Landmines :: Nuclear War Weapons Essays

LandminesThe affirmable use of weapons of mass destruction much(prenominal) as nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons, terrorizes us, as it force out keep up catastrophic repercussions if they were to be in the hands of terrorists. One of the reasons behind our fear is that no matter where we ar in the world can we tomorrow suffer from the use of such weapons, and are in no place completely safe, as we have seen with the catastrophe of September 11, 2001. Yet there exists many new(prenominal) weapons that can be used to harms civilians, from which we are less conscious about since they tangle witht affect us. The result of the use of landmines, for example has been horrendous in many third world countries, hurting many non-military personnel, even at a time a booking between tow nations has been resolved. They have been implanted on the battlefield of more than 70 countries in the world, and are still existence built by some of the most powerful nations such as Rus sia, China or the United States. The first known description of a pressure-activated landmine was by the German military historian Frieherr Von Flemming in 1726, but such mines were not comm besides used in warfare until the Second world War. It has been accounted that more than 300 million mines were deployed between 1939 and 1945. In the first single-valued function of the war mines were solely used as a device to restitution enemy tanks. Yet, one of the problems with Anti-Tank (AT) mines of the time was that they were easily removed and re-used by the other side, so Anti-Personnel (AP) were created to solve this problem. They were deployed around AT mines to prevent their removal. Originally, both AT and AP landmines were developed as tactical, defensive weapons. They were intended to protect troops, military bases, and central installations like power plants and water supplies. After the Second World War, with the advances in technology the landmines became an offensive weap on. Mines in the 1960s could be simply launched from an airplane, and would only activate once on the ground, thus making it possible to acquit more mines from the air than if placing them on the ground. Not only this would allow mines to be placed in a war zone in a much greater frequency, but until now, each mine that was placed was put down and mapped, in order to be able to remove it once the conflict was over.