Meet the people who make land mines.

• Author: Capello, Catherine
• Position: Accudyne Corp. - Includes related article on smart land mines - Cover Story

While President Clinton was refusing to sign the Canadian treaty that would ban land mines, we went in search of the people who make them. They work in plain brick warehouses in regular, middle-American towns.

One of the biggest land-mine manufacturers in the country, Accudyne Operations, provides jobs to 325 people in Janesville, Wisconsin. Two of Accudyne's three facilities are located on the banks of the Rock River in downtown Janesville. A renovated building that at different times turned out belt buckles, women's undergarments, and boards for pipe organs now bears the Accudyne emblem--a red figure with tiny feet, skinny legs, a swollen upper body, and no facial features.

Below the red Accudyne man on a company storage facility, a sign warns fire fighters: Danger: Do Not Fight Explosives Fires. 1.4 Explosives Stored at This Site.

Accudyne, which was founded in 1954 as a spinoff of the Hammond Organ Company, is a subsidiary of Alliant Techsystems of Hopkins, Minnesota. The parent company, a leader in the munitions field, is worth more than $1 billion. Alliant does a brisk business in land mines. It raked in $350 million in land-mine sales between 1985 and 1995. Accudyne itself brought in $150 million from land mines during those years, making the company the third-largest builder of anti-personnel mines in the country. Together, Alliant and its subsidiary Accudyne "hold a prominent role in that particular hall of shame," says Andrew Cooper, land-mine researcher for the Arms Project of Human Rights Watch.

In April, Human Rights Watch issued a comprehensive report on forty-seven American manufacturers of land mines and their component parts. The group included some familiar names: among them, General Electric and Motorola. "We were shocked to learn that many of the companies that manufacture our pagers and cell phones and the chips that go in our hair dryers were also involved in the manufacture of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction," says Cooper.

According to Human Rights Watch, the three U.S. companies that have profited most handsomely from the land-mine business are Alliant, Hughes Aircraft (a subsidiary of General Motors), and Accudyne.

Although seventeen companies--including Motorola, Hughes Aircraft, and Olin Ordnance--have informed Human Rights Watch that they will no longer produce components for anti-personnel land mines, Alliant recently told the organization that neither it nor Accudyne would promise to stop making them.

Accudyne is remarkable in one other way. Motorola, General Electric, and most of the companies Human Rights Watch identified were simply manufacturing parts, such as computer chips, that another government contractor would then put together to make a mine. Unlike most of the others, the little Accudyne plant was assembling a substantial portion of the mines. Rod Bitz, who handles public relations for Accudyne, says the company had been making the "brains" of the land mines. Bitz says it stopped making antipersonnel mines in May of this year.

But it's unclear whether Accudyne has actually gotten out of the business of antipersonnel land mines. The company makes a mine system called Volcano. Until recently, the U.S. government considered the Volcano a "mixed" system--one containing both anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. Bitz says the Pentagon has redesigned the devices so they no longer contain an anti-personnel component. "Now they are all anti-tank," he says.

A recent article by Dana Priest of The Washington Post suggests that the only thing that may have changed is the terminology. The Clinton Administration has now decided that mixed systems, like the Volcano, are not anti-personnel mines, Priest found.

According to an Army letter to Minnesota Representative Jim Ramstad, Accudyne and Alliant have contracts to produce the Volcano through July 1999.

Only Accudyne, its parent company, and Hughes Aircraft were assembling land-mine fuzes. Now that Hughes has agreed to Human Rights Watch's request to stop producing land-mine parts, Accudyne and Alliant may have the U.S. market all to themselves.

Promotional literature for Accudyne is circumspect about the company's line of products. "We are market leaders in the design and fabrication of systems for assembly and test of customer products," says a company flier. Accudyne's capabilities include: "through-hole insertion; wave soldering; encapsulation; staking, swedging, crimping, and welding"; "dry-film lubrication"; and "hazardous-component assembly." Land mines appear to belong to the "hazardous-component assembly" category.

Alliant says it's not worried about the possibility of a worldwide ban on land mines. "It has been a very small part of our business," says Bitz. He says the ban "isn't something we're tracking real closely."

But Alliant Tech fiercely defends its product.

"Alliant Tech has been the most vocal opponent of an anti-personnel land-mine ban," says Cooper. The Human Rights Watch report notes that several years ago Alliant also lobbied against the mine-export moratorium sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Lane Evans, the Democratic Representative from Illinois. The Leahy-Evans moratorium has brought about an effective ban on worldwide trade in land mines. Alliant argued that U.S. producers would lose $500 to $650 million in overseas business.

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