Ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention was the most recent attempt to pacify the world with parchment. Critics say the CWC illustrates the paradox of arms control: arms agreements are impossible until they are unimportant. That is, where arms agreements are feasible, they are unnecessary. Critics say the CWC will protect law-abiding nations like the United States from chemical weapons attacks from other law-abiding nations, like Denmark, but not from renegades like North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya. And critics say agreements like the CWC encourage a false sense of security.
A ban on anti-personnel mines is similarly vulnerable to the criticism that American military forces might someday pay a price in blood for an agreement useful only in giving politicians and diplomats an occasion to feel virtuous. A pinch of history helps illuminate the problem.
The evolution of warfare has been driven by a dialectic: new weapons respond to new needs and create new needs. The dynamic of this dialectic has been accelerating ever since the energy of men and animals was supplanted as the most important military energy by chemically stored energy in gunpowder. Not until recently did actual fighting, as distinct from campaigning, become the most lethal facet of war. John Keegan, the military historian, says that as late as the Boer War (1899-1902) the British Army suffered more fatalities from sickness than from weapons. Then came the First World War, from which came much of the modern world, including land mines.
The carnage in that war was on a scale hitherto unknown: on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) the British lost 20,000 killed, almost as many as the deaths from wounds and disease combined in the Boer War. Generals were fighting a new weapon, the machine gun, with young men’s chests. Then a young English politician, Winston Churchill, had an idea that became the tank - mobile metal behind which infantry could advance. In November 1917, in the small battle of Cambrai, massed tanks first carried out the main thrust of an attack. They made a more spectacular gain of ground in six hours than had been seen since 1914. So the question became, what to do about tanks?
One answer was: sow their paths with armor-destroying mines. Anti-personnel mines followed, to deter soldiers sent out to remove anti-tank mines. Anti-personnel mines are easy and inexpensive to manufacture. They can be scattered by air or artillery projectiles. In conventional warfare they are useful in defending the perimeters of defensive positions, in retrograde operations and in canalizing enemy forces into the concentrated fire of killing zones.
Since the Second World War there has been a rise in unconventional warfare, often civil wars, insurgencies waged on one side by irregular forces. Such conflicts involve heavy use of mines sometimes costing as little as $3 to purchase and $300 to $1,000 per mine to remove (counting logistic and support costs). Mines also are sown widely by regular forces to deny irregular forces access to territory.
The intra-national nature of many conflicts blurs the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and the mobility of forces using helicopters often makes the very idea of a ““front’’ problematic. This encourages the promiscuous use of mines. The control, eviction or demoralization of civilian populations, as well as the disruption of resettlements, humanitarian relief efforts and commerce, are war aims facilitated by the indiscriminate use of mines. Thomas Hawkins, in a Congressional Research Service report, says 10 million to 15 million mines were sown in Angola ““to ring cities, deny civilians access to roads and despoil agricultural lands.’’ From the Balkans to Afghanistan to Indochina, an estimated 110 million mines are in the ground. They take a continuing toll on children at play, women gathering firewood, farmers in their fields and others.
What good would a ban do? Little if any, as long as mines are useful. And as long as China, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, busy merchants of mines, refuse to endorse a ban that is supposed to be finalized in Ottawa later this year. And a ban might do harm. The United States surely will not sign unless there is an exemption for the Korean peninsula, where the North’s million-man army is 30 miles - and a 57-second flight of an artillery shell - from the 15 million residents of Seoul. But even with the Korea exemption, the ban is a bad idea.
Mines remain important in U.S. military doctrine and are apt to remain so for the foreseeable future as a smaller military plans for rapid deployments to places without pre-positioned supplies. Hawkins cites the dispatch of the Seventh Marine Expeditionary Brigade to Saudi Arabia in 1990, at the beginning of Desert Shield. Research may eventually produce nonlethal technologies to perform some of the canalizing and defensive functions mines have performed. For example, there may be ways of using electronic pulses to disable tanks’ diesel engines, and high-pitched audio to cause advancing soldiers to lose control of their bowels. But for now, mines, especially those that destroy or deactivate themselves in a matter of hours or days, should remain in the military’s inventory. Yes, even such mines can be used in violation of the rules of war. But so can a rifle.
Unfortunately, mere considerations of military prudence are apt to be unavailing against the vocational interests of the arms-control clerisy, which must keep busy.
