In January, senator Charles Robb, the Virginia Democrat, was sitting on Air Force One sipping soda with several congressional colleagues. They were flying to Bosnia with President Clinton, and the conversation turned to land mines. Robb related an experience he had as a Marine in Vietnam. His unit was escorting supply convoys passing through Viet Cong-held territory, and the mission included searching for mines by poking bayonets into any disturbed soil. One afternoon, an engineer several yards in front of Robb struck a detonator with his bayonet. "He was literally vaporized right in front of my eyes," Robb remembered. "We searched for 30 minutes. But the only thing we could come up with was one boot with a foot in it."
General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listened closely. "He was extremely attentive," recalled one lawmaker. Shalikashvili was aware that banning antipersonnel mines had become an important political issue, both in Congress and internationally. A former frontline soldier, he understood the value of mines, but his experience helping the Kurds in Iraq after the Gulf War had shown him how devastating they can be to civilians. As the presidential plane drew nearer to Bosnia, the general well knew that he might soon have to rethink America's land-mine policy.
The subject appears to have been rethought. White House and Pentagon sources say the Clinton Administration is expected to announce soon--perhaps this week--that no later than the year 2001, the U.S. military will unilaterally abandon the use of mines, except to protect South Korea and the Persian Gulf. White House officials even suggest that the ban could begin as early as 1999. "We've all agreed we're going to have to get rid of land mines," says a senior Pentagon policymaker. "We have to lump them together with chemical and biological weapons. Even though we used them more carefully than other nations, we still agreed to scrap them too."
The decision marks the resolution of an important debate within the Pentagon over whether the U.S. can afford to sacrifice its mines. Both the risks and the significance of that outcome were underscored last week when a major U.N. conference on mines ended with minimal achievements. The conference made it clear that the world will be awash in mines for a long time to come, leaving the U.S. at a potential disadvantage; but it was also evident that to push a prohibition forward, a moral gesture by the U.S. may be necessary.
The campaign to bar American use of land mines had its first significant victory in 1992, when George Bush signed a bill sponsored by Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. The legislation outlawed the export of U.S.-made antipersonnel mines for one year. Later, Leahy succeeded in extending the law through 1997. Then in 1995 he won the votes for a one-year ban on the use of all mines, except along international borders and in demilitarized zones, to take effect in 1999. "Mines are the worst of human depravity," Leahy argued.