In Defense Of Land Mines

By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, 12 September 1997

Last week saw an international event even more surreal, if you can believe it, than the global convulsion over Diana: the convening of the Oslo Conference on an International Total Ban on Anti-Personnel Land Mines (ironically enough, Diana’s latest and last cause).

The Oslo Conference is a convocation of do-gooders so enthralled with their own goodness that they have managed to overlook the fact that (1) some of the largest producers of land mines — Russia, China, India, North Korea and Iraq — are not participating, and (2) a ban is in any case unverifiable, even among those participating, most of whom don’t use land mines anyway.

In an act of faith and devotion even more touching than that shown Diana, the abolitionists are so mesmerized by the talismanic power of parchment that they believe that by merely signing such a declaration — as they undoubtedly will in Ottawa later this year — they will shame and move the Great Powers of the world to forgo an important element of their own national security and turn claymores into compost.

The Clinton administration, impelled by its own instinctive parchment-worship but restrained by Joint Chiefs responsible for the lives of U.S. soldiers currently shielded by mines, has, as usual, equivocated. It is now in Oslo negotiating — surprise! — a compromise with the abolitionists. Things are not going well.

The abolitionists, of course, have a real concern: civilians who accidentally walk into mine fields, sometimes long after a conflict has ended. Hence the heart-wrenching pictures of children wounded by mines in places such as Angola, Bosnia and Vietnam.

But what would their treaty do? There are two kinds of land mines. The first kind are “smart” mines. The United States uses these almost exclusively. Unlike the old, dumb kind, which remain active in the ground forever, these are short-duration, self-destructing and unbelievably reliable (99.996 percent — that’s .004 less reliable than God). Yet the Oslo conferees would ban them completely.

Why? Banning these devices will have no effect on civilian casualties. In 1995 and 1996 not a single civilian anywhere on earth was injured by a smart U.S. land mine. But it will have a serious effect on the safety of U.S. soldiers in the field.

As noted in a letter to the president signed by 24 retired four-star generals, a ban would gratuitously deprive U.S. troops of an important defensive weapon. Why, even special forces — commandos trying to blow up, say, a biological weapons factory in some rogue nation — would be prohibited from using small smart mines to protect them from and alert them to enemy attack.

What about the old-style land mines? We do not generally use them. We do not even manufacture them anymore. But they are extremely important for us in one place, Korea, the most dangerous spot on the globe. Thousands are strewn across the demilitarized zone to deter the world’s most heavily fortified, most aggressive and most irrational regime.

No one lives in the DMZ. The only people who are going to get blown up treading on an American mine are North Korean infiltrators or North Korean battalions headed south to kill our soldiers.

The United States has insisted that it must have an exception for Korea. Naturally, our delegation has been mercilessly pummeled for this insistence. No exceptions, say the abolitionists — if the United States asks for an exception, so will others.

Indeed they will — and for good reason. Take Finland, for example. A nation twice invaded by Russia across an exposed 800-mile border is not about to give up one of the most important means of deterring and forestalling invasion.

Attacked for his atavistic insistence on retaining the means to defend his country, the Finnish prime minister was tart: “I heard somebody ask, ‘Do other Nordic countries want Finland to be their land mine?’ It is very convenient.”

Exactly. For countries surrounded by friends, sheltered by allies (i.e., us) and facing no serious possibility of war (Sweden, lying to Finland’s west, is hardly going to be invaded by its neighbors), a land mine ban is completely costless — and a lovely opportunity for moral display.

For serious countries facing serious risks, however, a land mine ban could be a fatal luxury. The United States (in Korea) has a front line. It needs land mines. Finland has a front line. It needs land mines.

It is the safe and the parasitic — those countries living comfortably behind the protection of others who act as their shield, their land mine — who do not need land mines. It is they who are leading the charge against those, like the Americans and the Finns, who must calculate how many of their soldiers will die on the altar of yet another disarmament delusion.