The devious ingenuity that went into land mine design is quite remarkable. The consequences for the civilian population were broadly regarded as irrelevant. My

The devious ingenuity that went into land mine design is quite remarkable. The consequences for the civilian population were broadly regarded as irrelevant. My "favourite" example is the Valsella VS-50, a viciously clever piece of engineering. It has practically no metal content, making it almost impossible to detect; this also makes the mine cheaper to produce and impervious to corrosion. The amount of explosive is carefully calibrated to blow off your foot without killing you, because wounded soldiers are more expensive for the enemy to deal with than dead soldiers. The pressure plate is isolated from the trigger with a compressible bladder, so the mine will react to the steady pressure of a foot while ignoring the shock from being helicopter-dropped or from explosive or flail demining. That wasn't quite devious enough for Valsella, so they made the VS-50AR. The standard VS-50 will only trigger due to pressure, so once you've done the difficult work of finding them, they're relatively straightforward to render safe. The AR variant has mercury tilt switches, designed to detonate in response to standard mine probing and defusing techniques. If you find a VS-50, you have to act on the assumption that it's an AR, massively complicating demining efforts. The icing on the cake? Valsella illegally exported 9 million mines to the Iraqi government in 1991, via a front company in Singapore. Heroically, some of Valsella's own employees lobbied the Italian government to ban the production of anti-personnel mines, effectively protesting to demand their own redundancy. War is hell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VS-50_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VS-50_mine https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1991/02/13/vendevo-ottime-mine.html https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica...