Small point: People throw around the "kt" label when it means very different things in context. Nuclear weapons are generally measured in TNT equivalent, the hiroshima bomb being roughly 15,000 tonnes equivalent (15kt). This is so common that "kt" has blurred in the mind and we forget that different explosives can be considerably more or less powerful than their TNT equivalent.

The 2020 Beirut explosion involved 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrite which exploded with a force equivalent to 1,100 tonnes of TNT.

The SS Richard Montgomery sank with 1,400 tonnes of explosives, of a variety of types, some of which could be more powerful than TNT.

Hm, reminds me of the 2020 beirut explosion. It was 2.7 kt of ammonium nitrate.

Isn't that a kind of thing you just have to bite the bullet and deal with directly, because waiting only makes dealing with it more expensive with time?

Just evacuate the people and blow it up, accepting that it'll inconvenience a lot of folks and the national budget even more, but will also briefly revitalize the local economy, as every contractor there is will maximize the opportunity to suck out the funds set aside for repairing buildings damaged in the explosion - and make sure to record the disposal itself from every possible angle, with most expensive cameras government can buy, as selling clips of it to the media industry would be a licensing goldmine and recoup some of the costs.

Hell, turn it into a spectator event, and tourists coming to see it may just pay for the whole thing.

Seems like some enterprising biotechnology researcher needs to create some explosive eating bacteria/fungu, like the plastic eating mushrooms like the ones found in the Amazon.

I've always kind of wondered if it would be possible to invent some kind of fungus or bacteria that eats tnt, and just let it eat away.

They just cut the masts off it last week, apparently to stop boats heading over to look at it.

I saw them while still attached earlier this summer - very spooky, like being next to a potentially active volcano.

So a cautious person would naturally wonder when will an adversary (such as Iran?) choose to do something with this situation.

As a German living in Berlin it's still pretty normal that once in a while WW2 bombs are found during construction. Heavy bombs that didn't explode probably penetrated the ground quite a bit so when rebuilding it was probably just easier to just leave them there. That's just a guess.

There are also still bombs and grenades in the rivers. There are some magnet fishing YouTube channels where you can occasionally see them pulling up stuff like that.

> I still wonder how...

A 500 lbs bomb falling from altitude can bury itself a fair ways in soil. Most of its fellow bombs will have good fuses - and with the mess they make, it would take some careful excavation in just the right spot to find the dud bomb. (Or, maybe it fell in a patch of overgrown brush in a park, or in a river, or a farmer's pond, or ...)

And with the scale at which Germany was bombed in WWII, there was nothing remotely resembling the resources to carefully excavate all the myriad square miles where dud bombs might have fallen. Either during the war, or after.

Yeah, bombs are found regularly. A special case was about 15 years ago when there was a bomb in Munich they couldn't diffuse and which in consequence has been exploded purposly right in the city: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dJwE2wLJKKc

That was a quite impressive experience. Windows in the surrounding area broke and straw, which they used to damlen the shockwave, caught fire and was thrown around.

10 - 20 % never exploded, and those exploding buried the unexploded ordnance. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-bomb-craters-after-allied-...

Those areas where moon craters at the end of the war. But by then logistics where decentralized, all those last days last ditch products, where made in underground facilities or small village smith factories. Effectively they bombed a bomb disposal pit..

True further east, here in former Germany, now Poland. Especially throughout the construction and investment boom that's been happening since 00's. Just last year my neighborhood was evacuated.

Unexploded Soviet ordnance - insane how much of it was dropped and buried in the rubble to this day. You're right though - weird to think that nobody would notice, but so much Europe was turned to rubble at that time. These things got turned to unrecognizable rusty mush after a few decades.

Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice. These things are pretty routine, there is no fear or panic. IThey just diffuse and take the thing away to some military range to dispose of it.

About 10 years ago somebody found an unexploded shell/cannon ball from the war of 1812 in Boston Harbor while poking around during an astronomically low tide. The bomb squad detonated it on the beach in my neighborhood (most likely a training exercise hard to know how dangerous it was). Still upset I missed it. At the time I lived in an apartment where I could see the detonation site.

For Berlin you can really imagine how much bombs were dropped if you look at the aerial images from the 50s. You can find them on their Geoportal. if you click on the dots there is a link to see the oblique aerial image to get even a better feeling.

Link Aerial image: https://gdi.berlin.de/viewer/main/?MAPS={"center":[390416.44...

Link example oblique aerial image: https://gdi.berlin.de/data/luftbild_1954_sl/pictures/1954_sl...

It really is very common here in Germany to get an alarm that a WW2 bomb was found somewhere near you, telling people close by to evacuate. Like every couple of months. It doesn’t even register with people, I don’t know if the news even report it.

Germany deals with multiple thousands of WW2 bombs each year to this day.

9 years ago in Thessaloniki Greece, another 500 pound bomb was found 70000 people were evacuated, the disarming took 30 minutes reportedly. Last week they found 1000 pieces of various unexploded ordnance in the city's harbor, leading theory is they were dumbed during the German withdrawal in the second world war.

While searching for that I discovered "U.X.B." a 1942 UK bomb disposal training film that is surprisingly thorough in description of the types of German bombs, fuses, and how to report UXBs (during WW2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhpmXeCp6sc

Not directly bomb related but another good UK series from the 80s that gives a good impression of how so many bombs ended up undiscovered is "The Machine Gunners".

My parents were around the age of the children in the series during WW II in Germany and what they recounted matched how the children experienced the time pretty well.

That was one of my favourite TV series as a kid.

It was still in fresh memory for a lot of people, broadcast 25 years after the end of WW2, I think it got the feeling over very well.

This is a dramatization of a 1958 book that goes more technical detail than the series did, "Unexploded Bomb: A History of Bomb Disposal" by Major B.Hartley. There's also a relatively recent talk on it, "Hacking WWII Bomb Fuses" which may be on YT somewhere.

There was a similarly named documentary on Channel 4 called "Danger, Unexploded Bomb" which covered all the various types of fuzes. Sadly seems to be lost to the sands of time, now!

James May did a bit about it in one of his shows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnQ_pS4T0vI

Also "Blitz Street" with Tony Robinson, where they build a street of typical 1940s houses and slowly increase the WW2 bomb size to see the damage the would do.

Whoh 1979! Downloading now, thanks for the rec

> I remember being astounded by how the water "amplifies" the explosions - so while a hand grenade blast is very dangerous on the surface, under the sea it becomes far more horrific prospect, due to the water transferring the blast more efficiently.

Curiously, it is exactly the opposite in many video games. In video games water often protects you from the explosion. I wonder, where did this trope came from...

I'm pretty sure if you've seen figures in the 100 year range, that's something that was largely aspirational, put out after the 100 year anniversary of the armistice. Some of the experts in France still say over 500 years at the current rate of remediation.

In France and Belgium it is common for farmers in the area of former battle of WWI to collect unexploded ordinance while ploughing in autumn. Sometimes the bombs have been dropped and not exploded. Sometimes it is an old stock along the line that was not used as the line moved.

I wonder how F up Ukraine is going to be in the future. I know that the thousands of kilometers of drone fiber wire is probably going to be a problem, but are there other horrible things to be wary of? (mine I assume?)

Same with parts of Germany, there are signs along the side of the road telling you not to stray from the road. Most recently it's affected firefighters fighting forest fires where the forest is full of UXO.

Surely, these rouge zones can be turned back into useable areas- after the bombs are defused. If there was lots of lead, then the produce from those areas would be poisonous though..

Here in the states, the main WWI issues are stockpiles of chemical weapons that were buried and then forgotten about. They pop up from time to time, and we've only recently started cleaning them up. Ironically, the ones that were stored somewhat deliberately with safety in mind end up being some of the worst to dispose of, because the poorly-stored ones can be largely thrown into a blast-resistant washing machine, popped open with a small charge, and then scrubbed with all sorts of fun chemicals to neutralize the toxins.

Fun fact: One of the best analogs available for phosgene that's been sitting in cold water for a hundred years is Wintergreen DOTS candy, if you can keep the engineers and military brass from eating all of them.

> Then they move to the "back seat" and consult or assist from far away

Probably not. The article mentions two active bomb disposal soldiers whose rank is Major or higher, and a colonel who oversees operations. This seems like a standard military career progression, not specific to the EOD regiment. In the armoured infantry, for example, a company commander (i.e. a Major) might still fight as a dismount, delegating a sergeant to stay in their vehicle to command it.

Also note that in the British Army, soldiers of all trades often move jobs every couple of years, sometime returning to a particular organisation but now with a higher rank.

> You never know piece of trivial information may prove vital down the road. You also don't know how long in the future a current piece of critical information will stay critical.

When our house was built, the water company workers spend a day digging on the side of the road to search for the fresh water pipe, but they could not find it. A retired neighbor walked by and told them, that the road has been straightened and one bend removed 10 years ago. As their map was not updated, the actual pipe was 5m from where they were digging. Trivial piece of information missing.

The current models are much fancier but until 2019 they were using various variations of the old Alvis Wheelbarrow, which dated all the way back to 1972!

https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/collections/remotec-wh...

They were a fairly common sight on the streets of Belfast in the 1980s/90s, where carrying out controlled explosions on unattended vehicles proved to be a remarkably effective deterrent against illegal parking...

I'm sure most of them are much less militarized than the police in the US.

The per-capita number is only one part of the puzzle. This is one of the annoying things about Gladwell's work: he writes breathlessly about statistics like this, but often fails to put them in broader context, when that context matters.

It probably depends, but for example in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, between 1000 and 2000 bombs are found and defused each year. The last uncontrolled explosion was in 2014, killing one person.

Even if every scrap of WWII bombing records had been kept, preserved, and properly indexed for that - WWII bomber navigation was nothing near accurate enough for it to be very useful. I'd figure the builders just go with their local knowledge - of how many WWII bombs have turned up, and where, and things to watch out for.

BTW, Europe has similar problems with dud artillery shells, old minefields, etc. And it's not just WWII, nor just Germany. The most infamous is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Zone_(World_War_I)