In Search of Buried Bombs.(Brief Article)

Hiroshi Tomita made his name finding potholes. His Tokyo-based company, Geo Search, develops machinery that scans highways with ground- penetrating radar to spot sinkholes in the roadbeds beneath the surface. In 1994, however, Tomita realized that his contraption might have a more humanitarian application: detecting land mines.

Such devices are urgently needed. Ninety million live mines are still scattered throughout former war zones from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and by some estimates they maim and kill 15,000 people a year. Since demining workers use standard metal detectors, which also pick up nails, hairpins and empty beer cans, finding the buried explosives is a slow business. At the curent pace, experts say, it will take 600 years to remove the weapons now in place along paths and roads. In the meantime, the abandoned mines will continue to shatter communities and kill innocents. "These hidden killers maim children," says Tomita. "We shouldn't leave them buried."

To develop a portable radar detector that could speed things up a bit, Tomita enlisted the cooperation of Omron, Sharp and IBM Japan. In 1998 he formed a non-profit organization, the Japan Alliance for Humanitarian Demining Support (JAHDS). The result is a new device that he calls Mine Eye, which can detect and identify the weapons underground. One recent afternoon in a wooded slope near Tokyo, Tomita put his invention to the test on dummy mines. A technician wearing six kilograms of equipment on his back scanned the ground with what looked like a metal detector. As he moved the detector head back and forth, however, it sent a radar beam a foot into the ground, which was reflected back into the detector. The backpack computer instantaneously translated the reflected beam into a map shown on a liquid-crystal display on the backpack's shoulder strap, revealing the explosives buried in the area immediately in front of the technician.