Casualties have dropped from an estimated 26,000 a year to a little more than 7,000 a year at last count. Some 40 million mines in stockpiles or buried in the ground have been destroyed. Even most countries that haven’t signed abide by the treaty, and international trade in land mines has virtually dried up.

Those are the consequences of the ban on land mines as reported in this USA Today article ‘We have changed the world.’

Only Russia, China and the USA have refused to sign the agreement, Bush reiterating in 2004 that the US didn’t want “to give up a needed military capability.”

The Nobel prize winning group which inspired the ban is now targeting the cluster bombs used recently by Israel in Lebanon.