Salting the earth

Salting the earth refers to the practice of spreading salt on fields to make them incapable of being used for crop-growing. This is typically used at the end of a war as an area denial measure.

Perhaps the most famous example of salting the earth occurred at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC between the Romans and Carthage. After sacking the city and forcing the few survivors into slavery, an area 50 miles around the city was salted. However it was later learned that this event was ficticious, the land was merely "cursed".

Today the term is used in a variety of ways, referring in general to any sort of poisoning. This varies from the direct in the use of area denial or radiological weapons, to the philosophical, where it is often used to describe business strategy to avoid takeovers (similer but broader in scope than a poison pill).

The area where everything that could be useful for the enemy is destroyed, while withdrawing from that area during a military conflict, is called "scorched earth". It was a tactic widely used by the Russians fighting against the Germans in world war 2.