Congress Orders Further Study of New Landmine’s Indiscriminate Impact

Congress has put the brakes on a Pentagon plan to begin production of a new class of landmines, at least for the moment.

The Pentagon was slated to decide in December whether or not to go forward with the production of a new antipersonnel mine called “Spider.” However, in a last minute decision at the end of 2005, Congress told the Pentagon that it needed to study the possible indiscriminate consequences of deploying this weapon before Congress would authorize release of funds for production of Spider.

The idea for developing the Spider system grows out of a Clinton administration plan to develop alternatives to landmines. Instead of joining the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, President Clinton asked the Pentagon to identify possible alternatives to landmines in order to “end reliance on [antipersonnel mines] as soon as possible.” The Pentagon has spent more than $320 million on researching alternatives to antipersonnel mines since 1997. The Spider mine system alone has already cost $130 million.

These new Spider mines would detonate in a variety of ways, both command-detonation (that is, a soldier decides when to explode the mine) and conventional victim-activation (when a victim detonates the weapon through stepping on or picking up the mine).

Once a soldier flips a switch, Spider becomes a conventional victim-activated antipersonnel mine that cannot tell the difference between the boot of a solider and the foot of a child. After spending millions of dollars researching alternatives to antipersonnel mines, the Pentagon has produced a conventional landmine with a switch. This is not what Congress intended when it funded research for alternatives.

FCNL opposes all weapons systems. But we are particularly alarmed that the Pentagon might be developing yet another indiscriminate victim-activated weapon system. We have worked to alert policymakers about possible indiscriminate features of new landmine alternatives for more than five years. We will continue to meet with policymakers on this issue regularly. Legislators should continue to provide oversight on this issue to insure that the U.S. does not fall back into the business of landmine production.

For more information, see FCNL's web site.