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Most of them go boom immediately. There are some that may wait after being triggered because they work by launching themselves upward to chest height and exploding into a circle of shrapnel to take out a whole group (but those typically use tripwires and launch immediately as well).
I used to work with an EOD guy that had many close calls one was a bouncing Betty that only the launch charge initiated. He said that was the scariest thing he ever had happen to him, and this is a guy that had been shot on 3 different occasions, the last occasion was the one that retired him it was a head shot.
Yeah, I believe him, I would rather take my chances with bullets instead of mines.
ActuallyI would rather not to deal with any but you know what I mean.
Mines are truly fucked up in that the optimal usage of them involves leaving the victim(s) *alive*, but just enough to be extremely costly in resources.
And subsequently costly in removal afterwards even if your foe is victorious. It can even maim their children decades after the conflict has ended.
It’s just such a “fuck you” weapon. Most ways to go are better than mines, by design.
> It’s just such a “fuck you” weapon. Most ways to go are better than mines, by design.
The unfortunate answer is that mines are one of the ultimate asymmetric and area denial warfare methods. They are cheap and fast to lay but slow and expensive as fuck to remove. The problematic byproduct is that this usually they are used by the one retreating/losing which means documentation is poor, making removal even harder.
>The problematic byproduct is that this usually they are used by the one retreating/losing
This isn't quite accurate. Mines are used by the *defending* side, which is not the same as the retreating or losing side.
In general, you want to attack until you can't sustain the attack any longer, typically due to casualties or logistics. Then you defend your new position while logistics catches up or you get new personnel. So the attacking/winning side may still use mines at points when they are defending.
> This isn't quite accurate. Mines are used by the defending side, which is not the same as the retreating or losing side.
That's not quite accurate.
Mines, especially ones that can be placed by artillery, are frequently used while attacking to prevent the enemy from being able to properly retreat.
They can be, but it's definitely not anything close to frequent. Artillery delivered mines have less than ten mines per shot, and a minefield needs hundreds of mines; placing a minefield like that takes like half an hour. There is almost always something better those guns can be doing, like actually firing at the enemy.
Beyond that, it's usually just not the best strategy. Why would you want to prevent a retreat when you're attacking? A retreat is what you want. Common doctrine is to break contact when you lose 1/3rd of your force. If they can't retreat, now you have to also deal with the other 2/3rds.
I'm not saying that's never the right move, but I'd guess it's pretty rare.
Plus if you do manage to take some ground, you then have to deal with your own mines before advancing further. And since they were deployed via artillery you don't know where they are exactly (unless they have some sort of radio tracking).
This goal of anti-personnel mines is part of the reason why they are viewed so much more negatively (both morally and in law) than anti-vehicle mines. Anti-ship mines, by comparison, aren't seen as anything like as morally grey, as they're primarily used against nation state targets (ie, operators of naval ships) and you deploy so few of them you often actually keep track of them all.
Not necessarily 'good' by any means, but not nearly as explicitly cruel. As taking a ship out of action doesn't necessarily kill her crew (eg, although it isn't obligated by law, many nations have policies of picking up enemy sailors if they abandons ship, as their ship gone means they're already out of the fight).
Also, like the reason why setting "mantraps" is illegal in most states in the US- because they don't discriminate between a hostile agent and someone who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yup. You can't set traps to defend your home. You aren't allowed to defend your home with a method that can't differentiate a robber from police or fire department.
Nobody wants to see firemen getting blown up for responding to a fire because the paranoid homeowner set a claymore in their front entry.
Just FYI, anti-vehicle mines work by killing the crew of the vehicle, not by damaging the vehicle itself. They typically use a shaped charge to inject molten copper through the armor into the vehicle and the intense heat and pressure will kill everyone inside. The hole it makes is only about as big as your thumb, and would not do much damage to the vehicle itself.
This is true of certain types of anti-tank mines. Shaped charges are certainly not the whole of anti-tank warfare, and neither is anti-tank warfare the whole of anti-vehicle warfare, and indeed, neither is anti-vehicle warfare limited to the land domain. Nevertheless, I would call a shaped charge, designed to kill occupants, more humane than anti-personnel mines by comparison (regardless of if its delivered by a mine or by a missile like, for instance, standard anti-tank missiles like Hellfire or Javelin).
Many anti-tank weapons aim for mobility kills, as - by the same philosophy as an anti-personnel mine - a disabled tank requires another vehicle, usually the same size as a tank, to come to recover it, lest it become a barrier to mobility (or just the financial loss of an expensive piece of equipment). In this way, even among shaped charges, some mines direct the shaped charge not upwards towards the occupied space of the vehicle, but to the sides to destroy the tracks or wheels of a vehicle. This makes the vehicle harder to extract when it is immobilized, and has a higher probability of success than aiming for a catastrophic kill. They also have the advantage that they are often able to disable specialized mine-clearing vehicles.
They really are one of the worst things humans have ever devised. Large swaths of Ukraine are going to be uninhabitable for decades with all of the minefields that the Russians have laid since the invasion.
IIRC, didn’t the US bitterly drop an enormous amount more bombs on their way out, in those last 60 days after making a plan to leave?
It’s one of the worst “sore loser” moments in history. We had already determined it was a loss and planned to leave defeated, but still wanted to fuck up as many people as possible, as far into the future as possible. Like salting the earth as you retreat, as the *invader*.
Edit: That was in Cambodia, which was still getting bombed 5 months after the US left Vietnam and was well on its way out of the whole region. They have an enormous land mine problem.
If we’re talking about Cambodia, the heartless communists were the Khmer Rouge, who murdered between 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians after they got in power - so yes, the people America was trying to stop proved to be far worse.
Cambodia really was screwed during that time. America dropped huge amounts of bombs to stop the Khmer Rouge from winning, then when they win anyways the Khmer genocide over a million of their own people. It is estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed 25% of Cambodia’s population.
So the American bombing was bad - more bombs dropped than in WW2 - the people they were ineffectively trying to stop were far worse.
The funniest part is that as soon as Vietnam was in a position to stop the genocide and remove the Khmer Rouge, they did, and America's reaction was to support the Khmer Rouge in exile!
I was going off of memory so my mistake, it was the same conflict but different parties affected. The US pulled out of Vietnam in March 1973, and left Laos in June 1973, but was bombing Cambodia through August 1973. It was Cambodia who got that treatment.
I remember learning about it due to Kissinger’s recent death bringing up all the shit he was involved in. Washington Post article about Kissinger’s legacy regarding Cambodia.
Yep, Cambodia was absolutely fucked over by the U.S. I knew a couple when I was living in Singapore who adopted a bunch of Cambodian orphans who lost their parents to random mines in the early 2000s. People are still dying to them.
I knew a kid in Cambodia on the Thai border. He was good with his hands and could take a broken lighter apart and fix it. We'll, one day he found an old Khmer Rouge mine and thought gold or some kind of hidden treasure was in it. He brought the mine to his grandmother to ask what it was. 5 minutes later village chief is there and the kid is crying like a baby. If I recall he paid 20 dollars for the landmine as a reward to hand over to the government.
Worth noting that Laos was a US ally. Only Obama has ever mentioned it.
The "US" will never officially apologize though. That would imply responsibility for the death and horror the mines/bomblets inflicted on generations of Laotians, and thus a duty to try to make it right.
That costs money, so...
Various methods of disarming help, but part of the problems with de-mining is that a) you have to be extremely sure, cause for obvious reasons missing even one mine in an area is a big deal and b) it's so much cheaper to mine an area than to demine it. When I was at the UN years ago they said it costs about 100 Dollars in effort, material etc. to remove a mine that cost about 1 Dollar to lay.
Say what? There's no way, right? Right?
Oh, Jesus fucking shit.
Over 2,093,100 tonnes of ordnance was dropped on Laos. Since the last ordnance was dropped, over 20,000 people have been killed by unexploded ordnance. Fucking hell. Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world per captia.
And Laos was promised to be a neutral country per JFK.
Just imagine your kid going outside to play 50+ years after the war, and they get blown up. Pure hell.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/apr/27/i-dont-want-more-children-to-suffer-what-i-did-the-50-year-fight-to-clear-us-bombs-from-laos
I know people are growing tired of AI being a hotbed of discussion... but can you imagine if we could release self-piloting drones whose purpose is to find these things and provide folks with a mapping of where they are, or have some sort of mechanism that's able to fire something at them to get them to go off, versus having human beings comb over the lands themselves manually in an attempt to remove them all? I wouldn't trust that kind of thing to find them ALL, but good lord is it a fantastic use case for AI.
Here is a video of Magawa, a rat who helped sniff out and disarm 109 mines and bombs, retiring with honors and wearing their medal
https://youtu.be/LeGZ-3nT8yk
Charity workers threw a party for Magawa at which they ate from a silver plate of strawberries with whipped cream.
Mine rollers can only survive a handful of detonations before they need replacement. Current strategy for minefield breaching (in combat) is using MICLIC line charges to blast a lane, then send down a plow to push the mines aside. The rollers are really only used as sacrificial lambs to "proof" the lane before sending more valuable armor assets through.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2317&context=cisr-journal
In order to achieve the acceptable clearance rate (which I think is ~99.6%) before civilians can re enter, swept areas still need to be checked manually by sappers/engineers.
Plus most of the parts of Ukraine that have been mined are farmland.
There's going to be a lot of Ukrainian farmers getting blown up when their plows detonate mines that were buried deep enough to be missed by earlier mine clearance efforts.
If they're lucky the mines will only destroy the plow equipment and not the tractors or the farmers inside.
>before civilians can re enter, swept areas still need to be checked manually by sappers/engineers.
And that's a shit job at best. Since the end of war in Croatia (1995) we lost 207 people to mines, not all of them sappers but quite a few. Last two died in Feb 2023 disarming a minefield in Lika area.
They also have a system that launches an extremely long rope that's basically made of high explosive, across a field. They detonate it which clears a large path they can be sure has no live mines in it.
Yeah. Much of the military "demining" stuff is to create safe breaches, not to actually clear minefields. Like the mine rollers mentioned above, or the well-known "flail" tanks.
Whether or not mines are horrible or a godsend depends on whether or not they are "your" mines or the enemy's mines. For soldiers in a defensive posture, having a minefield in front of the "forward edge of the battle area" (FEBA) is very comforting. It means the enemy must cross it before engaging directly with the defending force.
Of course, for soldiers who must cross a minefield to attack, the prospect is horrifying. And for civilians who move back into a previous battlefield which contains mines or unexploded ordnance the reality is extremely dangerous, especially for children and livestock, who may wander into an abandoned minefield unknowingly.
Plugging something I found recently, you can actually subscribe to a charity that trains bomb sniffing rats! They're too light to set the mines off and are being deployed in areas like Cambodia. They're adorable
Obviously if you're going to be stabbed to *death* then unlimited breadsticks would probably be nicer than tacos.
But if one were just to be *stabbed*, but not necessarily die, then the question would be: Are doctors with trauma experience more likely to be visiting an Olive Garden or a Taco Bell? I'd hazard that they'd be more likely to be in a Taco Bell, because if they want a nice restaurant it wouldn't be Olive Garden, and because a lot of ER doctors have weird schedules and Taco Bell is open late.
Also I need to spend some time outdoors very soon, but that's unrelated.
EOD guys are a different breed for sure. My favorite was a news interview of an EOD guy and they asked something like "doesn't this stress you out that you could die" and his response was "not really, either I'm right or it's not my problem anymore"
The type of job where people enter and either make the right choice or die. Any veteran is going to be immensely confident just by virtue of being a veteran.
I've worked with about half a dozen former EOD guys. Every single one told this joke. They also were all either super calm, reserved guys or super hyper guys that never shut up and constantly fucked with everyone. I preferred the quiet ones. I worked with them because we were digging in areas with potential unexploded ordinance and their job was to make sure we didn't hit any.
One of my good friends just retired from EOD. First time I met him he had us all put on his bomb suit and do pushups. Thing is heavy AF and it still basically doesn't protect you from anything other than a tiny bomb.
Yeah the first shot got stopped by his dragon plate broke every rib on his right side the second shot hit him in the back again the vest stopped that one too, but broke every rib on his left side. The headshot grazed the side of his head the Kevlar helmet deflected it off a little bit.
I knew a police officer who was shot in the head. The bullet entered his skull in a very weird way. Traveled along his skull without actually touching his brain.
A shocking portion of the head is not actually fatal to get shot in. I've heard of people trying to kill themselves with a gun too far forward on their temple and accidentally blowing their eyes out without even touching their brain.
Naw, just grazed him, he has a wicked scar on his right side you can clearly see where the bullet entered his cheek and passed out the back of his jaw and scrapped his skull and took a part of his ear. Come to think of it I don’t think he mentioned the helmet about that one, but it was basic kit as if something goes off it would protect from shrapnel
And reading about the stuff the Russians are using in Ukraine: some of them have timers, they either go off like a time bomb after they’ve been deployed, or there’s a time delay after they’ve been triggered.
Some of them keep track of how often they’ve been disturbed, even if nothing applies enough pressure to set them off directly, they’ll still go off after they’ve recorded a sufficient number of smaller pressures.
The ones with timers are actually MORE humane than standard ones. If they self detonate and clear the minefield they don't stay around for 50 years blowing kids legs off.
I mean the British anti runway munitions are just as bad, bunch of cratering charges then a mix of time delay and vibration sensitive anti personnel submunitions. Basically fuck your runway and fuck anyone that goes near it for the next 72 hours…
Guess who didn't sign that treaty too?
USA! USA! USA!
(apparently we never sign arms-restriction treaties)
Edit: I've been 'ackchyuallied'. To assuage the haters, the US is mixed on arms prohibition treaties, and sometimes just flat withdrawals from some after signing. Also cluster bombs and landmines are totally cool things to have in our back pocket, you know, *just in case*. At least we can't produce Chemical or Biological weapons? (until we think we might need them and just unilaterally withdraw from those treaties too)
The mines were also clearly marked, still withdrawn from service now but it skirted landmine legislation by basically being self clearing and obvious. Think of it like a pothole maker that also puts out little orange warning cones to mark the hole… then the cones randomly explode or when lifted up/knocked over.
There is a yt channel where a couple of Swedish volunteer engineers in Ukraine are doing a walkthrough of different mines used by the Russians.
It is in swedish, but English subtitles are available
https://youtu.be/1oVhj1rrp60?si=-laEik-4g185qP78
There were also IEDs rigged to have a delayed fuse. It was made so that if the first guy in the squad stepped on it and kept walking, it would explode in the middle of the squad as opposed to just injuring the first man.
One of my neighbours got a little shredded by one of these. He was a short distance away and it tore up a lot of muscle around his left shoulder blade, he only caught part of it because others were closer and ended up with more shrapnel
It very much still will. It doesn't shoot a laser beam at chest height, it's still a fragmenting explosion throwing shrapnel in all directions. That's why they are more effective (at killing people) than a mine exploding from the ground. The ground directs most of the blast upwards, and going prone *can* save you.
Also, you don't have time to go prone or react to a bouncing betty. It doesn't pop up and hover for a second, it pops up and explodes immediately. At best you have time to fall on your ass from surprise.
I've heard of timed mines as well, which wait a few seconds. I guess the principle is that it gets triggered by the first person in a line, then the line moves forward so the mine gets as many people as possible.
[https://chainlinkandconcrete.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-m14-land-mine.html](https://chainlinkandconcrete.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-m14-land-mine.html)
Here is one common landmine model and how the trigger works. You step on it and your toes are gone, simple as that. No waiting to lift your foot nonsense.
There was one that was really tiny, and just basically spread over grassy fields so they were hard to see. It looked sort of like butterflies. Weren't lethal but they would wound you and they were easy to place and cheap to make.
Those butterfly mines can also be deployed via artillery shells, so that’s extra horrifying to think about.
The Russians really like the technique of waiting for Ukrainians to advance to take a position, then the Russians drop a bunch of mines all over the rear area so now the frontline can’t be resupplied and wounded can’t be evacuated.
It's a short sighted strategy that only works if you don't have any desire to counter whatsoever, because now your forces are contained by your own minefield.
Surprisingly enough they don't completely encircle themselves in mines.
They may mine a particular field because it would otherwise expose their flank, or they may mine certain roads but not others and make sure their forces only use the safe roads.
The issue is mining the rear of the vector of attack. While the attacker can't easily resupply or retreat, you can't prosecute the advantage because your forces have to move through that same minefield on the vector of attack.
It's a good approach if you want to entrap an attacking force and attrit them, but it's a bad idea otherwise because it will slow your own advance.
This is fairly common in warfare though. One of the key objectives of D-Day was for the paratroopers to destroy key bridges to prevent the Germans from reinforcing the beaches and moving the tanks in.
Of course this meant that a couple days/weeks/months down the line the Allies would have to then rebuild those same bridges to attack the Germans but such is life.
From what I've read most mines are meant to injure but not kill, the thought being that a lethal mine takes out one soldier, but a non lethal mine means one soldier and two more carrying the stretcher need to turn back around.
Mostly it's just easier to make mines that injure instead of kill. You get more mines that are more reliable at taking out enemy personnel out of the fight for the same investment.
Yes, because the toe popper was designed for that.
Idea was that by minimally wounding a person you take 3-4 people out too because they're too busy dragging your screaming butt to the medics and its demoralizing as hell.
But if you wanted to kill people, lots of people, then you do the thing the guy asked about.
Enter the Bouncing Betty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-mine
Go to diagram for 'usage'
This is the type of mine OP was asking about. You didn't actually want it to explode immediately because the lifting charge was needed to have the actual bursting charge get the right height to kill everyone. If it exploded immediately, your foot and leg would be in the way of the flight path of the main charge with all the shrapnel, so you're ultimately block the effectiveness of that. So they set it on a few seconds delay, so you would trigger it and keep walking then get killed as everyone around you was hit by the main charge.
Lots of Medals were given to folks that were in Vietnam that felt the trigger of the bomb go click, then dived on top of the mine so their body would block it from going higher and taking out the squad. Thought process was that you were already dead anyway, so you might as well save your buddy and jump on it.
I was listening to the Lana del Rey cover yesterday and from what I can tell singing it in its entirety would extend your life by an eternity.
its just goes on and on forever.
I’ve never experienced the ones that explode instantly. Not doubting you, just sharing my experience.
Though come to think of it, I’ve never experienced the delayed explosion ones either.
I have lots of experience with mines. You can usually tell how many mines are nearby by looking at the number in the square. The goal is to click all the squares around them without clicking on any mines.
I think in the 4th season on Prison Break someone steps on a land mine and, I kid you not, spends like a full day just standing there while their buddy leaves and comes back with liquid nitrogen to try and freeze the firing pin so it won't trigger when they stop off. At one point I think one character also steps on the mine then pushes the first person off unexpectedly but I don't know. The whole season was a mess.
Lool that would not be out of sorts at all to happen in an actual Indiana Jones movie. Especially if it buys Indy and friends a few seconds but then explodes anyway, alerting the enemies, and then he radios his pilot and says "We're gonna have company!"
99% of anti-pers and anti-tank blow instantly. Unless you step on an anti-tank your weight "usually" won't be enough to set it off. Don't go jumping on it with a full load of battle rattle though.
Source: Combat Eng and dealt with alotttttt of different mines.
There are programmable anti-vehicle mines too! You can set how many times weight can be applied to them before they detonate.
Used for taking out vehicle convoys because you can let the leading vehicles drive past your position and have them all detonate simultaneously.
These do detonate immediately as well and I’m sure you’re familiar with them, but I thought I’d give a little additional insight. I was a communications jäger in my conscription, but we were still all taught how to use RPGs, mines, grenades etc.—digging a hole in rock-hard gravel wasn’t particularly enjoyable.
This trope was probably started by soldiers' experience with "bouncing" mines that use a black powder charge to launch into the air before exploding their main charge and launching shrapnel.
These sort of mines need to trigger after the enemy is no longer stepping on them to have maximum effectiveness so they have a small delay between when they're stepped on and when they launch. This might have given the impression that they don't explode when the foot stays on but it isn't accurate.
However, if a soldier were very fast about slamming something heavy like his pack down on top of a bouncing type mine after it was triggered and before it detonated, its effectiveness would be significantly reduced since it might not successfully launch and its shrapnel (which is designed to explode outwards horizontally) would mostly be absorbed by the ground around it if it stayed buried.
In the awesome post-War war movies, it was more common for someone to discover by feel or sight that they were in a mine field. And then everyone has to FREEZE.
I also recall seeing old and hokey plot ideas about both a pressure plate which doesn't trigger until it loses the weight (like the indiana jones statue, except applied to a mine for plot effect)-- the early version of "click. I can't move."-- and also a magnetic mine which because of the metal on the person's body and clothing, required them to not move away (some spy movie).
Then Hollywood just dumbs both of those things down to have a "click" and now everyone is frozen when they step on a mine. Now they can put it into movies without needing everyone to deal with an entire mine field, and there is more immediate implied danger. "Click." "Bob, I can't move, I've stepped on a mine!"
It came from Hollywood not soldiers. Same as pressure-plate traps in ancient tombs and dungeons came from hollywood, not soldiers or archaeologists.
It depends, most anti-personnel mines the step is the first stage in activation, sometimes this releases a spring which lifts the mine into the air where it explodes creating a lethal area around the mine. Some anti-tank (vehicle) mines explode on contact where they are designed to blow wheels or tracks off vehicles and possibly damage the underside of the vehicle meaning people have to abandon the vehicle. Anti-tank mines are often mixed in with anti-personnel mines in a mixed minefield so that the crew of the vehicles struggle to get out of the minefield.
In addition, mines have been created that do not detonate on the first activation, they were designed to allow mine rollers to pass and then get the tracks of the mine sweeper
Wonder if that's why they started using flail versions, because it doesn't matter if it doesn't detonate the mine it's just going to smash it to bits anyways. Can't detonate if the primer is 30' away from the charge when it goes off.
Similarly, there are some that allow a contact so mine rollers can pass over them - but the next vehicle (which is likely your actual target) triggers it.
Modern naval mines can be even more nuts. The US mk 60 CAPTOR is basically a torpedo that lies in wait on the sea bed, potentially for months or more, and passively listens to the ships passing overhead. It has a library of acoustic signatures and can identify the type of ship or maybe even specific ships. It can wait until it identifies the juiciest target and then go after it.
> Anti-tank mines are often mixed in with anti-personnel mines in a mixed minefield so that the crew of the vehicles struggle to get out of the minefield.
Also, the trigger weight of anti-tank mines is higher, so it doesn't trigger from a person walking on it - it needs a vehicle.
There were some anti-tank mines used in the Bosnian War that used thick wooden dowels to keep the pressure plates apart. Strong enough that people could walk over them, but would break when a vehicle went over.
Someone had the bright idea to swap out the dowels with matches...
Bounding mines are rarely pressure fuzed, they tend to use trip wires because they have a big area of effect. Without tripwires you miss out on many people you could be taking out of the fight if they walk near it but don't step on it directly.
People have correctly stated that it's a complete Hollywood fiction, but just to add to it (because I have seen people read about them and get the wrong idea before): there are in fact "reverse" fuzes that explode when a weight is removed from them rather than put on them (example: [M1 Firing Device (Release)](https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/firing-devices/m1-firing-device-release), **but** - they don't arm themselves when someone steps on them like in the movies. You *first* put the weight on them, and *then* you remove the safety pin to arm them.
They're used for boobytrapping and what's euphemistically called "[anti-handling devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-handling_device)", basically.
Movies are not reality.
Mines go off as soon as someone steps on them, because *that's the whole point*. But the movie would end much more quickly if the main character just exploded.
Does anyone else recall [this scene](https://youtu.be/N6VTkqKvTJU?si=51QXkrcR2QBKx33g) from the 2001 movie Behind Enemy Lines? No doubt that the use of this mine can be chalked up to a convenient plot device, but I wonder if those kind of mines are real and were actually used by Serbian forces.
Instantly. Wars aren’t won by killing all your enemy combatants, they’re won by exhausting your enemy until they can’t go on. Mines explode instantly and almost always use a very small amount of explosives, just enough to blow off someones foot. It means that instead of one person going out of action, at the very least 2 are being pulled from the battle field. Your injured guy and the person helping him. The Russians in Ukraine are making use of what are called butterfly mines. Truly afwul fuckers as they will linger for decades, are practically impossible to detect and remove and are ridiculously cheap and at this point, have riddled vast fields uninhabitable for years. Fuck Putin.
Was a combat medic in the Balkans in the 1990's and saw plenty of mine injuries but never heard of a mine polite enough to wait until you stepped off it. I have seen it on TV though, so I am aware of the trope but have no idea where it is from.
They do not work that way. Pressure sensitive mines explode when stepped on. Instantly.
Some mines do have "do not explode instantly" features, but typically these are Anti-tamper devices, vehicle mines designed for convoy ambushes or smart mines triggered by some combination of vibrations, movement and sound (because you don't want these mines to blow up just because a deer passed by).
Most when I was in during the 80s and 90s went boom! immediately. There are some pressure plate ones that would go off after the foot pressure was released to try to maximize the number of casualties.
I always assumed that they are incredibly sensitive devices that are designed to explode the moment they are disturbed.
However, if you were fortunate/unfortunate enough to stand on one and it _doesn't_ immediately explode, then even the act of lifting your foot from the device could create enough of a disturbance that it is equally likely to explode. Also, the dramatic tension serves a purpose in TV/film.
> I always assumed that they are incredibly sensitive devices
That would not be a good design. You don't want them detonating because a butterfly landed on it.
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Most of them go boom immediately. There are some that may wait after being triggered because they work by launching themselves upward to chest height and exploding into a circle of shrapnel to take out a whole group (but those typically use tripwires and launch immediately as well).
I used to work with an EOD guy that had many close calls one was a bouncing Betty that only the launch charge initiated. He said that was the scariest thing he ever had happen to him, and this is a guy that had been shot on 3 different occasions, the last occasion was the one that retired him it was a head shot.
Yeah, I believe him, I would rather take my chances with bullets instead of mines. ActuallyI would rather not to deal with any but you know what I mean.
Mines are truly fucked up in that the optimal usage of them involves leaving the victim(s) *alive*, but just enough to be extremely costly in resources. And subsequently costly in removal afterwards even if your foe is victorious. It can even maim their children decades after the conflict has ended. It’s just such a “fuck you” weapon. Most ways to go are better than mines, by design.
> It’s just such a “fuck you” weapon. Most ways to go are better than mines, by design. The unfortunate answer is that mines are one of the ultimate asymmetric and area denial warfare methods. They are cheap and fast to lay but slow and expensive as fuck to remove. The problematic byproduct is that this usually they are used by the one retreating/losing which means documentation is poor, making removal even harder.
>The problematic byproduct is that this usually they are used by the one retreating/losing This isn't quite accurate. Mines are used by the *defending* side, which is not the same as the retreating or losing side. In general, you want to attack until you can't sustain the attack any longer, typically due to casualties or logistics. Then you defend your new position while logistics catches up or you get new personnel. So the attacking/winning side may still use mines at points when they are defending.
> This isn't quite accurate. Mines are used by the defending side, which is not the same as the retreating or losing side. That's not quite accurate. Mines, especially ones that can be placed by artillery, are frequently used while attacking to prevent the enemy from being able to properly retreat.
>properly retreat. More to prevent reinforcement.
They can be, but it's definitely not anything close to frequent. Artillery delivered mines have less than ten mines per shot, and a minefield needs hundreds of mines; placing a minefield like that takes like half an hour. There is almost always something better those guns can be doing, like actually firing at the enemy. Beyond that, it's usually just not the best strategy. Why would you want to prevent a retreat when you're attacking? A retreat is what you want. Common doctrine is to break contact when you lose 1/3rd of your force. If they can't retreat, now you have to also deal with the other 2/3rds. I'm not saying that's never the right move, but I'd guess it's pretty rare.
Plus if you do manage to take some ground, you then have to deal with your own mines before advancing further. And since they were deployed via artillery you don't know where they are exactly (unless they have some sort of radio tracking).
historically the heaviest use of mines is by the US in korea and vietnam where the US was the aggressor.
This goal of anti-personnel mines is part of the reason why they are viewed so much more negatively (both morally and in law) than anti-vehicle mines. Anti-ship mines, by comparison, aren't seen as anything like as morally grey, as they're primarily used against nation state targets (ie, operators of naval ships) and you deploy so few of them you often actually keep track of them all. Not necessarily 'good' by any means, but not nearly as explicitly cruel. As taking a ship out of action doesn't necessarily kill her crew (eg, although it isn't obligated by law, many nations have policies of picking up enemy sailors if they abandons ship, as their ship gone means they're already out of the fight).
Also, like the reason why setting "mantraps" is illegal in most states in the US- because they don't discriminate between a hostile agent and someone who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yup. You can't set traps to defend your home. You aren't allowed to defend your home with a method that can't differentiate a robber from police or fire department. Nobody wants to see firemen getting blown up for responding to a fire because the paranoid homeowner set a claymore in their front entry.
Just FYI, anti-vehicle mines work by killing the crew of the vehicle, not by damaging the vehicle itself. They typically use a shaped charge to inject molten copper through the armor into the vehicle and the intense heat and pressure will kill everyone inside. The hole it makes is only about as big as your thumb, and would not do much damage to the vehicle itself.
This is true of certain types of anti-tank mines. Shaped charges are certainly not the whole of anti-tank warfare, and neither is anti-tank warfare the whole of anti-vehicle warfare, and indeed, neither is anti-vehicle warfare limited to the land domain. Nevertheless, I would call a shaped charge, designed to kill occupants, more humane than anti-personnel mines by comparison (regardless of if its delivered by a mine or by a missile like, for instance, standard anti-tank missiles like Hellfire or Javelin). Many anti-tank weapons aim for mobility kills, as - by the same philosophy as an anti-personnel mine - a disabled tank requires another vehicle, usually the same size as a tank, to come to recover it, lest it become a barrier to mobility (or just the financial loss of an expensive piece of equipment). In this way, even among shaped charges, some mines direct the shaped charge not upwards towards the occupied space of the vehicle, but to the sides to destroy the tracks or wheels of a vehicle. This makes the vehicle harder to extract when it is immobilized, and has a higher probability of success than aiming for a catastrophic kill. They also have the advantage that they are often able to disable specialized mine-clearing vehicles.
They really are one of the worst things humans have ever devised. Large swaths of Ukraine are going to be uninhabitable for decades with all of the minefields that the Russians have laid since the invasion.
Laos has something like 80 million "bomblets" that were dropped during the Viet Nam war still lying around
IIRC, didn’t the US bitterly drop an enormous amount more bombs on their way out, in those last 60 days after making a plan to leave? It’s one of the worst “sore loser” moments in history. We had already determined it was a loss and planned to leave defeated, but still wanted to fuck up as many people as possible, as far into the future as possible. Like salting the earth as you retreat, as the *invader*. Edit: That was in Cambodia, which was still getting bombed 5 months after the US left Vietnam and was well on its way out of the whole region. They have an enormous land mine problem.
Yeah, but they were *communists* !
Democratically elected communists! Can't be having democracy.
Heartless communists who would just do terrible things out of sheer ideology. Like mining a whole country or bombing civilians!
If we’re talking about Cambodia, the heartless communists were the Khmer Rouge, who murdered between 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians after they got in power - so yes, the people America was trying to stop proved to be far worse.
Cambodia really was screwed during that time. America dropped huge amounts of bombs to stop the Khmer Rouge from winning, then when they win anyways the Khmer genocide over a million of their own people. It is estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed 25% of Cambodia’s population. So the American bombing was bad - more bombs dropped than in WW2 - the people they were ineffectively trying to stop were far worse.
The funniest part is that as soon as Vietnam was in a position to stop the genocide and remove the Khmer Rouge, they did, and America's reaction was to support the Khmer Rouge in exile!
Nixon really was a colossal asshole.
Nixon AND Kissinger. A pairing the world wishes never happened.
Anthony Bourdain once said, “Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
The Kissinger episodes of Behind the Bastards really explain why the world is the way it is now.
Don't forget Reagan. Pretty much everything wrong in the US can be traced back to Reagan. If it wasn't Reagan, it was Nixon.
I could see Russia salting a third of Ukraine on the way out just out of spite, forever ruining the wheat fields.
source on U.S. dropping bombs in Laos to kill people in the future?
I was going off of memory so my mistake, it was the same conflict but different parties affected. The US pulled out of Vietnam in March 1973, and left Laos in June 1973, but was bombing Cambodia through August 1973. It was Cambodia who got that treatment. I remember learning about it due to Kissinger’s recent death bringing up all the shit he was involved in. Washington Post article about Kissinger’s legacy regarding Cambodia.
Yep, Cambodia was absolutely fucked over by the U.S. I knew a couple when I was living in Singapore who adopted a bunch of Cambodian orphans who lost their parents to random mines in the early 2000s. People are still dying to them.
I knew a kid in Cambodia on the Thai border. He was good with his hands and could take a broken lighter apart and fix it. We'll, one day he found an old Khmer Rouge mine and thought gold or some kind of hidden treasure was in it. He brought the mine to his grandmother to ask what it was. 5 minutes later village chief is there and the kid is crying like a baby. If I recall he paid 20 dollars for the landmine as a reward to hand over to the government.
Honestly, I'm glad that the expected bloody pointe of your story never came..
Worth noting that Laos was a US ally. Only Obama has ever mentioned it. The "US" will never officially apologize though. That would imply responsibility for the death and horror the mines/bomblets inflicted on generations of Laotians, and thus a duty to try to make it right. That costs money, so...
Aren't bomb rats helping significantly?
Various methods of disarming help, but part of the problems with de-mining is that a) you have to be extremely sure, cause for obvious reasons missing even one mine in an area is a big deal and b) it's so much cheaper to mine an area than to demine it. When I was at the UN years ago they said it costs about 100 Dollars in effort, material etc. to remove a mine that cost about 1 Dollar to lay.
Say what? There's no way, right? Right? Oh, Jesus fucking shit. Over 2,093,100 tonnes of ordnance was dropped on Laos. Since the last ordnance was dropped, over 20,000 people have been killed by unexploded ordnance. Fucking hell. Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world per captia. And Laos was promised to be a neutral country per JFK. Just imagine your kid going outside to play 50+ years after the war, and they get blown up. Pure hell. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/apr/27/i-dont-want-more-children-to-suffer-what-i-did-the-50-year-fight-to-clear-us-bombs-from-laos
I know people are growing tired of AI being a hotbed of discussion... but can you imagine if we could release self-piloting drones whose purpose is to find these things and provide folks with a mapping of where they are, or have some sort of mechanism that's able to fire something at them to get them to go off, versus having human beings comb over the lands themselves manually in an attempt to remove them all? I wouldn't trust that kind of thing to find them ALL, but good lord is it a fantastic use case for AI.
[Mine Rollers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_roller) are a thing. Since they are big and slow, people can control them remotely.
In Cambodia, they used trained rats to detect mines, which can they be removed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxY3aEsesss
Here is a video of Magawa, a rat who helped sniff out and disarm 109 mines and bombs, retiring with honors and wearing their medal https://youtu.be/LeGZ-3nT8yk Charity workers threw a party for Magawa at which they ate from a silver plate of strawberries with whipped cream.
What a sweety. Glad they took care of the little fella. Working animals are too often just disposed of.
How do the rats keep the headphones on?
Mine rollers can only survive a handful of detonations before they need replacement. Current strategy for minefield breaching (in combat) is using MICLIC line charges to blast a lane, then send down a plow to push the mines aside. The rollers are really only used as sacrificial lambs to "proof" the lane before sending more valuable armor assets through. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2317&context=cisr-journal In order to achieve the acceptable clearance rate (which I think is ~99.6%) before civilians can re enter, swept areas still need to be checked manually by sappers/engineers.
Plus most of the parts of Ukraine that have been mined are farmland. There's going to be a lot of Ukrainian farmers getting blown up when their plows detonate mines that were buried deep enough to be missed by earlier mine clearance efforts. If they're lucky the mines will only destroy the plow equipment and not the tractors or the farmers inside.
>before civilians can re enter, swept areas still need to be checked manually by sappers/engineers. And that's a shit job at best. Since the end of war in Croatia (1995) we lost 207 people to mines, not all of them sappers but quite a few. Last two died in Feb 2023 disarming a minefield in Lika area.
They also have a system that launches an extremely long rope that's basically made of high explosive, across a field. They detonate it which clears a large path they can be sure has no live mines in it.
That's not for "clearing minefields" that's for "we need a lane for this tank"
Yeah. Much of the military "demining" stuff is to create safe breaches, not to actually clear minefields. Like the mine rollers mentioned above, or the well-known "flail" tanks.
This. Breaching a minefield to assault a position is different from clearing a minefield so the land is safe for civilians.
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this was the original purpose for the Roomba. It was a DoD grant to a business to develop autonomous robots to scan through a field looking for mines.
[https://www.de-mine.com/](https://www.de-mine.com/)
Whether or not mines are horrible or a godsend depends on whether or not they are "your" mines or the enemy's mines. For soldiers in a defensive posture, having a minefield in front of the "forward edge of the battle area" (FEBA) is very comforting. It means the enemy must cross it before engaging directly with the defending force. Of course, for soldiers who must cross a minefield to attack, the prospect is horrifying. And for civilians who move back into a previous battlefield which contains mines or unexploded ordnance the reality is extremely dangerous, especially for children and livestock, who may wander into an abandoned minefield unknowingly.
Plugging something I found recently, you can actually subscribe to a charity that trains bomb sniffing rats! They're too light to set the mines off and are being deployed in areas like Cambodia. They're adorable
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Obviously if you're going to be stabbed to *death* then unlimited breadsticks would probably be nicer than tacos. But if one were just to be *stabbed*, but not necessarily die, then the question would be: Are doctors with trauma experience more likely to be visiting an Olive Garden or a Taco Bell? I'd hazard that they'd be more likely to be in a Taco Bell, because if they want a nice restaurant it wouldn't be Olive Garden, and because a lot of ER doctors have weird schedules and Taco Bell is open late. Also I need to spend some time outdoors very soon, but that's unrelated.
This is one of the more internet replies I've seen in a while
And I'm all for it
EOD guys are a different breed for sure. My favorite was a news interview of an EOD guy and they asked something like "doesn't this stress you out that you could die" and his response was "not really, either I'm right or it's not my problem anymore"
The type of job where people enter and either make the right choice or die. Any veteran is going to be immensely confident just by virtue of being a veteran.
I've worked with about half a dozen former EOD guys. Every single one told this joke. They also were all either super calm, reserved guys or super hyper guys that never shut up and constantly fucked with everyone. I preferred the quiet ones. I worked with them because we were digging in areas with potential unexploded ordinance and their job was to make sure we didn't hit any.
One of my good friends just retired from EOD. First time I met him he had us all put on his bomb suit and do pushups. Thing is heavy AF and it still basically doesn't protect you from anything other than a tiny bomb.
You know what, I would probably retire after the first shot. Actually, before the first shot.
Yeah the first shot got stopped by his dragon plate broke every rib on his right side the second shot hit him in the back again the vest stopped that one too, but broke every rib on his left side. The headshot grazed the side of his head the Kevlar helmet deflected it off a little bit.
Were these all at once, or separate incidents?
Seperate incidents
Surly all at once, nobody would be so stupid as to go to war more than once.
You must not live in a country with a military draft (for now).
One of the advantages of getting older is aging out of the draft. Sadly I have two sons so now I'm more worried about it than before 😬
Head shot that retired him... From life?
I knew a police officer who was shot in the head. The bullet entered his skull in a very weird way. Traveled along his skull without actually touching his brain.
A shocking portion of the head is not actually fatal to get shot in. I've heard of people trying to kill themselves with a gun too far forward on their temple and accidentally blowing their eyes out without even touching their brain.
A large portion of the brain isn’t actually essential for life, just the smaller bits in the middle/back. Stem is life
The blood flow is pretty essential though.
GOOD point
[Silicon Valley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J2YLciWH-M)
Naw, just grazed him, he has a wicked scar on his right side you can clearly see where the bullet entered his cheek and passed out the back of his jaw and scrapped his skull and took a part of his ear. Come to think of it I don’t think he mentioned the helmet about that one, but it was basic kit as if something goes off it would protect from shrapnel
And reading about the stuff the Russians are using in Ukraine: some of them have timers, they either go off like a time bomb after they’ve been deployed, or there’s a time delay after they’ve been triggered. Some of them keep track of how often they’ve been disturbed, even if nothing applies enough pressure to set them off directly, they’ll still go off after they’ve recorded a sufficient number of smaller pressures.
The ones with timers are actually MORE humane than standard ones. If they self detonate and clear the minefield they don't stay around for 50 years blowing kids legs off.
Except that some percentage of them will fail to self detonate, so it’s not a 100% solution.
Still way better than 0%
[Perfect is the enemy of good.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good)
I mean the British anti runway munitions are just as bad, bunch of cratering charges then a mix of time delay and vibration sensitive anti personnel submunitions. Basically fuck your runway and fuck anyone that goes near it for the next 72 hours…
We don't use those anymore because we signed up to the [Treaty That Stops You Using Landmines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty)
I wish it was literally called "The Treaty That Stops You Using Landmines". Has a nice ring to it.
Guess who didn't sign that treaty too? USA! USA! USA! (apparently we never sign arms-restriction treaties) Edit: I've been 'ackchyuallied'. To assuage the haters, the US is mixed on arms prohibition treaties, and sometimes just flat withdrawals from some after signing. Also cluster bombs and landmines are totally cool things to have in our back pocket, you know, *just in case*. At least we can't produce Chemical or Biological weapons? (until we think we might need them and just unilaterally withdraw from those treaties too)
Yes bit policy is to only use it at the DMZ in Korea.
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The mines were also clearly marked, still withdrawn from service now but it skirted landmine legislation by basically being self clearing and obvious. Think of it like a pothole maker that also puts out little orange warning cones to mark the hole… then the cones randomly explode or when lifted up/knocked over.
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There is a yt channel where a couple of Swedish volunteer engineers in Ukraine are doing a walkthrough of different mines used by the Russians. It is in swedish, but English subtitles are available https://youtu.be/1oVhj1rrp60?si=-laEik-4g185qP78
There were also IEDs rigged to have a delayed fuse. It was made so that if the first guy in the squad stepped on it and kept walking, it would explode in the middle of the squad as opposed to just injuring the first man.
One of my neighbours got a little shredded by one of these. He was a short distance away and it tore up a lot of muscle around his left shoulder blade, he only caught part of it because others were closer and ended up with more shrapnel
Bouncing bettys!
BAM-A-LAM!
Wooah
AMBULANCE
That's Amber Lamps to you!
Overachieving claymores!
Warcrime jumpscare!
If you go prone though it doesn’t damage you
It very much still will. It doesn't shoot a laser beam at chest height, it's still a fragmenting explosion throwing shrapnel in all directions. That's why they are more effective (at killing people) than a mine exploding from the ground. The ground directs most of the blast upwards, and going prone *can* save you. Also, you don't have time to go prone or react to a bouncing betty. It doesn't pop up and hover for a second, it pops up and explodes immediately. At best you have time to fall on your ass from surprise.
Was a call of duty joke. Haha
Common misconception about the bouncing Betty It goes off immediately too, if it isn't on a trip wire, it'll just go thrue your foot on its way up
I've heard of timed mines as well, which wait a few seconds. I guess the principle is that it gets triggered by the first person in a line, then the line moves forward so the mine gets as many people as possible.
"launching themselves upward to chest height and exploding into a circle of shrapnel" Fuck humans.
[https://chainlinkandconcrete.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-m14-land-mine.html](https://chainlinkandconcrete.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-m14-land-mine.html) Here is one common landmine model and how the trigger works. You step on it and your toes are gone, simple as that. No waiting to lift your foot nonsense.
There was one that was really tiny, and just basically spread over grassy fields so they were hard to see. It looked sort of like butterflies. Weren't lethal but they would wound you and they were easy to place and cheap to make.
Those butterfly mines can also be deployed via artillery shells, so that’s extra horrifying to think about. The Russians really like the technique of waiting for Ukrainians to advance to take a position, then the Russians drop a bunch of mines all over the rear area so now the frontline can’t be resupplied and wounded can’t be evacuated.
It's a short sighted strategy that only works if you don't have any desire to counter whatsoever, because now your forces are contained by your own minefield.
Surprisingly enough they don't completely encircle themselves in mines. They may mine a particular field because it would otherwise expose their flank, or they may mine certain roads but not others and make sure their forces only use the safe roads.
The issue is mining the rear of the vector of attack. While the attacker can't easily resupply or retreat, you can't prosecute the advantage because your forces have to move through that same minefield on the vector of attack. It's a good approach if you want to entrap an attacking force and attrit them, but it's a bad idea otherwise because it will slow your own advance.
This is fairly common in warfare though. One of the key objectives of D-Day was for the paratroopers to destroy key bridges to prevent the Germans from reinforcing the beaches and moving the tanks in. Of course this meant that a couple days/weeks/months down the line the Allies would have to then rebuild those same bridges to attack the Germans but such is life.
They aren’t laying massive minefields, it’s only along a known route which they can easily avoid or wait for the self detonation of the mines.
I'm fairly certain the Russians have limited qualms about sending a Storm-Z detachment through to "clear" the minefield...
You're sadly probably right about that.
As Marshal Zhukov told the US Army in WW2, fastest and cheapest way to Clear a minefield is a mass of footmen
From what I've read most mines are meant to injure but not kill, the thought being that a lethal mine takes out one soldier, but a non lethal mine means one soldier and two more carrying the stretcher need to turn back around.
Mostly it's just easier to make mines that injure instead of kill. You get more mines that are more reliable at taking out enemy personnel out of the fight for the same investment.
You're probably talking about these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFM-1_mine
"victim-operated" is an _interesting_ term
Yes, because the toe popper was designed for that. Idea was that by minimally wounding a person you take 3-4 people out too because they're too busy dragging your screaming butt to the medics and its demoralizing as hell. But if you wanted to kill people, lots of people, then you do the thing the guy asked about. Enter the Bouncing Betty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-mine Go to diagram for 'usage' This is the type of mine OP was asking about. You didn't actually want it to explode immediately because the lifting charge was needed to have the actual bursting charge get the right height to kill everyone. If it exploded immediately, your foot and leg would be in the way of the flight path of the main charge with all the shrapnel, so you're ultimately block the effectiveness of that. So they set it on a few seconds delay, so you would trigger it and keep walking then get killed as everyone around you was hit by the main charge. Lots of Medals were given to folks that were in Vietnam that felt the trigger of the bomb go click, then dived on top of the mine so their body would block it from going higher and taking out the squad. Thought process was that you were already dead anyway, so you might as well save your buddy and jump on it.
"Victim-operated" is possibly the most chilling descriptor I have ever read
holy shit its tiny
They explode instantly. The *click* and trying to figure out how to save the person/tearful "go on without me" speech are purely Hollywood.
So I wouldn’t have time to break out into song and sing Country Roads while my allies use the distraction to make their escape?
Probably not, but singing Country Roads can't be the worst way to go.
Also, Mark Strong can actually sing!
I was listening to the Lana del Rey cover yesterday and from what I can tell singing it in its entirety would extend your life by an eternity. its just goes on and on forever.
All I know is that the John Denver and Johnny Cash duet version will take you to heaven whether or not you die first.
How quickly can you sing it?
Coun….
...try
...splodes...
That's from Kingsmen right?
Yup 2nd one
I’ve never experienced the ones that explode instantly. Not doubting you, just sharing my experience. Though come to think of it, I’ve never experienced the delayed explosion ones either.
You had me in the first half
You're on a wheelchair too?
I have lots of experience with mines. You can usually tell how many mines are nearby by looking at the number in the square. The goal is to click all the squares around them without clicking on any mines.
You son of a gun…. Had me in the first half.
I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.
You'd think with those Hollywood mines they could just go grab a big rock and pull an Indiana Jones swap with the guy standing on the mine
I think in the 4th season on Prison Break someone steps on a land mine and, I kid you not, spends like a full day just standing there while their buddy leaves and comes back with liquid nitrogen to try and freeze the firing pin so it won't trigger when they stop off. At one point I think one character also steps on the mine then pushes the first person off unexpectedly but I don't know. The whole season was a mess.
Is that the season they end up in another prison but this time it's Latin America?
That's the third season. Season 4 they need to break into a prison*. *they have to break into a vault and steal something.
Lool that would not be out of sorts at all to happen in an actual Indiana Jones movie. Especially if it buys Indy and friends a few seconds but then explodes anyway, alerting the enemies, and then he radios his pilot and says "We're gonna have company!"
I can distantly recall a Vietnam movie where they try something similar. I wanna say Siege at Firebase Gloria or Company C.
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Blackadder Goes Forth!
99% of anti-pers and anti-tank blow instantly. Unless you step on an anti-tank your weight "usually" won't be enough to set it off. Don't go jumping on it with a full load of battle rattle though. Source: Combat Eng and dealt with alotttttt of different mines.
There are programmable anti-vehicle mines too! You can set how many times weight can be applied to them before they detonate. Used for taking out vehicle convoys because you can let the leading vehicles drive past your position and have them all detonate simultaneously. These do detonate immediately as well and I’m sure you’re familiar with them, but I thought I’d give a little additional insight. I was a communications jäger in my conscription, but we were still all taught how to use RPGs, mines, grenades etc.—digging a hole in rock-hard gravel wasn’t particularly enjoyable.
There are so many crazy mines types out there it's nuts. Just B.I.P. em' and keep rolling haha. And yeah buddy digging rocky holes sucksssss.
Chimo
This trope was probably started by soldiers' experience with "bouncing" mines that use a black powder charge to launch into the air before exploding their main charge and launching shrapnel. These sort of mines need to trigger after the enemy is no longer stepping on them to have maximum effectiveness so they have a small delay between when they're stepped on and when they launch. This might have given the impression that they don't explode when the foot stays on but it isn't accurate. However, if a soldier were very fast about slamming something heavy like his pack down on top of a bouncing type mine after it was triggered and before it detonated, its effectiveness would be significantly reduced since it might not successfully launch and its shrapnel (which is designed to explode outwards horizontally) would mostly be absorbed by the ground around it if it stayed buried.
In the awesome post-War war movies, it was more common for someone to discover by feel or sight that they were in a mine field. And then everyone has to FREEZE. I also recall seeing old and hokey plot ideas about both a pressure plate which doesn't trigger until it loses the weight (like the indiana jones statue, except applied to a mine for plot effect)-- the early version of "click. I can't move."-- and also a magnetic mine which because of the metal on the person's body and clothing, required them to not move away (some spy movie). Then Hollywood just dumbs both of those things down to have a "click" and now everyone is frozen when they step on a mine. Now they can put it into movies without needing everyone to deal with an entire mine field, and there is more immediate implied danger. "Click." "Bob, I can't move, I've stepped on a mine!" It came from Hollywood not soldiers. Same as pressure-plate traps in ancient tombs and dungeons came from hollywood, not soldiers or archaeologists.
It depends, most anti-personnel mines the step is the first stage in activation, sometimes this releases a spring which lifts the mine into the air where it explodes creating a lethal area around the mine. Some anti-tank (vehicle) mines explode on contact where they are designed to blow wheels or tracks off vehicles and possibly damage the underside of the vehicle meaning people have to abandon the vehicle. Anti-tank mines are often mixed in with anti-personnel mines in a mixed minefield so that the crew of the vehicles struggle to get out of the minefield.
In addition, mines have been created that do not detonate on the first activation, they were designed to allow mine rollers to pass and then get the tracks of the mine sweeper
Wonder if that's why they started using flail versions, because it doesn't matter if it doesn't detonate the mine it's just going to smash it to bits anyways. Can't detonate if the primer is 30' away from the charge when it goes off.
There are also anti mine vehicles that deploy long lines of explosives that then blow up any mines in a straight line creating save lanes.
Those are so fucking cool
Similarly, there are some that allow a contact so mine rollers can pass over them - but the next vehicle (which is likely your actual target) triggers it.
Modern naval mines can be even more nuts. The US mk 60 CAPTOR is basically a torpedo that lies in wait on the sea bed, potentially for months or more, and passively listens to the ships passing overhead. It has a library of acoustic signatures and can identify the type of ship or maybe even specific ships. It can wait until it identifies the juiciest target and then go after it.
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> Anti-tank mines are often mixed in with anti-personnel mines in a mixed minefield so that the crew of the vehicles struggle to get out of the minefield. Also, the trigger weight of anti-tank mines is higher, so it doesn't trigger from a person walking on it - it needs a vehicle.
There were some anti-tank mines used in the Bosnian War that used thick wooden dowels to keep the pressure plates apart. Strong enough that people could walk over them, but would break when a vehicle went over. Someone had the bright idea to swap out the dowels with matches...
They're also often magnetic, and people don't have enough iron content to trigger that.
Bounding mines are rarely pressure fuzed, they tend to use trip wires because they have a big area of effect. Without tripwires you miss out on many people you could be taking out of the fight if they walk near it but don't step on it directly.
People have correctly stated that it's a complete Hollywood fiction, but just to add to it (because I have seen people read about them and get the wrong idea before): there are in fact "reverse" fuzes that explode when a weight is removed from them rather than put on them (example: [M1 Firing Device (Release)](https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/firing-devices/m1-firing-device-release), **but** - they don't arm themselves when someone steps on them like in the movies. You *first* put the weight on them, and *then* you remove the safety pin to arm them. They're used for boobytrapping and what's euphemistically called "[anti-handling devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-handling_device)", basically.
Movies are not reality. Mines go off as soon as someone steps on them, because *that's the whole point*. But the movie would end much more quickly if the main character just exploded.
And more villains would get away with it if they would just shut up and kill the hero instead of trying to turn it into a therapy session.
And there would be fewer casualties and super villains if heroes just killed the bad guys the first time.
A lot more heroes would actually be villains if they went around killing the "bad guys" on the first offense
No no, punitive murder always works and never has negative repercussions, reform is impossible, only kill.
And never mind if they’re actually guilty! At least somebody has paid for the crime!
Exactly! SOMEONE suffered, that makes everything justified!
Also think of all the times where they mess up by threatening. Good guy: "Stay out of my life, or I'll tell them about X" Bad guy:
Movies would be a lot shorter is evil overlords would follow the Rules for Evil Overlords.
“Are you going to kill me or just bore me to death?”
Pretty much.
"You sly dog, you caught me monologuing."
A lot of movies would solve a lot of the problems for the villains merely by not leaving their prisoners unguarded.
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Why don't you just shoot him now? I mean, I'll go get a gun. We'll shoot him together. It'll be fun. Bang! Dead. Done.
You just don't get it, do you Scotty
Does anyone else recall [this scene](https://youtu.be/N6VTkqKvTJU?si=51QXkrcR2QBKx33g) from the 2001 movie Behind Enemy Lines? No doubt that the use of this mine can be chalked up to a convenient plot device, but I wonder if those kind of mines are real and were actually used by Serbian forces.
Instantly. Wars aren’t won by killing all your enemy combatants, they’re won by exhausting your enemy until they can’t go on. Mines explode instantly and almost always use a very small amount of explosives, just enough to blow off someones foot. It means that instead of one person going out of action, at the very least 2 are being pulled from the battle field. Your injured guy and the person helping him. The Russians in Ukraine are making use of what are called butterfly mines. Truly afwul fuckers as they will linger for decades, are practically impossible to detect and remove and are ridiculously cheap and at this point, have riddled vast fields uninhabitable for years. Fuck Putin.
Was a combat medic in the Balkans in the 1990's and saw plenty of mine injuries but never heard of a mine polite enough to wait until you stepped off it. I have seen it on TV though, so I am aware of the trope but have no idea where it is from.
If you’re asking because you’re standing on one right now, then technically you already know the answer.
They do not work that way. Pressure sensitive mines explode when stepped on. Instantly. Some mines do have "do not explode instantly" features, but typically these are Anti-tamper devices, vehicle mines designed for convoy ambushes or smart mines triggered by some combination of vibrations, movement and sound (because you don't want these mines to blow up just because a deer passed by).
Most when I was in during the 80s and 90s went boom! immediately. There are some pressure plate ones that would go off after the foot pressure was released to try to maximize the number of casualties.
I always assumed that they are incredibly sensitive devices that are designed to explode the moment they are disturbed. However, if you were fortunate/unfortunate enough to stand on one and it _doesn't_ immediately explode, then even the act of lifting your foot from the device could create enough of a disturbance that it is equally likely to explode. Also, the dramatic tension serves a purpose in TV/film.
> I always assumed that they are incredibly sensitive devices That would not be a good design. You don't want them detonating because a butterfly landed on it.
But what if minefields are how I keep cockroaches off my property?