Stardate 20011005.0637 (On Screen): A lot of people are in favor of an international treaty banning land mines. I oppose it. I understand the evil that land mines do in a nation after a war is over (let alone during a war), but there are things which mines do better than anything else. What if you have a very high value installation where the absolute top priority is to prevent it from being captured by your enemy? Take, for example, Pakistan's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Destruction of the facility would be vastly preferable to capture by hostile forces, for obvious reasons. What better way to defend such an installation than with a deep mine field, backed by military forces? Mines make ideal front line defenders; they will wait patiently for years, if need be; they will never abandon their positions, and cannot be scared away. They are cheap and reliable and deadly. Were any insurgent force to try to capture Pakistani nuclear weapons, a mine field would serve as a far better deterrent than would any other kind of defense I can conceive of. A mine field is the modern equivalent of castle walls, except that a mine field costs far less and can be deployed in hours.
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