty to ban? Why are China, Russia, and the United States not among them? And what happens to the land itself when millions of these things are scattered and forgotten?

• 2. Before Gunpowder

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  Some fortifications in the Roman Empire were ringed with buried hazards that worked much like a modern mine. There were goads, one-foot pieces of wood tipped with iron hooks. There were lilia, named lilies for their look, pits holding sharpened logs set in a five-point pattern. And there were abatis, felled trees with sharpened branches turned outward. Like today's mines, these were victim-operated and often concealed, and they made the enemy vulnerable to spears while trying to clear them.

  Julius Caesar relied on such defenses at the Battle of Alesia, besieging the Gallic leader Vercingetorix. Caesar built fortifications on both sides to hold the siege and fend off reinforcements, and they helped win him the battle. Lilies appeared again when Scots faced the English at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and when Germans dug in at Passchendaele during the First World War.

  The caltrop offered a quicker defense. The Romans used this weapon of four sharp spikes, 12 to 15 cm across, arranged so one point always faced up when thrown down. Like anti-personnel mines, caltrops aimed to disable rather than kill, and they worked especially well against mounted troops who could not check each step. The Jin dynasty scattered them at the Battle of Zhongdu to slow Genghis Khan's army. Joan of Arc was wounded by one at the Siege of Orleans. In Japan they were called tetsu-bishi and used by ninjas from the fourteenth century onward.

• 3. The Age Of Gunpowder

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  Gunpowder, a mixture of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate, was invented in China by the 10th century and turned to war soon after. An enormous bomb credited to Lou Qianxia struck the Chinese enemy at the Battle of Zhongdu in 1277. A 14th-century treatise, the Huolongjing or Fire Dragon Manual, even described hollow cast iron shells filled with gunpowder, their wooden wads carrying three fuses in case one failed.

  The Huolongjing also recorded a mine set off by enemy movement. A 9 ft length of bamboo was waterproofed with cowhide and oil, packed with compressed gunpowder and pellets, sealed with wax, and hidden in a trench. When an enemy stepped on concealed boards, a dislodged pin dropped a weight. A cord turned a drum and steel wheels struck sparks against flint, lighting the fuses. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a similar mechanism for the first wheellock musket in Europe around 1500.

  At Augsburg in 1573, the German engineer Samuel Zimmermann built the Fladdermine, or flying mine. Around a kilogram of black powder sat near the surface, triggered by a step or a tripwire that fired a flintlock. It saw use in the Franco-Prussian War but worked poorly, since a flintlock fails when left untended. The fougasse, a precursor of fragmentation mines and the Claymore, packed gunpowder in a cone-shaped hole topped with rocks, scrap iron or shells, and a flintlock tripwire set it off. Black powder's weakness for damp kept it confined to major fortifications, where it served in eighteenth-century European wars and the American Revolution.

• 4. Reliable Fuses And Civil War

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  Early land mines failed because their fuses rotted in damp ground. The safety fuse changed that. Then electricity made command initiation possible, detonating a charge instantly with a spark down a wire instead of waiting for a fuse to burn. The Russians claim first use of this in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829, and it kept the fougasse useful until the Claymore replaced it in the 1960s.

  Victim-activated mines stayed unreliable while they leaned on flintlocks. The percussion cap, developed in the early 19th century, made them far more dependable, and pressure-operated mines went into action on land and sea in the Crimean War of 1853-1856.

  Confederate brigadier general Gabriel J. Rains laid thousands of torpedoes during the American Civil War, artillery shells fitted with pressure caps, starting at the Battle of Yorktown in 1862. As a captain he had used explosive booby traps during the Seminole Wars in Florida in 1840. His mines caused only a few hundred casualties across the war, but they hurt morale and slowed Union troops. Many on both sides called the weapon barbaric, and Union generals forced Confederate prisoners to remove the mines.

• 5. The Rise Of High Explosives

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  Guncotton, up to four times stronger than gunpowder, was invented by Christian Schonbein in 1846, often for jobs like blasting train tunnels through the Alps and Rockies. It was dangerous to make until Frederick Augustus Abel found a safe method in 1865, after which it served as the standard British military explosive into the First World War.

  Ascanio Sobrero invented nitroglycerine in 1847 to treat angina pectoris, and it proved far more powerful than guncotton. Alfred Nobel tamed it into a solid mixture he named dynamite, paired with a safe detonator. Even so, dynamite could form crystals that detonated easily, so the military still favored guncotton.

  Trinitrotoluene, or TNT, came from the German chemical industry in 1863. It resisted detonation, survived the shock of being fired by artillery, and ignored nearby blasts. Lightweight, damp-proof, stable, meltable to fill any shape, and cheap, it became the standard explosive in mines after the First World War. By that war, a mine burst into roughly 1,000 high-velocity fragments, against only 20 to 30 in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

• 6. World Wars And Cold War

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  Tens of millions of mines were laid in the Second World War, especially across the deserts of North Africa and the steppes of Eastern Europe where open ground favored tanks. Finland used them first, defending against a Soviet force with over 6,000 tanks, twenty times its own. Lakes and forests funneled enemy armor onto roads, and the Mannerheim Line wove these natural barriers together with mines.

  After 1942 the Germans turned defensive and became the most systematic users of mines, ringing anti-tank mines with S-mines and adding anti-handling devices. At the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942 they laid about half a million mines in fields five miles deep, nicknamed the Devil's gardens. The Allies won but lost over half their tanks, with 20 percent of losses caused by mines. The Soviets manufactured over 67 million mines, and at the Battle of Kursk they laid over a million in eight belts reaching 35 km deep.

  The Polish officer Jozef Kosacki built a portable detector, the Polish mine detector, and 500 units went to Field Marshal Montgomery's Eighth Army at El Alamein. The Germans answered with wooden-cased mines, the Schu-mine 42 and Holzmine 42, and in 1944 built the fully non-metallic Topfmine, hiding their own under radioactive sand. The flail offered one of the best clearing methods, with chained weights on rotating drums; the Scorpion rode the Matilda tank, and the faster Crab rode the Sherman through D-Day. During the Cold War, NATO feared Soviet armor and planned a minefield along the entire West German border, while the Americans developed the Claymore, which hurls steel balls in a 60-degree arc at 1200 m/s.

• 7. How A Mine Works

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  A conventional land mine is mostly casing filled with a main charge, set off by a firing mechanism such as a pressure plate that triggers a detonator and then a booster. Triggers can respond to pressure, movement, sound, magnetism or vibration. Anti-personnel mines often read the pressure of a foot or use tripwires. Modern anti-vehicle mines tend to use magnetic triggers, so they can fire even when tires or tracks miss them directly. Advanced mines carry a built-in signature catalog to tell friend from foe.

  Anti-tank mines arrived in answer to the tank in the First World War, striking at the tracks, a weaker area. They are larger than anti-personnel mines and normally need 100 kg of pressure, which keeps infantry and smaller vehicles from setting them off. Anti-personnel mines are often built to injure rather than kill, increasing the enemy's burden of evacuation and medical care.

  There is a misconception that a mine is armed by stepping on it and triggered by stepping off. In every case the initial pressure detonates it, since mines are meant to kill or maim rather than wait to be disarmed. That false idea came from movies that turned defusing into a source of tension. Anti-handling devices fire the mine if anyone tries to lift or disarm it, which is why the standard render-safe procedure is often to destroy a mine on site rather than move it.

• 8. The Human And Environmental Cost

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  From 1999 to 2017 the Landmine Monitor recorded over 120,000 casualties from mines, IEDs and explosive remnants of war, and estimates another 1,000 each year go unrecorded. In 2017 alone at least 2,793 people were killed and 4,431 injured. Civilians made up 87 percent of casualties and children under 18 made up 47 percent. The heaviest tolls fell on Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine. Since 1989 nearly 44,000 Afghan civilians have been killed or injured by mines and explosive remnants, around 110 people a month.

  The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, launched in 1992, pushed for prohibition and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 along with its leader, Jody Williams. Their work produced the Ottawa Treaty, which came into force on the 1st of March 1999 through the leadership of Canada, Norway, South Africa and Mozambique. It covers anti-personnel mines, not anti-tank mines or command-operated Claymores, and requires stockpiles destroyed within four years. The United States declined to sign because the treaty offered no exception for the Korean Demilitarized Zone.

  Land degradation from mines splits into access denial, loss of biodiversity, micro-relief disruption, chemical change and lost productivity, according to a study by Asmeret Asefaw Berhe. Yet denial of access has sometimes helped nature. Formerly arable land in Nicaragua returned to forest, and on the Falkland Islands penguins too light to trigger the mines have bred safely in old minefields. A 2025 study in Econometrica found that clearing mines in Mozambique brought substantial economic gains, above all where the mines had blocked roads and railroads.