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British Town Worried About WWII Ammo Ship Wreck
Radical Rad writes "For 60 years, 1.4 kilotons of unstable world war II bombs have lain in the rusting wreck of a US cargo ship half-submerged on a sandbank in the river Thames. If it explodes it will be one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever with predictions of a 3 kilometre high wall of mud, water, and metal fragments causing devastation to the nearby town of Sheerness in Kent." The BBC has more.
Would some of the explosives now be inert?
Unstable is the word you're looking for.
Am I the only one who thinks it would too cool just to see that eplosion? Not that I would want to harm anyone or their property. 16ft high wave? That is just way to neat.
There are history nerds, too.
Well they have a clusterfuck of a problem and are looking for solutions. Sounds like nerd business to me.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Why did this get modded up? Obviously it involves modern technology because that's how this problem will (hopefully) be solved. This article easily could lead into some great posts about the various ways they might be able to learn whether these explosives are still a danger, and if they are, how they might be defused.
Another article I read elsewhere said that some of the fuses could be triggered by contact with water (too unmotivated to find the link). The bomb casings have (presumably) started to rust and decay.. if only one bomb casing springs a leak.. it could blow - and set off the rest of the explosives. And if the explosives are water-tight, it means that they aren't decaying...
Personally I think the town should be evacuated, all the windows boarded up, shipping traffic diverted - and a torpedo lobbed at it from a couple of miles away to set the entire thing off and ensure it's made safe. I wouldn't want to ask anyone to go down there to try and defuse anything - it seems far too risky.
"How does this involve modern technology?"
uhm, how about that the problems of the past will require greater technology to resolve than it took to create them. (believe it was an einstein idea, not quoted verbatim, and dont care to look it up)
or more specifically, this bunch of bombs will require 2004 technology (or more) to safely remove items designed, built, and deployed between 1937 and 1941.
Sorry but "London Bridge" has been moved to the suburbs of Phoenix Arizona.
Because it's "News for Nerds," not "News For Nerds Who Only Care About Things That Run On Silicon." It's the obsessives who think that computers are the be-all and end-all of everything that matters who give nerds in general a bad name, IMNSGDHO.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In 1917 250 tons of explosive gun powder, benzol, and gun cotton loaded on the French ship Mont-Blanc exploded and devastated the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The ship was carrying supplies to help the war effort over seas. A fire resulting from a collision with a Norwegian ship as the Mont-Blanc was leaving the harbor to join up with a convoy was triggered the blast 28 minutes after the minor collision.
The death toll rose to about 1,600 in a city with a population near 50,000. An explosion 5 times as powerful in a town 5 times smaller could conceivably wipe it off the face of the earth. 12,000 homes were damaged or destroyed not only by the blast, but also the fires that followed.
Wikipedia has some more information on the Halifax explosion.
Look up the halifax explosion
Largest ever non-nuclear blast has already occured. It happend in 1947 in Texas City Texas. Read about it here: http://www.local1259iaff.org/disaster.html
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Anyway, I have seen the spot where the Montgomery lies buried; ferries between the UK and the Netherlands pass pretty close by. A veteran told me about the wreck and its history, and he pointed out that the houses on the shore would get wiped out if the wreck were to explode.
"What houses?" I wondered. Then I looked really hard, and it dawned on me that he meant the small specks I could barely see on the horizon.
It's been 15 years since I made that trip, and I forget most of the other things I saw, but that one has stayed with me alright...
The real enlightening part of that read, is to note how many of those nuclear incidents occurred in areas where the us military is specifically prohibited by treaty and/or local law from having nukes. Kind of demonstrates how the usa as a country honors, or more appropriately does NOT honor, the treaties it signs.
> ... which we don't have to deal with here in the US
... it's easier to make the stuff if you don't have to deal with the consequences on your own soil.
Perhaps that's part of why the US _isn't_ one of the 152 countries that have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (effectively a landmine ban)
Yeah, it was a volcano eruption.
Next time, be sure to say it's the largest man-made non-nuclear that-has-yet-to-occur type of explosion.
In any case, shouldn't those explosive materials start to decay after some time. I'm not saying that they can't explode, but at least I would expect the explosion to be a fraction of what it might have been fifty years ago.
Ok America, this ones your problem so get your asses over here and pick it up.
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Ok i say we tow the thing to perl harbour, let them deal with it.
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The parent has the amount of explosives wrong. ~2000 tons of TNT and another ~2000 tons of other explosives.
Just because they didn't CALL it a "cluster bomb" at the time, doesn't mean it's not of the same classification as what we would now call a cluster bomb - and operate in just the same fashion.
Weather this is done by engineers/sappers, artillery fire, or pointing a machine gun into the backs of prisoners and telling them to run en masse over certain areas, or vehicles with the appropriate mechanism to detonate mines safely (ie chains and extremely thick tractor treads).
You're talking about using up lots of prisoners, and vehicles aren't practical except for clearning road-sized passages.
The whole point of a minefield is to really slow down the enemy. If you send 1000 prisoners into a field, one will trip a mine, which will probably kill at least a few dozen of them (many launch grenades high into the air), and the mine 10 feet away will still be active. How do you get all those prisoners to the border in the first place.
What a minefield does is make your enemy either put millions of people on the border simply so that they can absorb HUGE losses, or use mineclearing techniques, which funnel their troops through narrow corridors which can be more easily defended.
You can't park millions of troops on a border for years at a time - it costs a fortune and they aren't occupied in useful work. So, if the N Koreans started moving that many troops to the border, the US would quickly reinforce its lines.
Also, if you send prisoners across the minefields, they won't set off anti-tank mines - just anti-personnel mines. So at best the enemy can get lots of poorly-armed and unsupported troops over the border. That isn't much use in a war - you need a well-reinforced army with armored support to be effective.
Minefields are very effective. They're basically like $10 smart-bombs - every detonation is a perfect hit. They force the enemy to slow down, buying you time to reinforce.
And the mines that the US uses are well mapped, and are designed to disable themselves after some amount of time. I'm sure this isn't perfect, but there are no perfect solutions when you have a country ruled by a dictator on your border. The normal rules of diplomacy don't really apply - the behavior of a single person is not that easy to control...