One of the greatest escapes for children growing up against the backdrop of war & famine is had in their creative imaginations. The power of pretend is brilliantly articulated by children in games where they explore & adventure in the unforgiving rubble & debris of their war-torn communities. Imagine, a child wanders to the outskirts of town kicking stone pebbles in between barbed wiring intermittently dispersed in a seemingly unsuspecting demarcation area alluding to some kind of neverland. The child struggles to read & does not understand the faded warning signs informing of the nearby minefield. Eventually, the child steps on an anti-personnel mine & loses their life. It may take days, weeks, & possibly months to recover pieces of the child’s body assuming their remains are found & recovered by international peacekeepers, provided if they have not already been demobilized. This is descriptive of a world where according to the International Committee of the Red Cross 10 million landmines currently remain spread across 64 nations.
The Red Cross also estimates since the end of the Cold War, 25 million additional landmines are laid each year killing 1,000-2,000 people each month; the majority of whom are civilians with many children deaths. In Yemen alone, the United Nations reported as of 2022, war casualties impacting civilian populations increased by 75% due to landmine exposure with antipersonnel mines identified as posing the greatest risk when compared to antitank variants. To paraphrase the idealistic bravado of Jack Valentine from the 2005 film Lord of War: “the real weapons of mass destruction are small arms, not nuclear weapons sitting safely in silos protected as national state secrets.” Why have landmines not made INTERPOL’s “international weapons ban?” It must be realized accelerants for mine laying typically materialize in proxy wars, armed border skirmishes, & military occupations. Considering the great potential for civilian blowback, why have the Geneva Conventions in conjunction with the United Nations failed to ban landmines as conventional weapons?
Established in 1997, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) is the only supranational organization to date committed to mitigating, managing, & eliminating the global threat of landmines. Per UNMAS official reportage, the estimated annual budget of the organization is slated at $63.5 million with the majority of its funding derived from the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Assistance in Mine Action, & philanthropies in addition to private individuals.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported 164,000 antipersonnel mines were cleared globally as of 2020. It costs anywhere from $3-30 to lay a landmine, but $300-$1,000 to remove them. The total cost of removing all antitank & antipersonnel mines globally is estimated at $50-100 billion. At this ratio, it would take 1,100 years to achieve a world free of landmines with UNMAS as the supranational spearhead. It therefore becomes all too obvious to realize the facts alone cannot escape one irrefutable reality: the numbers are not on the side of international minesweeping operations. It is for that reason why a seemingly hopeless situation begs Silicon Valley innovation. It is all too obvious: solutions cannot be identified without first raising a series of propositional questions:
- Can national governments be bothered to commit their militaries to demining operations in the name of world peace using the supranational peacekeeping machinery of the United Nations?
- What long term albeit collaborative partnerships can be formed with artificial intelligence & robotics dedicated to demining operations?
- How can advocacy organizations join forces with think tanks & tech innovators to develop & perfect automated demining technologies using advanced artificial intelligence interactively?
We have developed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) capable of destroying entire villages remotely from thousands of miles away often on opposite sides of the world. Why have we failed to apply a similar conceptual approach to demining operations in the interest of securing an attainable world peace? Nations plagued with landmines are not at peace. As long as preventable landmine casualties are accepted as routine facts of life in failed state realities, peace will forever remain illusory allowing state kleptocracies to thrive at the expense of their own people. It is for this reason why a “Bots for Demining Peace Initiative” is required to introduce a unique trimetric between demining operations, demining advocacy, & advanced AI automation to pursue a world free of landmines.