A landmine is a hidden explosive device placed on or just below the ground, designed to detonate when a person, vehicle, or animal triggers it. Landmines are found in at least 57 countries and territories today, and in 2024 alone they caused 6,279 recorded casualties worldwide. They fall into two broad categories: anti-personnel mines, which target people, and anti-vehicle mines, which are built to disable trucks, tanks, and armored vehicles.
How a Landmine Works
Most landmines share a simple design: a casing, an explosive charge, and a triggering mechanism called a fuze. The vast majority of the world’s legacy mines are pressure-activated, meaning they detonate when enough weight presses down on them. But pressure is only one triggering method. Mines can also be set off by tripwires, tilt rods, electrical command wires, or even magnetic sensors that detect a vehicle passing overhead.
Tripwire-activated mines deserve special attention because they cover a much wider danger zone. With a pressure mine, you have to step directly on it. A tripwire, by contrast, can be encountered anywhere across several meters. To prevent false triggers from falling branches or small animals, tripwire fuzes typically require several kilograms of force to activate. Tripwires are most commonly paired with fragmentation mines, where spreading metal shrapnel over a wide area is the goal.
Anti-Personnel Mine Types
Anti-personnel mines are designed to injure or kill people and come in three main varieties, each with a different purpose and lethal range.
- Blast mines are buried in the ground and detonate when someone steps on them. They contain relatively small explosive charges, ranging from as little as 7 grams to around 300 grams of explosive. Their primary effect is the blast itself, which typically causes severe injuries to the legs and lower body.
- Fragmentation mines come in two forms. Directional fragmentation mines are positioned to face an expected path of approach and project metal fragments in a focused cone. Omnidirectional fragmentation mines hide above ground in vegetation, triggered by a tripwire, and spread shrapnel in a full 360-degree arc.
- Bounding mines are buried in the ground but, once triggered by a tripwire or direct pressure, launch upward to about waist height before detonating. They spray metal fragments in every direction at the level of the torso, making them especially lethal.
Anti-Vehicle Mines
Anti-vehicle (or anti-tank) mines are much larger and require far more force to trigger. A typical anti-tank mine needs somewhere between 300 and 900 pounds of pressure on its fuze plate to detonate, well beyond the weight of a person on foot. They carry between 12 and 30 pounds of high explosive, compared to the few ounces found in most anti-personnel mines. That difference in explosive payload reflects their purpose: disabling or destroying heavy vehicles and armored equipment rather than targeting individuals.
Because of the high activation threshold, anti-tank mines generally won’t detonate under a pedestrian. However, their fuzes can sometimes be modified to lower the trigger pressure, and they remain a serious hazard for civilian vehicles, tractors, and buses in post-conflict areas.
A Brief History
The modern landmine is a relatively recent weapon, first appearing in the 1800s. Its ancestry traces to two older military practices: digging explosive tunnels under enemy defenses (literal “mining”) and using obstacles and traps to slow advancing forces. These two ideas merged with the development of the fougasse, an early buried explosive charge.
Gabriel Rains, later a Confederate brigadier general, is often called the father of modern mine warfare. He used buried explosive devices he called “subterra torpedoes” during the Seminole Wars in Florida as early as 1839. Landmine use remained limited through the Civil War and World War I, largely because mines favor defenders, and armies on the offensive had little reason to refine them.
Everything changed in World War II. Germany began mass-producing landmines to counter the emerging threat of armored tanks, making them the first mass-produced mines in history. The United States didn’t produce its first anti-tank mine until 1941. By the war’s end, landmines had proven their full potential as a battlefield weapon, and they’ve been a fixture of armed conflict ever since.
Why Landmines Persist for Decades
What makes landmines uniquely destructive is their longevity. Unlike a bomb or artillery shell, a landmine sits waiting indefinitely. It doesn’t expire, doesn’t rust into harmlessness on any useful timeline, and can’t distinguish between a soldier and a child. Decades after a conflict ends, mines continue to kill and maim civilians who step on them while farming, walking to school, or herding livestock.
Landmines trap communities in poverty by cutting people off from farmland, healthcare, and education. Farmers lose access to their fields. Livestock can’t graze safely. Displaced families returning home after a war face the possibility that every footpath is dangerous. Aid workers struggle to reach isolated communities. The result is that a weapon costing as little as $3 to manufacture continues destroying lives and livelihoods for generations.
Detection and Removal
Removing a single landmine costs between $300 and $1,000, meaning clearance can be hundreds of times more expensive than production. The process is slow, dangerous, and labor-intensive.
The most established detection method is a metal detector paired with careful manual probing, but many modern mines use plastic casings that make metal detection unreliable. Trained dogs are a vital tool in demining operations, particularly in heavily contaminated countries like Colombia, because they can detect trace amounts of explosive chemicals in the soil. Mechanical clearance using armored vehicles equipped with flails or rollers can process larger areas but works best on flat, open terrain.
Newer approaches include unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) equipped with remote sensing equipment, combined with machine learning systems that analyze the data to identify likely mine locations. These technologies are promising for surveying large contaminated areas more quickly, but ground-level verification and manual removal remain necessary for confirmed clearance.
Self-Destructing “Smart” Mines
Some modern mines are designed to neutralize themselves after a set period. Self-destructing mines contain a mechanism that detonates the mine after a predetermined window, which can range from as little as 4 hours to 15 days. As a backup, self-deactivating mines rely on a battery that gradually loses its charge, rendering the mine inoperable within 90 days at most. Testing of over 67,000 such mines showed no failures of the self-destruct system, according to U.S. military data. Newer designs also include remote control capabilities, allowing operators to detonate them on command when they’re no longer needed.
These features address the core problem of mines outliving the conflict they were placed in, but they apply only to newly manufactured mines from a handful of countries. The tens of millions of older mines already in the ground have no such safeguards.
International Law and the Mine Ban Treaty
The 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty, commonly called the Ottawa Treaty, prohibits the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of anti-personnel mines. To date, 161 states have formally agreed to be bound by the convention. Notable holdouts include the United States, Russia, China, and India, all of which maintain stockpiles or reserve the right to use anti-personnel mines.
The treaty has had measurable effects. Global production and trade of anti-personnel mines have dropped sharply since 1997, and signatory countries have destroyed tens of millions of stockpiled mines. Still, anti-personnel mine contamination persists in at least 57 states and territories, including 32 that are parties to the treaty, often because of mines laid before those countries signed on or by non-state armed groups operating within their borders.