The Ground That Remembers: The Science of Clearing Bombs

The rats are light enough that they don't trigger pressure plates, they work faster than dogs across open ground, and they're cheaper to transport.

They've cleared millions of square meters of land in Mozambique and Cambodia.

¿Ratas?

Rats?

Eso es muy raro.

That's very strange.

Pero funciona, ¿no?

But it works, right?

It absolutely works.

They call them HeroRATs, which is maybe the best branding in the history of rodent-related public relations.

But here's the thing, all of this, dogs, rats, ground-penetrating radar, neutron emission detectors, it still requires humans to do the final confirmation.

A human being has to get close.

That's why this work has a casualty rate that is, frankly, hard to look at.

Es un trabajo muy valiente.

It's very brave work.

Esas personas son muy especiales.

Those people are very special.

They are.

And the Naxalite conflict specifically, I want to stay on that for a moment, because it's one of the longest-running Maoist insurgencies in the world.

It began in the 1960s in West Bengal, a village called Naxalbari, which is where the name comes from.

And it spread through what the Indian government calls the 'Red Corridor,' a belt of forested, impoverished states running down the center of the country.

Casi sesenta años de conflicto.

Almost sixty years of conflict.

Mucho tiempo.

A long time.

Muchas minas en el suelo.

A lot of mines in the ground.

That's exactly the point.

One of the most insidious things about landmines and buried IEDs is that they outlast the conflict they were built for.

Cambodia still has an estimated four to six million unexploded ordnance items in the ground, forty years after the Khmer Rouge.

Angola is still clearing mines from a civil war that ended in 2002.

The ground holds onto these things.

En España también.

In Spain too.

Hay bombas de la Guerra Civil en el suelo.

There are Civil War bombs in the ground.

La guerra termina pero el peligro no termina.

The war ends but the danger doesn't end.

That's a detail I genuinely didn't know, that the Spanish Civil War ordnance is still turning up.

Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

Europe is still finding World War Two munitions constantly, every construction project in Germany or Poland or Belgium seems to hit something.

There's a name for this phenomenon in explosive ordnance disposal, it's called 'legacy contamination,' and it's a global public health problem that doesn't get nearly enough attention.

En España encontramos cosas viejas cada año.

In Spain we find old things every year.

Una bomba aquí, una bala allí.

A bomb here, a bullet there.

La historia está debajo de nosotros.

History is beneath us.

I love that framing.

The history is beneath us.

And it's not metaphorical, it's literal.

Now, the technology for finding these things has advanced enormously in the last twenty years.

Ground-penetrating radar, GPR, sends electromagnetic pulses into the soil and maps what's down there based on how those pulses reflect back.

You can see density anomalies, voids, metallic or non-metallic objects, without touching anything.

¿Y los robots?

And robots?

¿Los robots pueden limpiar minas?

Can robots clear mines?

Eso es más seguro para las personas.

That's safer for people.

You're ahead of me.

Yes.

There are now remotely operated vehicles designed specifically for mine clearance.

The most widely used is probably the Mine Kafon, which looks like a giant tumbleweed made of bamboo rods and weighted balls.

It rolls across a minefield pushed by the wind, and the weight detonates the mines one by one.

Invented by an Afghan designer, Massoud Hassani, who grew up near a minefield in Kabul and built toy versions of it as a kid.

Eso es muy bonito.

That's very beautiful.

Un niño de Kabul hace un juguete.

A child from Kabul makes a toy.

Después el juguete salva vidas.

Then the toy saves lives.

Me gusta esa historia.

I like that story.

The best inventions usually come from necessity.

But the challenge with robotic clearing is terrain.

In a flat Cambodian rice paddy, the rolling tumbleweeds work.

In a dense Indian forest, on uneven ground, with roots and rocks and undergrowth, you still largely depend on a human being moving carefully through the landscape.

Which brings us back to Chhattisgarh.

El bosque es el problema.

The forest is the problem.

Las minas están en lugares difíciles.

The mines are in difficult places.

No hay un camino fácil.

There is no easy path.

And the Naxalites know that.

They place devices specifically where security forces have to go.

Along patrol routes, at water sources, at ridge crossings.

There's a strategic intelligence to it that's grim to acknowledge.

It's not random.

It's an understanding of how the human body moves through terrain, and how to exploit that.

Es horrible.

It's horrible.

Usas la ciencia para matar.

You use science to kill.

La misma ciencia puede salvar vidas o quitarlas.

The same science can save lives or take them.

That's the central tension, isn't it.

The chemistry of ammonium nitrate is the same whether you're growing food or making a bomb.

The physics of a shockwave is the same whether you're studying it to protect soldiers or to direct it at them.

Science is morally indifferent.

What people do with it is not.

Sí.

Yes.

Y los soldados de hoy en India, ellos usan la ciencia para limpiar el suelo.

And the soldiers today in India, they use science to clean the ground.

Para proteger a la gente normal.

To protect ordinary people.

That's worth sitting with.

The people who died in that forest this week weren't planting mines.

They were removing them.

And internationally, there is a legal framework for this, the Ottawa Treaty, signed in 1997, which bans the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of anti-personnel mines.

A hundred and sixty-four countries have signed it.

Pero no todos los países, ¿verdad?

But not all countries, right?

Estados Unidos no firma ese tratado.

The United States doesn't sign that treaty.

Correct.

The U.S., Russia, China, India, Pakistan, none of them have signed.

Which tells you something about the gap between the humanitarian aspiration of international law and the strategic calculus of major military powers.

India argues it needs landmines to defend its borders with Pakistan and China.

Which is a real argument.

It doesn't make the deaths in Chhattisgarh any less real.

La política dice una cosa.

Politics says one thing.

Las personas en el bosque viven otra cosa.

The people in the forest live another thing.

Siempre es así.

It's always like that.

Twenty years of journalism.

That's it right there.

The gap between what governments say and what happens on the ground.

Literally, in this case.

Now there are some genuinely hopeful advances coming.

There's research into biosensors, plants that change color when their roots encounter explosive compounds in the soil.

You'd fly a drone over a field, photograph the vegetation, and the plants themselves tell you where the mines are.

¿Las plantas avisan del peligro?

The plants warn of danger?

Eso es increíble.

That's incredible.

La naturaleza trabaja para nosotros.

Nature works for us.

A Danish company called Aresa Biodetection developed a genetically modified thale cress that turns red in the presence of nitrogen dioxide, which leaks from buried explosives.

The idea is you seed a field, wait a few weeks, and the plants map the minefield for you from above.

It's not deployed at scale yet, but the proof of concept works.

Pero mientras esperamos esa tecnología, los soldados trabajan con sus manos.

But while we wait for that technology, the soldiers work with their hands.

Con su cuerpo.

With their bodies.

Eso no cambia.

That doesn't change.

No, it doesn't.

And that's the honest conclusion to this, I think.

The science is advancing, and it's genuinely exciting, color-changing plants, trained rats, ground-penetrating radar on drones.

But for the three men who went into a forest in Chhattisgarh this week, none of that was available in time.

Progress and tragedy are not on the same schedule.

Bien dicho.

Well said.

El mundo cambia despacio.

The world changes slowly.

Pero la bomba explota muy rápido.

But the bomb explodes very fast.

That might be the darkest sentence you've ever said on this show.

And also completely accurate.

Okay.

One thing I keep thinking about, and I want to ask you about it.

You used the word 'suelo' earlier, 'el suelo que guarda secretos.' And I know 'suelo' means ground or floor, but in Spanish I've also heard 'tierra' for the same thing.

What's the actual difference?

Buena pregunta.

Good question.

'Suelo' es el suelo donde caminas.

'Suelo' is the ground where you walk.

'Tierra' es la tierra del planeta, o la tierra del jardín.

'Tierra' is the earth of the planet, or the soil of the garden.

So 'suelo' is more surface, more physical underfoot, and 'tierra' is broader, almost conceptual sometimes.

Like 'tierra natal' for homeland, your native land.

Exacto.

Exactly.

'Tierra natal' es correcto.

'Tierra natal' is correct.

También decimos 'piso' para el suelo de una casa.

We also say 'piso' for the floor inside a house.

Tres palabras para el mismo concepto, más o menos.

Three words for more or less the same concept.

Three words, and each one lands differently.

English collapses all of that into 'ground,' 'floor,' 'earth,' and 'soil,' and we still manage to confuse them.

Though I'll admit, I once told someone their house had a beautiful 'suelo' when I meant to compliment the ceiling.

Different direction, same confusion.

Fletcher, el techo es 'techo'.

Fletcher, the ceiling is 'techo'.

El suelo es abajo.

The floor is down.

El techo es arriba.

The ceiling is up.

No es difícil.

It's not difficult.

In my defense, I was looking at it at the time.

Anyway.

Three soldiers died clearing the ground this week.

Let's remember what that actually costs.