In the new James Bond superspy flick, the villains use hovercraft to evade deadly land mines and a high-tech satellite weapon to blast them to bits. The bad guys aboard the hovercraft actually laugh about their ability to glide over these mines in Korea without fear.

On celluloid, that’s a clever plot.

In reality, though, there is no escaping the deadly monstrosity of mines.

In wartime land mines kill and maim soldiers; in peacetime they kill and maim farmers, merchants and children — as many as 20,000 a year.

That’s an unacceptable number.

Battlefield veterans know the horror of land mines and many of them, organized as Veterans for Peace, recently adopted a resolution imploring the U.S. government to join the Ottawa Ban Landmines Treaty without delay, to remove and destroy planted and stockpiled land mines here and abroad, and to outlaw further use of these antipersonnel weapons.

It is a timely resolution.

Tuesday was the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Mine Ban Treaty, a treaty that the United States has yet to sign. We are the only NATO member to decline support because we see land mines as potentially useful military weapons, even though we haven’t deployed any since the Gulf War in 1991 and haven’t manufactured any since 1997.

We are storing them, some designed for use during the Korean conflict, holding them in reserve for possible use in Iraq or other distant lands. Does it really make sense to use a Korean-era ground weapon for a nation that now largely wages war from the sky?

While the United States has been holding out on the mine ban, it has been helping and funding volunteers around the world in the de-mining process, clearing fields of mines we laid years ago. If we’re already paying the cost to remove these weapons, doesn’t it make sense to formally ban their use so we don’t make more work for ourselves?

For most of us, it’s easy to dismiss the danger of mine fields because they are in faraway places. What if there were mine fields in the United States? In open fields just outside militarily strategic locations? Wouldn’t we do everything in our power to secure the fields, to protect the public?

Absolutely. If Americans were in danger, we would act.

Well, they are.

We deployed some 117,634 land mines during the Gulf War and counted 81 American casualties as a result. And that was, as wars go, a brief moment in time.

If we enter a prolonged war, the number of casualties is sure to climb.

American lives are in danger because this country does not support the mine ban. And our callous disregard for innocent victims of mines that we manufactured, deployed and then abandoned turns the stomach.

If we can’t see our way clear to ban land mines to protect civilians in other countries, we should at least do everything possible to ban them to protect our own personnel.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com

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