In introducing legislation against victim-activated landmines, U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter took a critical step today toward ensuring that the production of antipersonnel landmines does not resume in the United States, Human Rights Watch said.
The Pentagon is expected to make a decision soon to produce a munition called “Spider” with a controversial feature that turns it into an antipersonnel mine.
“The United States shouldn’t be making and using weapons that can’t discriminate between a soldier and a civilian,” said Steve Goose, director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch. “The U.S. should be moving closer to the community of nations that have banned antipersonnel mines, not farther away.”
The United States has not produced antipersonnel mines since 1997, exported them since 1992, or used them since 1991. However, the United States retains the right to produce antipersonnel mines and is not among the 151 countries that have joined the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which comprehensively prohibits the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of antipersonnel mines. The U.S. currently stockpiles 10.4 million antipersonnel mines, the world’s third-biggest arsenal. The Victim-Activated Landmine Abolition Act of 2006 would prohibit the procurement of landmines or other weapons that are designed to be victim-activated.
In its standard mode, the Spider system is command-detonated, rather than victim-activated. The system has a soldier-operated control unit capable of monitoring up to 84 hand-emplaced munitions that deploy a web of tripwires across an area. When the tripwires are touched, the soldier decides if and when to detonate the munitions.
However, Spider contains a “battlefield override” feature that removes the man-in-the-loop and allows for activation by the victim. This feature turns Spider into an antipersonnel mine that would be prohibited by the Mine Ban Treaty.
The decision whether to produce Spider was scheduled to be taken by the Pentagon in December 2005, with the first units to be produced in March 2007. However, Congress delayed the decision by including a provision in the fiscal year 2006 defense appropriations bill, passed on 31 December, that requires the Secretary of the Army to conduct a review of new landmine technologies and report on the possible indiscriminate effects of these new systems before any production decision is made. It was the inclusion of the “battlefield override” feature in Spider that led Congress to request the study. The Pentagon has not yet provided the study to Congress.
A total of $301 million has been budgeted to produce 907 Spider systems, and another $11.8 million for continued research. On July 3, the Pentagon announced that Alliant Techsystems and Textron Systems had been awarded a $31 million contract for “low-rate initial production” of Spider “network command munitions,” but no mention was made of the battlefield override feature.
Thirty-eight countries have stopped the production of antipersonnel mines, including four that have not signed the Mine Ban Treaty: Egypt, Finland, Iraq and Israel. Apart from the U.S., there are 12 countries that continue to produce, or retain the right to produce, antipersonnel landmines: Burma, China, Cuba, India, Iran, North Korea, South Korea, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore and Vietnam.
