Pentagon Prevails on Land Mines but Takes Heavy Fire

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon may have succeeded in persuading President Clinton to block U.S. participation in a global ban on land mines, but the decision appeared Thursday to be one of the most criticized American military positions since the Vietnam War.

Defense Department officials say that on the Korean peninsula, like nowhere else on Earth, antipersonnel land mines are needed to protect against a massive overland invasion of men and arms across a narrow border region.

“North Korea is the only place where there are 1 million forces staring across the border,” said a Pentagon spokesman. “The use of the mines allows us to slow down that attack until we can bring other weapons to bear. Land mines don’t stop troops; all they do is slow them down.”

Clinton announced Wednesday that the United States will not sign a treaty intended to eliminate land mines because negotiators rejected several proposed U.S. amendments, the most important of which would have permitted continued use of the weapons on the border between the antagonistic Korean states.

Some State Department and White House officials argued that it is folly to oppose efforts to rid the world of an insidious weapon that kills and maims civilians, many of them children, and can remain lethal for years after the conflict in which it was used is over. Regardless of military concerns, these officials said, the human and political cost is too high.

Gulf War commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Vietnam Veterans of America and other normally pro-military individuals and groups also support a ban on a weapon that they say is inhumane and of dubious military value.

But the Pentagon bureaucracy was adamant in its refusal to go along with a total ban.

“This was the issue that the military truly dug in its heels,” said Dan Goure, a senior military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The military doesn’t spend its political capital recklessly, but this time they felt they had no choice.”

Every year, land mines kill and injure about 25,000 people, a human toll that captured the attention of Diana, the late princess of Wales, and the leaders of many humanitarian organizations.

The mines are packages of explosives buried in the ground and primed to go off if stepped on. They are cheap to manufacture and easy to use. In places such as Cambodia and Angola, thousands of mines are still in place, often in unmarked fields long forgotten by the troops who sowed them.

In South Korea, according to Pentagon officials, the United States has such mines but stores them in warehouses near the border, and would plant them only if intelligence showed an invasion to be imminent.

Elsewhere in the world, the U.S. military uses only “smart” mines, which self-destruct after a set period, usually no more than 48 hours. They rarely inflict civilian casualties. And they allow a commander to blunt an enemy attack, then counterattack across the same minefield.

The drafters of the anti-mine treaty refused to give Washington an exemption on the Korean peninsula or to make exceptions for smart mines. Backers of the treaty objected to opening loopholes in the ban. And, analysts say, they were reluctant to exempt a relatively expensive and sophisticated weapon produced primarily by the United States while prohibiting poor countries from using cheap weapons they can manufacture themselves.

In announcing that the U.S. will not sign the draft treaty, Clinton ordered the Pentagon to devise a substitute for mines by 2006. A Pentagon study committee is working on the problem, but analysts say it does not look promising.

Meanwhile, in Oslo, 89 countries formally adopted a treaty to be signed in Ottawa in early December. Japan and Russia joined the United States in criticizing the pact, but backers said it is an important achievement even if the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and other major producers of land mines refuse to sign.

In Seoul, South Korean and U.S. commanders hailed Clinton’s decision to refuse to sign the pact. “The use of antipersonnel land mines on the Korean peninsula is inevitable, because it is a powerful deterrent against North Korea’s armed provocation that could greatly reduce human casualties,” a senior South Korean government official said, according to Reuters news agency.