Fet Milner

I Love Betty

"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." -- William Blake

In all the history of human civilisation, no century has given bloody birth to as many machineries of destruction as the twentieth. The real delight of these creations, though, is not simply their effectiveness, nor the size of their designated catastrophes, but the grotesque imagination that devises them. Look at them not as simple weapons, but consider, for a moment, the mind that once thought, "Yes, that's nice, but it's not quite brutal enough."

My favourite spawn of deranged imagination is the elegantly feminine "Bouncing Betty". Though not as glamorous as the flame-thrower, nor as visually impressive as the hydrogen bomb, Bouncing Betty still holds a soggy piece of my heart for the sheer ingenuity of her design.

The Bouncing Betty, for those unaware, is an anti-personnel mine unlikely to have been rudely plucked from the earth by the ever-airbrushed Princess Diana, due to the notorious difficulty in defusing them. The basic idea is founded from the understanding that, at the time, mines were infrequently fatal, and normally only resulted in loss of limb. Betty circumvented this basic design flaw by employing a two-stage effect. The first stage begins once the target has removed their weight, informing Bouncing Betty that the time has come for her to ignite her first charge. This minor explosion beneath the mine causes her to leap six feet into the air -- roughly head height -- before the primary fragmentation charge (the deadly bit) is ignited. The true joy of this type of mine is that anyone near the trigger-tripping unfortunate was also likely to be -- euphemistically speaking -- liquidated.

Sadly, mines have since then fallen prey to a decidedly utilitarian set of designers. The current piéce de resistance of their oeuvre is the "Claymore", beloved of uninventive geeks worldwide. The Claymore rather tediously works simply by spraying 700 steel balls across a fifty-metre radius. The unfortunate Cambodian child that detonated the Claymore would, quite simply, be torn into thousands of bloody chunks -- as would anyone within twenty-or-so metres. Even at fifty-metres the Claymore is considered fatal. This mine, while certainly effective, just isn't terribly interesting: it does not become a fatal weapon through ingenuity, merely through excess; it lacks Betty's playful and feminine elegance; it is simply emblematic of the American method of warfare since Hiroshima.

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