Russian land mine detectors find success at Test Site

Thursday, Jan. 29, 1998 | 10:06 a.m.

Russian monitors that look like portable vacuum cleaner wands detected 60 percent of the deadly land mines buried at the Nevada Test Site, the project leader said Wednesday.

"There were some very interesting results that we got," Art Toor, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project director, said in a telephone interview from his northern California office.

The Russian scientists, who developed the technology at a research institute in Tomsk, Siberia, while the United States and the former Soviet Union were locked in the Cold War, got some surprises in the field.

Gregory Pekarsky and colleague Vitaly Bystritski detected 100 percent of the plastic Italian anti-tank mines buried beneath the Test Site's remote desert, Toor said, but found only 30 percent of the U.S.-made M-19s buried more than an inch deep.

The Russians expected to catch most of the M-19s, which are about the size of a large dog's water dish, and are part of the 296 explosive mines underneath the Buried Objects Detection Facility which takes up 100 acres of the Test Site.

The Russian detector works in two steps. First, hydrogen given off by the mine is detected. Then the detector measures nitrogen with neutrons from a tiny radioactive source.

The advantage of the Russian technology is its ease and mobility. More sophisticated or difficult machinery such as a laser detector under development at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., might be too complicated to operate in a remote mine field.

The Russian technology tested in Nevada can scan 10 times faster than a person using a wooden stick, an explosives-sniffing dog or a metal detector, Toor said.

The field work done about 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas on the secure Test Site during the first two weeks in January will allow the enterprising Russians, Livermore and the University of California, Irvine to refine the detection machinery, replacing electronics with modern U.S. parts, Toor said.

Robots from Livermore could deliver the detection equipment into a field laced with land mines some day.

The researchers will return to the Test Site for more field work as early as the end of summer, especially on anti-personnel mines, Toor said.

Buried land mines around the world menace innocent victims once a war is over, Toor said. Their deadly force maims or kills women and children trying to scratch out a living in Central America, Asia or the peat bogs of the Falkland Islands.

It will take 1,100 years and $33 billion to remove land mines buried in rice paddies, along dirt roads, under bridges and in the jungles of the world.

That's with existing technology, says David Schwoegler of Livermore.

It costs 78 cents to $3 to create a land mine, another $1,000 to $3,000 to find it and $1 million in lifetime medical and rehabilitation costs for each victim mangled by an explosion.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., saw the devastation caused by land mines, which kill or maim 26,000 people each year, he said.

"For many, it is a dream come true to save lives and limbs around the world," said Reid, referring to the Russian researchers field work.