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Argument: "Smart mines" almost never fail to self-destruct
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Richard L. Garwin. "Beyond the Ottawa treaty : On land mines, America is a humanitarian leader". 20 Mar. 2004 - Permitted mines must also be self-deactivating — that is, they must be powered by a battery which will exhaust itself in 120 days or less if self-destruction fails. But such failure is most unlikely. In more than 65,000 tests under a wide variety of conditions, no activated U.S. self-destructing mine has failed to self-destruct.
Failure of self-deactivation is even less likely; batteries always die. This is not to say that it is impossible that an activated U.S. mine will not somewhere, sometime fail to terminate on schedule. But we know that all the persistent antivehicle mines stockpiled by Austria and other members of the Ottawa Convention are designed to sit ready to kill for decades after emplacement.
