For $30,000, a donor supports the professional demining of about 10,000 square yards of deadly terrain, which can be chosen from a Web site, www.landmines.org.org
Just as creep-and-probe methods can find quick technological improvements, though, the brute force demining of open spaces, like field and paddy, can also profit almost at once by the adoption of simple technical improvements.
This involved the rebuilding of road and rail links (a rail line ran alongside Route One), the repairing of infrastructure, demining, the installation of new Vietnamese government administrators, and the provision of "everything from rice to anti-malaria tablets".
Heavy demining machines are intended for humanitarian demining of larger mine-suspected areas.
Teams of demining experts were the first to enter the zone on the road to the border village of Merdare, set in hilly and wooded landscape.
Then, with the assistance of a demining team from the Cambodia Mine Action Committee (CMAC), he pushed the detonator for the controlled destruction of one anti-tank and six anti-personnel mines.
The Karen Human Rights Group has documented villagers' reports of "atrocity demining", whereby the Myanmar Army forces villagers to walk in front of soldiers as human minesweepers [ 5].
We seek to improve the safety and efficiency of the demining process by developing support tools that will enable deminers to make better decisions using feedback from existing metal detectors.
Portable, rugged versions of these technologies, which detect small amounts of explosives, would be required for use in demining, but the task is certainly not beyond the capabilities of high-tech firms in the United States and elsewhere.
The constellation of humanitarian relief organizations that have patiently shouldered most of the demining efforts, including the Red Cross, CARE, and the United Nations, to name just a few, have had little contact with the scientific and technical communities in academia and in high-tech industries that could boost demining efficiency.
