Land Mine - Use

Use

Land mines were designed for two main uses: to create defensive tactical barriers, channeling attacking forces into predetermined fire zones or slowing an invasion force's progress to allow reinforcements to arrive; and to act as passive area-denial weapons (to deny the enemy use of valuable terrain, resources or facilities when active defense of the area is not desirable or possible).

Land mines are currently used in large quantities mostly for this first purpose, thus their widespread use in the demilitarized zones (DMZs) of likely flashpoints such as Cyprus, Afghanistan and Korea.

Land mines continue to kill nearly 20,000 people every year, even decades after the ends of the conflicts for which they were placed.

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