Leading Article: No mines are smart

It happens to old women out collecting firewood in Afghanistan. It happens to nine-year-old boys herding goats in Eritrea. It happens to farmers as they trudge behind their ploughs in the paddy fields of Cambodia. Every month around 1,000 people are maimed or killed by anti- personnel mines. It is not a part of war. Most of the explosions occur in places where the fighting is over and the civilian population is returning to its normal business.

But with land-mines, although the soldiers have gone, the killing continues. The Red Cross estimates that there are 30 million mines in 18 countries across Africa, 7 million in Cambodia and now some 3 million in former Yugoslavia. And in Afghanistan (10 million), many of them are little butterfly- shaped devices that are often picked up by a children who think they are toys; they then blow the child's arm off. At present rates it will take 400 years to clear Cambodia's farmland of the deadly devices.

Arguments about arms reduction usually involve a complex interrelation of defence strategy, foreign policy objectives and industrial and trade policy. But occasionally, as with chemical or biological weapons, there are factors that override other considerations. Weapons as uncontrollable and indiscriminate as land-mines fall into that category.

Earlier this year the British government finally signed the 1981 UN Inhumane Weapons Convention - just in time to give us voting rights at the conference called to strengthen the agreement, which opens this morning in Vienna. The UK is not a big producer of land-mines. In the run up, the government announced an indefinite moratorium on the export of old-fashioned conventional mines. But - unbelievably - it will today push for an agreement trying to exempt "smart" mines, which eventually switch themselves off or self- destruct. It wants to pursue a programme that it has coyly named Minx (Mines into the Next Century) to develop even smarter mines.

The official argument is that smart mines are safe and that, anyway, we only sell them to governments who will use them responsibly. Well, we all know about "responsible" governments, but what about "smart" mines? According to the Red Cross, 10 per cent of these fail to switch off and many can be doctored in the field so they do not self-destruct. The cost of such devices to the world's civilians far outweighs their military usefulness, as many distinguished soldiers agree.

The land-mine is not just another weapon of war. Most of its damage is "collateral"; it is an evil device that claims mainly the lives of the innocent. Britain should end production and stockpiling forthwith. And in Vienna today we should be pressing the international community for a total ban.