RE: Anti-armor mines!

You wrote: 

>14 kilos for an antitank mine?  I would have expected them to be a lot
>bigger - but, I've never seen one outside of Twilight 2000.  
Thankfully. 

Antitank mines aren't the scary ones (PGMDM Scatterable mines excepted, 
those are fscking nuts!).  Unless they've got AHDs, of course.	Easy to 
find, mark and clear.  The ones that give me nightmares are the 
itsy-bitsy plastic ones with a couple ounces of explosive--just enough 
to blow your face off.	I'll never forget some of the pictures they 
showed up during a mine awareness class.  Just to get our attention.  
This one fellow (I think the instructor said he was Pakistani?), you 
could see where the rim of his helmet was, 'coz from there up he was 
fine.  But his entire face on down looked like bloody, raw hamburger 
meat.  That one will stick with me my entire life.  The instructor's 
comment was "Bad probing technique".  

Enough with the morbidity. . . It's 0230 over here.

Anyway, most AT mines are smaller than that--scatterables generally 
weigh in at 2-3 kg, blast mines come as small as 3.5kg (VS-2.2, an 
Italian mine).	The most effective current AT mine is the M-21 Heavy 
Anti-tank mine which weighs 17.25 pounds, and uses a direct-energy 
warhead (Miznay-Schardin effect).

> Weren't there nuclear landmines, at one point?  Or were those just 
the >Atomic Demolition Munitions?

Yes, and Yes.  Neither are in my purview, thank God.  Those were the 
responsibility of the 12E MOS, nuclear demolitions specialist.	An MOS 
that went away sometime in the Early 80s (??)

John M. Atkinson