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As U. S. troops and other NATO forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina are attempting to safely remove some of the estimated six million land mines buried throughout the battlefield, a New Mexico Tech research center is testing and evaluating new methods and devices aimed at making the momentous task of land-mine detection and removal safer, cheaper, and easier in Bosnia and the rest of the world.
The Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC) has had a "counter-mine" test facility in operation for nearly three-and-a-half years now, and with recent developments in Bosnia and other war-stricken areas around the globe, more and more private companies are seeking out the facility.
An estimated 100 million unexploded land mines left over from this century's various wars and conflicts lie scattered in 64 countries, still lethal decades after the peace treaties have been signed. Many of those mines are of the more modern "anti- personnel" variety which are designed to maim, rather than kill, and they are chillingly effective for that purpose, each day claiming the limbs and lives of about 70 people, mostly civilians, in places like Cambodia, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Bosnia.
Compounding this bleak picture is the fact that as many as five million new mines are laid each year, products of over 50 nations which produce them and sell them for as little as $3 apiece.
In contrast, it can cost anywhere between $300 and $3,000 to deactivate a single land mine.
"The conventional method used for detecting land mines out in the field is to bring out a metal detector to try and locate them," says Van Romero, director of EMRTC. "However, almost all modern anti-personnel mines used today are relatively small, from about three inches to 20 inches in diameter, and are made of plastic with very few metal parts in them, making them very hard to detect."
And that, in part, is why a half-dozen companies are currently working full tilt, field testing their innovative mine-detection methods at EMRTC's counter-mine test facility.
The proving grounds where these new technologies are being tested consist of two on-road tracks--dirt roads, really--and one off- road test track. The mine-detection business has been so good lately that EMRTC will soon develop two additional cross-country, truck-route tracks to further test new mine-detection systems.
"Our test tracks look a lot like dirt racetracks, with several lanes in each of them," explains Romero. "We get various land mines, foreign, as well as U. S.; disarm them, so that they are no longer dangerous, but still retain their basic detection characteristics; and then we bury them in predetermined spots along the test tracks, as we carefully survey and record their precise locations. . . . Different companies with different locators then come in and try to detect where these mines are buried."
Steve Welch, an EMRTC engineer whom Romero refers to as the research center's "counter-mine man," says some of the newer methods being tested to detect land mines involve cutting-edge technologies such as supersensitive ground-penetrating radar, infrared emission, thermal neutron activation, and energetic photon detection. "Some companies are even trying combinations of these various technologies," Welch adds, "and some are combining their new techniques with ordinary metal detectors to increase the sensitivity of their particular methods."
Researchers at EMRTC also are hoping to team up with geophysicists at New Mexico Tech, Romero says, to investigate the possibility of using magnetometers--instruments commonly used by geophysicists to measure magnetic intensities associated with ore bodies--to more easily detect land mines and unexploded ordnance.
One of the more promising new technologies being evaluated at EMRTC's counter-mine testing facility is a product of Sandia National Laboratories's extended research into novel, practical applications of certain types of polyurethane foam.
The foam material is being tested not as a mine-detection device, but as something that can be used on beaches or other battlefields as a sort of "cushion" to keep mines from exploding as ground troops or vehicles move over them, or in the event that the mines do detonate, as a pressure-wave "absorber" which will shield troops from the destructive effects of the explosion.
A patent to use Sandia's foam technology for such military applications is pending.
"The foam, which is similar to insulating foam that's commonly sold in spray cans at hardware stores, could probably be adapted to spray over and cover any obstacles military vehicles will encounter out in the battlefield and the surf zone, including tank trenches," Welch maintains.
Tests conducted at EMRTC have shown that the foam material does withstand prolonged traffic from both tracked and rubber-tired military vehicles, Welch says, and more tests will soon be done to find out if a foam-covered road can hold up under a barrage of small-arms fire and small explosions.
"Computer models indicate that the foam will be able to safely absorb the pressure wave from most exploding land mines," Welch observes.
Various international efforts by the United Nations and other organizations currently are underway to restrict the use of and control the future spread of land mines.
On the home front, the U.S. House and Senate introduced pending legislation last year which would ban the use of anti-personnel land mines by American forces; and U.S. delegates to the United Nations sponsored an adopted resolution calling for a moratorium on the export of land mines.
Last year, mine-clearing operations around the world immobilized 120,000 devices; however, in the same period, about two and a half million land mines were manufactured.
In Croatia alone, mine clearance costs are projected at $400 million over the next nine years. In Bosnia, it's estimated that physical rehabilitation of land-mine victims, a third of them children, will cost more than $27 million.
But even those immense costs don't compare to the daunting task of safely neutralizing those 100 million land mines already strewn about the world.
Added to that are the 5 million or so new mines that are put into the ground each year.
Even if the laying of land mines were to immediately grind to a halt today, the United Nations estimates that, with conventional methods now being used, it would take over 1,000 years, at the cost of nearly $33 billion, to safely clear out the world's mine fields.
For more information about land mines, see the September 1997 article, For Insight into Finding Land Mines, Scientists Have Gone to the Dogs, in the Christian Science Monitor.
-NMT-
George Zamora
Public Information Office
New Mexico Tech
pio@nmt.edu
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