I have always been struck by the imagination of man in inventing weapons of destruction; over the millennia we have moved from throwing rocks at one another through degrees of one-on-one combat to today's weapons of mass destruction, weapons that appear to be suicidal to the user as well as the intended victim. I have worked in "defense" areas but I have managed, as far as I am aware, to avoid working on "offensive" projects. That positive-avoidance of such work might lead you to understand why, some years back, I became very concerned about the problems associated with land mines left on forgotten battle fields around the world.

The press generally starts stories about abandoned mines with the tear jerkers: So many injuries, so many deaths in any one year, from so many countries. I have done that myself and in the early days it was probably necessary to kick people into understanding that this really is a major world problem. This is a cause that I seem to keep coming back to and the subject is topical, again, because of an upcoming conference. In terms of understanding the victims, all you have to see is one innocent kid without a limb and one field that cannot be plowed to provide food for the remaining population.

The treaties that are being signed around the world to ban the future use of land mines -- both anti-armor and anti-personnel -- are great. They are to be applauded. But they do nothing to remove the menaces that are left. Anti-armor devices are not the major problem; these devices are generally buried, they are large enough to be detected by their mass, their radar signature, or the small amounts of explosive gas they leak; although they often have to be found in the middle of areas that are cluttered with the other detritus of war. But anti-personnel mines are rather different. A device to rip off a limb can be built into a plastic pen body for, maybe, a dollar in materials. They are almost totally non-magnetic, are difficult to detect in terms of mass, and may have been just causally thrown into the undergrowth or a clump of grass. They are a legacy for death and injury.

I believe that these problems will never be solved by governments; the treaties will stop the developed nations from laying mines, but they will never stop the cottage industries making anti-personnel devices for the skirmishes that are continually developing. There has to be a way, or ways, of locating these devices fast enough to at least keep up with new deployments.

And analog EEs are the problem solvers who can do it.

In 1996 there was a humanitarian conference on "The Detection of Abandoned Land Mines" in Edinburgh, Scotland. At the time some of the sciences suggested for detection were either not fully thought out or were a little zany. That conference, sponsored by the IEE (that's the British Institution of Electrical Engineers) and EUREL, was well attended and was extremely promising. It was decided to follow up this year in the same location in October 1998.

The 64 accepted papers include field descriptions and hazards plus all the technology suggestions. A number of papers will be presented on surface-penetrating radar from experts in eleven countries; electrical-optical sensors will be discussed with papers from seven countries; nuclear sensor technology will be presented, mostly from U.S. experts; different multi-sensor tools will be examined; and then there is a bunch of seemingly novel ideas about techniques which might harbor some interesting future directions. I don't know, for example, what to make of "Nonlinear vibro-acoustic technique for land mine detection."

The conference may be humanitarian but that doesn't mean that you or your company can't make a commercial success out of this area. No one, I don't think, expects the world to develop equipment free of charge. There are a lot of volunteers out in the field organizing the teams who today probe the ground carefully ahead of them, or run the sniffer dogs who seem excellent at the task (can anyone invent an artificial dog nose?) but the success of catching up with the deployment rate will take money: And that money is available.

How do you get involved? Come to Edinburgh. October 12 - 14, 1998 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. The conference center is modern and comfortable, the City is a delight, some of the hotels are grand and unique. The best ways to get there are by high-speed train from London, or shuttle from Heathrow, or an international connection through Amsterdam.

Look for more details on the conference at http://www.iee.org.uk/Conf/MD/ or e-mail the Secretariat.

See you there? This is really worth getting involved in.

By: Paul McGoldrick
Sr. Technology Editor, EDTN

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