It's funny how often these videos are from a camera pointed at a monitor, instead of a direct digital copy. I assume extracting the actual file is logistically tricky due to both technical and bureaucratic reasons.
One famous historical version of this was the live video feed from the Apollo 11 moon landing.
There was a direct video feed, but that was being transmitted to Australia (facing the Moon at the time), and it wasn't possible to patch that directly through to US-compatible video feeds. The first images that Nasa received were upside down. The ultimate video, broadcast live internationally, was from a camera pointed at the CRT / television image at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canbedra, ACT, Australia.
I'm having trouble finding a full retelling of this though here's a story of Honeysuckle Creek's role and a bit about the TV image:
The police have a never-ending issue with this when trying to get video from random Temu-quality CCTV recorders at the scene of a crime. I know one defendant who almost got away[1] with a heinous robbery on a mobile phone store because the technician from HQ remoted in to try and get the video off and somehow deleted it instead.
[1] the store clerk later remembered the defendant had been drinking a pop when he entered the store and they found the bottle had been left behind, which had his DNA on it, and his DNA was on file
If you don’t need it to be perfect it is actually not too difficult. A notch filter could be enough remove most of the pattern provided that you have a good way of guesstimating its frequency
Yeah, similar for interesting events caught on security cameras. I assume these videos tend to come from the operator who only has access to view but not to export. Plus, they'd need to get the export into a phone-native format for upload onto social media, so the uploader may need admin access, familiarity with formats and/or ffmpeg, and a way to transfer to a phone or personal PC.
> This is why HDCP enforcement may be the dumbest legal-technical mandate ever.
Indeed. Because of HDCP common use cases like splitting, converting or sending a video signal are unsupported or afterthoughts by most consumer devices, even when dealing with non-protected signals. Of course, the HDCP flag can be removed by some shady devices but these are not commonly available and are often poorly documented.
Heh, my wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She does live audio production for work but occasionally has to deal with video. Active HDMI splitters are one of the few cases where cheaper is often better because the cheap Chinese ones will usually do HDCP stripping and something sane with the EDID data, compared to more expensive ones that actually follow the spec.
HDCP strippers are very commonly available from the East.
Of course they aren't called "HDCP strippers", but ever since the master key was leaked/cracked, many anonymous devices with HDMI inputs will strip HDCP.
If its a DVR then one needs permission to download the video. Many DVR's have access policies that can limit certain users/groups to only view or playback disabling download. Then if they do have download access they likely need access to a USB port and have a USB drive handy as they likely have to download the file from a web UI. Then they have to get that video on to a PC or Phone/tablet and upload it.
Or just point the phone at the screen, record, click the share button and select YouTube or whatever.
When I was involved in an accident the police said they weren't allowed to give me the CCTV footage, but I was allowed to record it on my phone. Who knows.
The more upsetting part to me is that, with even a little bit of effort, recording a screen with a camera produces a perfectly acceptable image, other than some artifacts about framerate not being synced.
This was true back in the CRT and cheap Sony camcorder days, and it is even more true in the wide viewing angle, high quality phone image sensor, and image stabilization days.
But nobody cares to take five extra seconds to get good framing, or reduce glare, or hold their damn phone steady, or match the damn aspect ratio!
It's infuriating how little people seem to care in general
Which is getting scarily good. I realised this a couple of days ago shooting food photos, realising the color balance and saturation were way off, but that that was because in real time the camera app had recognised the subject as food.
(I'm probably way late in becoming aware of this. It still simultaneously 1) blew my mind, 2) annoyed me, and 3) terrified me.)
Whoa, that’s really close to where I live. I’m in Roseville right now, actually. Can you tell me more? Where was this mark 81 last week? Do you work at McClellan?
Same in Germany. Happened fairly regularly when I had to come to the office every day that a road was blocked because they found a WW2 bomb when they dug new underground parking garages.
Guess bombing civilians wasn’t a good idea. Sorry about that
Alas, this has never stopped to be part of warfare. When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?
While the bombing in WW2 did at times deliberately target civilians, also they were incredibly bad at dropping the bombs in the right place.
They regularly conducted bombing raids at night in almost complete darkness, with a guy looking out the top of the plane with a sextant measuring the location of stars to decide when to drop the bombs. So anything within, say, 3 miles of a tank factory was at risk of being bombed.
Improved technology had a great impact in this area, because if 90% of your bombs are missing the target, a perfect targeting system is like having 10x as many planes.
Plenty of such places in Italy too, in the Desenzano lake it's easier to find WW2 memorabilia than to avoid it.
We've learned at school that more people died to bombs in Italy post WW2 than during the war itself, it wasn't even close. I remember in the 2000s a single year made around 6 victims.
Most of the bombs are really at sea and lakes, and we still have around 250000 to a million unexploded bombs on our territory.
Most would not explode, but some are very dangerous because the triggers are the only parts that corrode and get ruined more easily thus making the bombs unstable.
"At the current rate of clearance it is a conservative estimate that the Département du Déminage will still be finding these weapons nine hundred years from now."
There are a lot of photos, really bad. You'd think people would have learned but in current events Gaza has had 4x the ordnance dropped on it (in about 1/5 the land area).
Prague is a really good example of a major European city that was relatively untouched in the war. And it shows. Lots and LOTS of historical buildings and a very "old European" feel through a lot of the city.
Imagine earnestly believing Hitler did the whole London bombing thing, which utterly crippled the Luftwaffe and seriously hurt how useful they were in the rest of the war, out of military necessity.
Also the bombing of Dresden being out of the ordinary for the war is Russian fiction. Stalin begged for Dresden to be bombed, we have the letters to the Americans to back that up.
You don’t have to struggle. There are plenty of videos and photos of that time that you can check out. Also if you visit London you can go around and see a bunch of buildings they haven’t rebuilt and just left them in semi destroyed state as monuments
> Also if you visit London you can go around and see a bunch of buildings they haven’t rebuilt and just left them in semi destroyed state as monuments
I lived in London for 20 years and never knew or saw anything like that?
The main thing you notice when you walk around London is the old/new mix. If you see a concrete monstrosity, nestled next to a Victorian/Edwardian/Elizabethan building, you're probably guaranteed that the newer building was built on top of a bomb site.
Yeah sorry I was specifically referring to Christchurch Greyfriars. Basically it was as the article said, I was staying in the area (near uh a pub Samuel Pepys I believe) and was walking around and that was definitely one of the things that caught my eye. Maybe such things aren’t as common as I thought
I spent a bit of time in Budapest, something like 80% of the buildings were damaged during WWII and neglected behind the iron curtain afterwards. Even walking around today it is very common for a building to have a restored facade but a lot of historical damage on the sides.
My mum and dad were teenagers during the war and did fire-watching, notoriously avoided if at all possible (they said) so given to anyone biddable or old. It got a bit hair-raising according to my dad, he stood in a doorway near Imperial College watching a plate glass sheet decide if it was going to fall on him or into the building. Walking through labs with bombs dropping was .. intense.
If you had an "anderson shelter" in your garden you were lucky. Many poor working class families got a "morrison shelter" which was basically a steel table you could use in a dining room or kitchen and then hide under. In some ways more convenient I guess? (Anderson shelters got cold and damp)
He was bombed out of a house in Stepney. They lost everything. I can't decide if he missed more the entire collection of the first 50 penguin books, or a lump of melted glass he scavanged from the fire of crystal palace in the 1930s: these are the two things he remembered in the 60s and 70s talking about it.
He was studying electrical engineering and maths at university by the end of the war and so not called up. He said they trained in how to manage live power cables with wooden "tongs" and were part of rescue crews when buildings collapsed. My mum was tracing maps for D-Day, and packing munitions and my Aunt did technical drawing on the "mulberry harbour" concrete caissons floated over to the beaches for D-Day.
A good read on the blitz would be "the people's war" by Angus Calder, which in large part is made up from "mass observation" recruited/organised diaries kept during the period, and donated to the University of Sussex. My mum kept one of them.
A standing joke in Architecture circles is that the greater london council destroyed more Wren churches in London than the Blitz. UCL used to say the basements where compsci was sited were kindly dug by the Germans.
Postwar housing was a mess. My aunt lived in a 5 story block of flats in Paddington she got on a long lease as bomb damaged property, my Uncle bought into commercial premises around Farringdon in a deal which demanded he do structural repairs immediately. There was a huge housing shortage and for years you could still see the pre-fabricated houses around Lambeth Palace which were a godsend of temporary housing but persisted into the 60s. Stepney where my dad grew up was a wreck, anywhere around the docks basically. It was a patchwork.
The pseudo-documentary film "Fires were started" by Humphrey Jennings has some iconic footage of the dock firestorm (not to be compared with Dresden, but it was severe) You would recognise the shots of the fronts of builings collapsing and firemen holding hoses wearing brodie helmets.
Comparisons are evil. Coventry was really badly affected and the modern day cathedral stands next to the wreck of the original gothic one. It's like the Kaiser Wilheim spire in Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a very pale shadow of the reality at the time. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Rotterdam were all significantly worse affected than London in the end, but to anyone in London I doubt it felt like it. The bombing in Japan was on an altogether different scale.
I can't imagine the record keeping to provide the data for this. And of course, they have weasel words at the bottom: "The National Archives give no warranty to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of the information provided"
It would be great to think that littering the countryside with unexploded ordinance was a thing of the past and we no longer do such things, but the conflict in Ukraine is just one example to the contrary.
Has any effort been put into making duds easier to find after the fact? e.g. Has anyone thought of putting something like an upscaled RECCO reflector on bombs? i.e. A passive radar reflector that would allow searchers to just hit a field with radar and get reflections back from unexploded ordinance.
Obviously, this wouldn't work for cruise missiles, etc. that need to have a low radar profile while in flight, but why not for bombs (especially cluster munitions) that are used in much greater numbers?
This is just one idea. I'm sure other methods could be used to make duds easier to find. Is there military value in leaving stealthy duds in your enemy's territory?
> Is there military value in leaving stealthy duds in your enemy's territory?
In all fairness -- probably, yes. It's the enemy's territory, and now you've made it more deadly, like an accidental minefield.
But I don't think any consideration is given to what happens to duds, what are the civilian consequences or environmental impacts of any part of the weapons lifecycles. It is an industry of death and destruction after all.
It'd likely to be more accurate to say that some are left that simply don't explode yet. A good example would be certain cases of cluster munitions that are designed to hit airfields. A most of the explosives will go off and crater the concrete and asphalt, but others will remain unexploded and sensitive to detonation. As runway repair work cannot commence until those unexploded munitions are cleared, the airfield is out of action longer than it would be otherwise.
I understand in these cases and other ones such as scattering mines that a timer can be set so the mine or munition deactivates after a set time (say, a week) by deactivating the fuse.
Not all are designed in this way of course. And apologies, I'm looking for source links, but I can't find them at the moment.
Edit: Here's an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATOR_mine_system
>But I don't think any consideration is given to what happens to duds
On the contrary. Duds causing UXO is the reason the US and most of NATO chooses not to build cluster munitions anymore, preferring instead pre-formed tungsten balls that are fired like a shotgun when the munition is over it's target.
The dud rate was something like 2%, not that much but enough to make the US decide that leaving tens of thousands of UXOs in formerly enemy territory isn't okay.
Russian cluster munitions being used in Ukraine right now have a much much higher dud rate, and that's before any bad storage or handling.
For similar reasons, many NATO countries have given up types of landmines
Modern US munitions have a mechanism that bricks the warhead after a certain amount of time from being fired (years). That way they retain use on the battlefield as a threat to enemy soldiers even if they don't properly detonate but will not pose a long term risk to civilians.
Maybe something useful happens to disable the fuse? The hundreds of pounds of high explosive are still hundreds of pounds of high explosive, in a rusty container, no?
Maybe the US and its proxies should lead by example before trying to convince anyone else, given they are the ones who dropped far more bombs than all of those combined.
I wonder if you could put the radar reflector on the end of the shell or bomb. It would only be visible from behind which is only possible when in ground.
The other way would be have fuse that shows reflector after hitting something but not detonating.
“We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.”
― Alfred Hitchcock
That is an excellent quote, thanks for sharing it. But I'm not sure why he told us the exact date of detonation. Wasn't he supposed to be the master of suspense?
For the joke to work, the listener needs to picture a highly advanced, evolved civilization far in the future. Saying a big number gives the imagination a concrete starting point. Like a writing prompt.
The date of intended detonation is very much not going to be the actual date anything explodes with how stable our bomb chemistry is over long intervals.
The bible says that no one knows the day or the hour of the apocalypse. But plenty of christians are eager to tell you the week or the minute! It's been on my mind lately due to several billboards in my area pointing to october9th.com
Mormons be hoarding all the wealth and supplies just in case it is sometime soon. Jesus would be real mad if he came back and they only had a measly 5 billion.
Over time, the explosive chemicals in the both the detonator and the main charge can frequently get MORE sensitive to disturbance, which is kind of perverse.
That's why if you ever come across any old UXO (UneXploded Ordnance) you should call the bomb squad and never touch it
There was a great discussion I read here a year ago from a chemist who went into the details on why this occurs. I'll link the comment. Really great read.
Even if it's inert many explosives decompose into toxic compounds. Other explosives use mercury compounds for detonators, which at the worst can make the soil itself toxic to the touch. There are also gas shells, some of which had arsenic. Areas affected in that way will be poisonous for a very long time.
> And "shelf-stable and safe for many decades" is never a priority feature for high-volume wartime production of explosives.
Maybe not on the order of decades, but 'shelf-stable and safe for handling' is a definite concern in any ordnance production. Last thing you want is your whole ammo stockpile blowing up because a tired soldier set an artillery shell down a little too hard.
Many of the explosives used are actually fairly stable chemically and require either severe degradation to become unstable, or an external force applied to them that is sufficient to trigger their explosive effects. C4, as long as it hasn't been sitting around too long, is pretty safe to light on fire. And yet it's one of the more energetic commonly used explosives out there.
> And "shelf-stable and safe for many decades" is never a priority feature for high-volume wartime production of explosives.
The problem is that those minitions do get used many years later. Often because after a war ends there is a huge surplus of munitions you want to save till the next war.
Russia is using decade-old shells in Ukraine for instance.
Mh, chemical stability is usually meant in a more delicate way.
There are explosives that need other explosives to set them off. If someone gave you a pound of C4 and then evacuated your neighbors, you would probably need to do some research to set it off. With the amount of explosives moved around in the world wars, easy storage and fairly safe logistics even by minimally trained soldiers are very much a priority.
On the flipside, there are explosives which won't let you finish a sneeze in the same room. Or which decompose into the latter. You wouldn't want to move thousands of tons of these around.
Re: your last paragraph called to my mind the great french thriller "The Wages of Fear" from 1953, in which two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin need to cross rough terrain, and the viewer finds himself holding his breath quite a lot...
Here's one in Oxfordshire 4 days ago, although I'm a little confused how a First World War bomb got all the way there. Dropped from a Zeppelin? (It's also sadly possible that the news reporter got the wrong war.)
I still have some german documentary about a man defusing these things burned into my head. He was asked why he wasn't wearing any safety equipment while working on these large bombs.
Well for smaller amounts of explosive chemicals, they'd wear the blast suit, because it could save them and might keep them a bit presentable otherwise. That'd be nice for the family. If the bomb is several times heavier than you are though, they'd just do the job right and go home after - and no one needs safety equipment on a job done right.
The way they figured out how to defuse the bombs was pretty rough, too. The person that did the defusal would call out what they were about to do next to a person taking notes at a safe distance. If the bomb exploded, they knew not to do that again.
More specifically such large bombs will kill you with the pressure wave if nothing else. They are not survivable. Either you diffuse them successfully or you die.
It would be interesting to see a graph over time, because presumably the vast majority of those happened in the immediate years following the war. That Wikipedia link mentions two deaths in 2014, which may be the most recent fatalities.
I can recommend a lovely short video in French documenting the work that I recently watched: Meet the team still cleaning up after World War I | Zone Rouge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB-Ncob1gDk)
Lots of unexploded ordnance. Reminds me of the story of the guy who tried to weld an artillery shell (and blew up), he was sure it's safe coze his father used it for 40 years as a gardening tool:
I have an irrational fear of dying from an airplane crashing into me. It doesn't help that friends of friends of mine were victims in this from just a few weeks ago:
I think I know the feeling. I had these nightmares as a kid about wolfes or 'cartoon heatseeking missiles' hunting me, like it was the same nightmare/feeling.
> Miyazaki Airport was built in 1943 as a former Imperial Japanese Navy flight training field from which some kamikaze pilots took off on suicide attack missions.
> A number of unexploded bombs dropped by the US military during World War II have been unearthed in the area, Defense Ministry officials said.
Same in the UK. I'd hope we as a species would learn from things like that, but I fear we'll be seeing the same thing centuries from now even if the details change.
There were craters just outside the village I grew up in. We used to go sledding down them when I was a kid. The story I heard was it just dumped bombs from a raid on a larger city so they didn't have to carry them back.
When I was in elementary school in Lower Saxony I „often" couldn't go home after school because there was some defusion of WW2 bombs in my area going on. „Often“ means something like 10 times in 4 years. Was quite used to this and didn't think much about it back then. Now that I have kids myself I would be glad to know that they won't have to deal with the fails of my generation. But the older I get, the less confident I am.
I grew up in a South Pacific country that served as an advanced American base during WW2. A few years ago a massive stockpile (over a hundred) of artillery shells was found at the bottom of the capital's port, right under the dock of a big ferry that shuffles people between islands every day. I can´t imagine the carnage if one of those had gone off during the 70 years or so they had been sitting there.
Its surprising to me that bombs explode after being buried for such a long time. The chemicals remain contained but I imagined the fuse would rust away.
The irony here is that nuclear weapons are actually safer to have lying around than conventional weapons; The amount of work that it takes to actually arm and activate a warhead is higher and you get basically one chance to get it right or it locks you out and self-defeats.
For anyone who is curious, there's a wonderful short video on PALs and how they isolate a nuclear warhead from the outside world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA
Nukes are also not very stable long-term Their fissile payload is radioactive after all, and as it decays it becomes harder and harder to achieve prompt criticality.
However, that does not stop adversaries with physical access from dismantling the warhead and extracting the enriched fissile material. In a practical sense, easily obtained nuclear weapons are probably more dangerous than TNT UXO, or at least possess the potential to be used for greater harm.
It can be caused by the explosives degrading over decades into much more unstable compounds which begin the explosive reaction and detonate the rest. In other words degrading into a new sort of fuse which spontaneously triggers.
Slightly off topic but when I read the headline, I assumed "large crater" would be much more large than you see in the picture. The article reports "7 meters (23 feet) in diameter and 1 meter (3 feet) deep." For a bomb that doesn't seem that "large."
Luckily no one was hurt or nearby when it went off.
The US 500lb bombs had about 270lbs of explosives in them. If this location were a WW-II airfield, it is the sort of bomb that would have been dropped on airplanes on the ground to destroy them.
Most of the damage to Japan's cities was actually done by napalm-filled bomblets combined into cluster-bombs[1], partly because weather made precision bombing difficult.
Also Japanese construction was conveniently, for the US, extremely flammable so you could do way more damage starting a firestorm than you could with the same number of bombers filled with traditional bombs.
There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.
Similarly, the Japanese launched over 9000 incendiary balloon bombs against the US & Canada, but they were generally ineffective. Six civilians were killed in Oregon in 1945.
Yeah one of the few instances of damage on the US side of the world from WW2 and it barely did anything. The US was incredibly fortunate to not have to fight basically any of the war on the home front. We rode that wave for a couple decades as Europe and Japan etc rebuilt.
It was the great success of the Allied firebombing campaign that inflicted suburbia on the United States. US construction is just as flammable but fire is less likely to spread when the houses are farther apart.
(Let's rephrase the success part. The campaign was destructive and deadly for the civilian population but did nothing to end the war earlier. Bomber Harris and the Lord Lindemann got a career boost, though.)
There are many contemporary sources on the Japanese side that suggest the firebombings did hasten the (inevitable at this point) surrender. The US certainly had a strategic desire for Japan to surrender to the US rather than the USSR.
Yeah it turns out the whole idea of morale bombing is pretty flawed, it largely just galvanizes the population it turns out; Japan, England and Germany all reacted similarly, maybe for different cultural reasons but it was ineffective everywhere.
Really? To assert this, you need to show not that Axis production didn't decline, but that the damage done didn't prevent production from increasing even more. How does one show that?
The war in Europe is highly arguable in both directions.
To assert that the bombing campaign did nothing for the war in the Pacific flies in the face of recorded history. We literally have the imperial Japanese equivalent of meeting minutes where they talk about this stuff and toward the end the sheer destruction of the bombing campaign did affect the credibility of the militarists "yeah we can still pull this off" claims in the eyes of many of the others.
Which, of course, proves nothing. What matters is how much it would have increased without the bombing.
Actually, it's even worse than that, since one must also subtract from this production the resources Germany was putting into air defense. This effort was massive.
You are completely ignoring Japanese mindset during that time. Absolute devotion to emperor, casualties could be in millions and that wouldn't change anything. Their suicidal charges and not giving up alive are pretty famous and this comes from certain place, same as kamikadze. Some rational counting of outputs may be for bureaucrats but those were not holding any real power in Japan empire.
There is a lot of speculation why emperor and generals surrendered, even atomic bombs may not have been the triggering point as much as soviet declaration of war to Japan at 8 August 1945. Most probably it all compounded.
Did historical bombs typically make big explosions? Reading some numbers from the war, it seemed like the strategy was more to dump enormous volume of ordinance and hope to get lucky hitting something vital.
That strategy was not because the bombs weren't very destructive, but because they just could not be placed accurately. So they had to drop a lot of bombs and hope a few of them hit the strategically important targets.
Yep. The US did drop around 160,800 tons of conventional bombs on Japan during WWII, thought that's still relatively tame compared to the 623,000 tons they drop on Germany. Though the two nukes more than made up for it, I guess.
Bomb findings during construction is nothing especially rare in these countries.
The conventional bombing of Japan was scheduled for massive increase. To quote Ian Toll's "Twilight of the Gods":
> If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. [...] At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan. According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.
> The conventional bombing of Japan was scheduled for massive increase.
Allegedly.
It's possible it's true, but claims like this have the incentive of selling the "atom bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and justified" narrative behind them, so that should be taken into account as a factor.
It doesn't even have to be consciously disingenous - the more one can convince oneself (and thus eventually others) of how destructive and costly conventional warfare would have been, the more digestible the nuclear option becomes, so there's a lot of motivation to fuel some motivated reasoning.
Professionals talk logistics indeed. To imagine what kind is pipeline would be required to enable such a venture. Producing, assembling, and shipping millions of tons of explosives as a continual operation.
'Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II.' - https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390b...
Absolutely. In my country it is mandatory to submit an UXO report as part of getting the building permit for nontrivial stuff. Most of the time this is boring office work (Was there a strategic target nearby during WWII? Are there any records of bombing happening here? Have there been earthworks in the last 70 years significant enough to rule out anything still remaining?) and you get a report noting that there's no risk expected, but sometimes you have to call in the cavalry and go searching with ground-penetrating radar.
It's just part of doing business, really. Same story with archaeological remains, chemical contamination, or threatened animal species.
In some parts of France, you can’t dig without getting a specialized surveyor inspection and certificate it’s safe to dig this deep in that place first.
It would have done considerably more damage if it had gone off when and where it was intended. The runway is designed to have enormous, heavy planes takeoff and land on it routinely, it undoubtedly absorbed a lot of the bomb’s energy. Not to mention the earth underneath it.
Real WWII historians could probably determine the date on which the bomb was dropped, its intended target, etc., etc.
But with the condition that most of Japan was in, later in WWII - I'm thinking that "gone off where & when intended" would probably have had little effect. Most of the country was burned-out rubble.
If the crater is only 1 meter deep then the bomb was likely more shallow than that (although some of the ejected dirt will fall back into the crater). So much of the bomb's energy went into the atmosphere.
Slightly off topic - if you want to see how explosion looks like in vacuum, here is recent (less than 1 day old) Iranian ICBM interception (either by Israeli Arrow 2/3 or Patriot) in cca outer space [1] or direct video link [2]. Expanse wasn't so far off
Every bomb, gun, and mine we make has impacts like this... AK47s manufactured by the Soviet Union are still in circulation in Africa and the Middle East, mines in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War still maim children decades later, cluster munitions in Syria and Ukraine continue to cause civilian casualties long after conflicts have subsided... weapons of war often outlive the wars they were created for, perpetuating violence and suffering for generations... yet we never learn.
The first time I ever went to Munich there was a bomb that had been discovered from WW2 under one of the buildings during a renovation and they had to do a controlled detonation. Despite their efforts there was visible damage everywhere, broken glass, etc. I feel terrible for Ukraine, Gaza and others, have unexploded ordinances that (probably more so in Ukraine than Gaza, just given scale/age of munitions) will be there for generations.
In a way I think Ukraine has a somewhat better handle on big unexploded munitions from ballistic or cruise missiles and drones: They have an active air defense and the big stuff can be followed on radar - so they know the possible point of impact and EOD teams know where to look.
I worry more about unexploded cluster munitions and small mines. Some of the latter look like something I'd definitely had picked up as a child just for curiosity.
Modern bombs tend to be more reliable about exploding when we want them to, and we now have some bombs that if they don't explode will degrade. So not quite as bad as you would guess. However still going to be a big problem for decades.
Mines and cluster ammunition are horrifying. They are invisible or look like toys even, and it is impractical to clean all of them up. They’re just waiting there, in the dirt, ready to kill some innocent child. Horrible.
Headline says "taxiway" and the crater is located on the edge, but runway 9/27 markings are very close by. Aircraft should not be at speed, departing or landing on a taxiway. "Taxi" is how they go between gate and runway at low speed.
The red box runway markings are actually warning you that you're approaching the runway 09-27 and are on the taxiway side of the taxiway/runway demarcation line (the one that's two solid lines and two dashed lines). You can also tell which side is which by the demarcation line, since the dashed lines are on the runway side and the solid lines are on the taxiway side. So technically the bomb actually exploded on the runway, although on a portion of the "runway" where aircraft would be transitioning to or from a taxiway and traveling slowly as you said. Also it's very close to the edge on a part aircraft shouldn't normally roll directly over with their tires, but it certainly could have been under a wing.
When I read the headline, I was wondering why in the world a bomb was being taxied on a runway, like on a cargo plane. However, now I'm wondering how a bomb wasn't discovered when the airport was built. From the video posted elsewhere in the comments, it looks like the bomb was buried under the runway. Are there no ground surveys done with radar before building a plane runway?
I haven't fact-checked anything about this, but this bomb (and its friends) were probably dropped here because it was an active military airport during WW2 and the US was desperate to put a dent in Japan's air power. After the war, thorough ordinance disposal was very likely a secondary consideration rebuilding the country. (And its runways.)
Thousands of tons of bombs were dropped on Japan in WW2. Many of them didn't explode. This airport was apparently an active airfield at the time the US was bombing Japan and 500lb bombs were the sort of thing used to destroy parked planes.
Yes, someone could have snuck into an airport and buried a bomb underneath the runway, then cleaned up the digging operation so as to not be noticed, but horses, not zebras.
They're just asking on what basis the article is confident that it's a specific bomb from a specific era. Is it based on a forensic analysis of the shrapnel, something like that? If it's just an assumption based on the context, you'd want to say "an explosion, believed to have been caused by an unexploded WWII-era bomb...".
An explosion goes off under a runway. The article says "it's a bomb, it was dropped on the runway 80 years ago, buried with dirt, paved over, then it went off".
Cool. Now, how did you figure that out? Did someone analyze the shrapnel and conclusively date it to allied bombing campaigns in WWII, or is that what a source close to the events said, or did the reporter just... look at the picture and shoot from the hip? Any of these is an acceptable answer, so long as readers know which one it is.
If it wasn't from the war, then the more likely scenario is the bomb feel off a plane after the war than somebody snuck into the airfield. Bombs do fall off planes.
My question was more of, how do they determine this sort of thing or is it just an assumption because it is the most likely scenario?
I'm not doing anything of the sort. I know bombs are still there from WW2. Just because there are still bombs from WW2 does not mean that every bomb that goes off is from WW2. While it is likely that the bomb is from the war, I haven't seen what evidence they have confirming that. That is all I am asking for.
The evidence is likely simple deduction, as in asking "when was the last time this area was bombed" combined with the history of the airport (built for the military in 1943, later converted to civilian use) and also noting other unexploded bombs have been unearthed in the area.
For it NOT to be a WW2 bomb would mean somebody sneaking in another bomb and paving it under the runway without being noticed.
There is a perfectly plausible alternative. A bomb fell off a plane after the war. This happens from time to time and has even happened with a nuclear bomb!
Yes, and it results in a huge amount of paperwork. You can't just randomly show up at your destination missing a bomb - especially during peacetime. They'll be combing over every part of your flight path to find it.
It could've also been intentionally buried there by bored soldiers, or placed there by airport maintenance people as a prank, or ended up there due to a freak teleporter accident. Maybe it was even put there by Godzilla. Maybe the Infinite Improbability Drive spontaneously materialized it, together with a bowl of petunias.
If you find a bomb in an area which is known to have been bombed, without any evidence to the contrary it is pretty safe to assume it's there due to the bombing.
Sorry about that. The article obviously doesn't explain. Here's my thoughts on it.
I don't think they did any exhaustive research. They didn't have to.
You would be able to look at the crater and see sizable pieces of a military air-dropped bomb. Normal bombs don't disintegrate. If they send it to a lab they can tell what explosive was used in it, which will roughly tell you when it was manufactured. (Assuming they don't find a serial number.)
That by itself is hardly conclusive, but that completely changes when you find identical unexploded bombs buried in the same area.
It would be rather odd if somebody came along later and put the same kind of bomb used in WWII in the ground. When the bomb got there isn't that important.
Somebody could have planted a bomb (if it was actually a WW2 bomb that doesn't seem likely) or it could have fallen off a plane before (not sure if there 500 pound bombs before the war?) or after the war.
That absolutely can be a WWII bomb. They are still finding unexploded artillery shells from the first world war in France!
Let me repeat that, hundred-year-old shells are still underground, intact, and the explosives in them are just as powerful as when they were manufactured.
Chemicals in fuse can slowly combine until they detonate.
The odds of someone planting more explosives in a field potentially containing a dozen WWII bombs from multiple attacks are remote.
You are not addressing anything of my question. I don't care if 99.9999999% of bombs that go off are from WW2. Not every bomb that goes off is from WW2. How did they determine if this bomb was actually from WW2? Is it just an assumption or did they check something? The article did not clarify that point and just stated it as a fact.
I understand that is what is usually used, but I was asking for the actual details which was scanty in the article. Is this what they did or are they still looking into the forensics?
Because it's a silly question. The airport was bombed in WWII by the US, just like the rest of the country, and Japan wasn't in any war since then, nor was it in any war before then when it would have had such bombs dropped on this location (there was a naval war with Russia in the 1900s, but that didn't result in bombs dropped on Japan).
So basically you're asking for forensic evidence to prove that this bomb wasn't the result of time-travelers or teleporters or something equally fantastical. It's a ridiculous question. Of course it's an unexploded WWII bomb, what the hell else would it be?
Planting a bomb especially of that size (needing a vehicle and multiple men to move) in the ground under a paved taxiway at a major airport without anyone noticing? Not very likely.
The WWII explanation is much more plausible. It happens at Schiphol too that they find them (luckily not by them exploding randomly but usually during construction efforts)
This bomb was buried. Nobody knew it was there...which is sort of crazy, considering that they built a runway over it and it didn't detonate until now.
Do they (Japan, Germany) ever purposely leave unexploded ordnance in place? I see a news story about once a year about them finding a bomb, and in every case they have their bomb squad disarm and remove it. I’ve never heard of them knowingly leaving a bomb in place.
Once there's any sort of record that there's UXO somewhere it pretty much has to be removed because nobody wants the liability that would be incurred by being the party that dropped the ball. Even if that wasn't the case they generally get found because they're in the way of some construction. You have to remove it for the same reason you have to get every other rock out of the hole you're digging.
That said, I'm sure there's a few farmers who have a pretty strong inkling where one is and are actively not looking to disturb that problem.
I know of some remote¹ forest in Germany that used to be a training area. It is so bullet- and bomb-riddled that they just decided clearing it wasn't worth it, put a fence around it and declared it off-limits.
¹ in Germany, "remote" means something like "2km from the next settlement".
I don’t think so. Bombs are usually found during construction so leaving them in place would not work if they block progress on a hole/tunnel etc
For reference the state of NRW (Germany) alone found 2811 bombs in 2018 so it’s much more common than you’d think.
Laws seem to differ by state but afaik new construction must include some kind of bomb assessment, often done via aerial photos to quickly filter out areas that were not bombed at all
One of the reasons that the explosives have not been removed was the unfortunate outcome of a similar operation in July 1967, to neutralize the contents of the Polish cargo ship Kielce, that sank in 1946, off Folkestone in the English Channel. During preliminary work, Kielce exploded with a force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, digging a 20-foot-deep (6 m) crater in the seabed and bringing "panic and chaos" to Folkestone, although there were no injuries.[5]: 2000 survey, p21–22 Kielce was at least 3 or 4 miles (4.8 or 6.4 km) from land, had sunk in deeper water than Richard Montgomery, and had "just a fraction" of the load of explosives.[10] According to a BBC News report in 1970,[12] it was determined that if the wreck of Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 300 metres (980 feet)-wide column of water and debris nearly 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) into the air and generate a wave 5 metres (16 feet) high. Almost every window in Sheerness (population circa 20,000) would be broken and buildings would be damaged by the blast.
in every case they have their bomb squad disarm and remove it
They would do that, the pencil detonators the Allies used to disrupt rescue and firefighting efforts after a carpet-bombing run become ever more touchy as time wears on. A bomb that is found is disarmed or exploded, else there will be a repeat of this incident down the line.
Looking at the article, this was a WWII air base converted to a civilian airport. The bomb was not paved over due to laziness; no one knew the bomb was there.
Hindsight being 20/20, maybe they (the Japanese) could have used metal detectors when they were updating the runway? But, given that they didn't find this, I suspect it wasn't practical back then.
Perhaps now there will be an effort to use modern technology to find these?
A bomb like this could be pretty deep though. They're pretty aerodynamic and heavy yet compact. They'd go through mud pretty easily. If it's a few metres deep I doubt it would show up on a metal detector. This is why so many are still found.
I'm not sure. What is to be gained over leaving a bomb buried, if you know about it? Because then, it could go off at any time versus doing a controlled detonation or remotely disarm it.
It was probably buried during WWII where the concern was get this airport working fast so it can be used and deal with the consequences latter. Of course nobody bothered to write down where hidden bombs are (that would take time they didn't have) and so they couldn't deal with it latter.
Link to the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9GDn-cl1og
It's funny how often these videos are from a camera pointed at a monitor, instead of a direct digital copy. I assume extracting the actual file is logistically tricky due to both technical and bureaucratic reasons.
One famous historical version of this was the live video feed from the Apollo 11 moon landing.
There was a direct video feed, but that was being transmitted to Australia (facing the Moon at the time), and it wasn't possible to patch that directly through to US-compatible video feeds. The first images that Nasa received were upside down. The ultimate video, broadcast live internationally, was from a camera pointed at the CRT / television image at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canbedra, ACT, Australia.
I'm having trouble finding a full retelling of this though here's a story of Honeysuckle Creek's role and a bit about the TV image:
<https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-19/nasa-apollo-11-moon-l...>
On the Parkes dish (Aus): <https://apollo11.csiro.au/the-australian-connection/live-fro...>.
The wind problem: <https://apollo11.csiro.au/the-australian-connection/delay-an...>.
More on the technical aspects of the video feed, but without my "camera-on-a-TV-screen" bit: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=tIogywOrv8s>
The Dish (2000) is a pretty fun fictional (I assume) account of the Parkes team.
I hate it when the TV signal is upside down because it is coming from Australia!
The police have a never-ending issue with this when trying to get video from random Temu-quality CCTV recorders at the scene of a crime. I know one defendant who almost got away[1] with a heinous robbery on a mobile phone store because the technician from HQ remoted in to try and get the video off and somehow deleted it instead.
[1] the store clerk later remembered the defendant had been drinking a pop when he entered the store and they found the bottle had been left behind, which had his DNA on it, and his DNA was on file
This assumes that it's available in digital form. Knowing Japan, there is a chance this is an analog CCTV
Surely it would still be cleaner to digitize the tape (?) than to point a camera at the screen, wouldn't it?
This was faster
Are there any denoising algorithms that remove Moiré patterns? It would be a welcome addition to the stock iPhone and Android cameras.
If you don’t need it to be perfect it is actually not too difficult. A notch filter could be enough remove most of the pattern provided that you have a good way of guesstimating its frequency
It looks like Adobe Raw added a dedicated moire reduction slider to their denoising features a few years back. I wonder how it operates.
Being very slightly out of focus would probably be the best solution
Yeah, similar for interesting events caught on security cameras. I assume these videos tend to come from the operator who only has access to view but not to export. Plus, they'd need to get the export into a phone-native format for upload onto social media, so the uploader may need admin access, familiarity with formats and/or ffmpeg, and a way to transfer to a phone or personal PC.
> I assume these videos tend to come from the operator who only has access to view but not to export.
This is why HDCP enforcement may be the dumbest legal-technical mandate ever. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Conte...
"Someone has a recording device they can point at a screen" is a low bar.
> This is why HDCP enforcement may be the dumbest legal-technical mandate ever.
Indeed. Because of HDCP common use cases like splitting, converting or sending a video signal are unsupported or afterthoughts by most consumer devices, even when dealing with non-protected signals. Of course, the HDCP flag can be removed by some shady devices but these are not commonly available and are often poorly documented.
Heh, my wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She does live audio production for work but occasionally has to deal with video. Active HDMI splitters are one of the few cases where cheaper is often better because the cheap Chinese ones will usually do HDCP stripping and something sane with the EDID data, compared to more expensive ones that actually follow the spec.
HDCP strippers are very commonly available from the East.
Of course they aren't called "HDCP strippers", but ever since the master key was leaked/cracked, many anonymous devices with HDMI inputs will strip HDCP.
If its a DVR then one needs permission to download the video. Many DVR's have access policies that can limit certain users/groups to only view or playback disabling download. Then if they do have download access they likely need access to a USB port and have a USB drive handy as they likely have to download the file from a web UI. Then they have to get that video on to a PC or Phone/tablet and upload it.
Or just point the phone at the screen, record, click the share button and select YouTube or whatever.
When I was involved in an accident the police said they weren't allowed to give me the CCTV footage, but I was allowed to record it on my phone. Who knows.
The more upsetting part to me is that, with even a little bit of effort, recording a screen with a camera produces a perfectly acceptable image, other than some artifacts about framerate not being synced.
This was true back in the CRT and cheap Sony camcorder days, and it is even more true in the wide viewing angle, high quality phone image sensor, and image stabilization days.
But nobody cares to take five extra seconds to get good framing, or reduce glare, or hold their damn phone steady, or match the damn aspect ratio!
It's infuriating how little people seem to care in general
It should be able to solved by auto situation recognition on camera app.
Which is getting scarily good. I realised this a couple of days ago shooting food photos, realising the color balance and saturation were way off, but that that was because in real time the camera app had recognised the subject as food.
(I'm probably way late in becoming aware of this. It still simultaneously 1) blew my mind, 2) annoyed me, and 3) terrified me.)
That was pretty impressive! Thanks for finding it.
It is really, /really/ dumb, miraculous, fucking luck that nothing was taxiing nearby when it went off. This could have ended so much worse.
Is it really miraculous, though? Even on a very busy runway, a specific spot would be free of anything most of the time.
How much do you want to play Russian Roulette with several thousands to tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel?
It's a miracle nothing besides the taxiway was damaged and nobody was harmed or killed.
We have a bunch of those here in our area still from a train accident in 1973.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Roseville_Yard_Disaster
It's believed that many of them are still buried and likely under homes & businesses. We just assisted detonating one of the mark 81s last week.
Whoa, that’s really close to where I live. I’m in Roseville right now, actually. Can you tell me more? Where was this mark 81 last week? Do you work at McClellan?
Good short video about the Roseville yard explosion by Fascinating Horror:
https://youtu.be/fyzw-1yuUB0
London fairly regularly has WWII unexploded bombs to deal with. When you look at all the bombs dropped [1] on the city, it's hardly surprising!
[1] http://bombsight.org/#13/51.5008/-0.0536
Same in Germany. Happened fairly regularly when I had to come to the office every day that a road was blocked because they found a WW2 bomb when they dug new underground parking garages.
Guess bombing civilians wasn’t a good idea. Sorry about that
> Guess bombing civilians wasn’t a good idea.
Alas, this has never stopped to be part of warfare. When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?
> When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?
Right, it was always bad and continues to be bad.
> Sorry about that
Right back atcha. Let's learn from this and stay friends!
And not even a winning strategy either.
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
While the bombing in WW2 did at times deliberately target civilians, also they were incredibly bad at dropping the bombs in the right place.
They regularly conducted bombing raids at night in almost complete darkness, with a guy looking out the top of the plane with a sextant measuring the location of stars to decide when to drop the bombs. So anything within, say, 3 miles of a tank factory was at risk of being bombed.
Improved technology had a great impact in this area, because if 90% of your bombs are missing the target, a perfect targeting system is like having 10x as many planes.
Plenty of such places in Italy too, in the Desenzano lake it's easier to find WW2 memorabilia than to avoid it.
We've learned at school that more people died to bombs in Italy post WW2 than during the war itself, it wasn't even close. I remember in the 2000s a single year made around 6 victims.
Most of the bombs are really at sea and lakes, and we still have around 250000 to a million unexploded bombs on our territory.
Most would not explode, but some are very dangerous because the triggers are the only parts that corrode and get ruined more easily thus making the bombs unstable.
I always like to share this [1] article about a UXO team working in La Zone Rouge. These are UXO from WWI. It's pretty haunting.
[1] https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-forbidden-forest/
"At the current rate of clearance it is a conservative estimate that the Département du Déminage will still be finding these weapons nine hundred years from now."
"Haunting" is right.
this is mind-boggling. I struggle to imagine how the city must have looked.
There are a lot of photos, really bad. You'd think people would have learned but in current events Gaza has had 4x the ordnance dropped on it (in about 1/5 the land area).
Edit: The easiest way I found to see photos and video is in Getty's archive: https://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/image?family=editorial&...
[flagged]
Prague is a really good example of a major European city that was relatively untouched in the war. And it shows. Lots and LOTS of historical buildings and a very "old European" feel through a lot of the city.
It's quite beautiful.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Imagine earnestly believing Hitler did the whole London bombing thing, which utterly crippled the Luftwaffe and seriously hurt how useful they were in the rest of the war, out of military necessity.
Also the bombing of Dresden being out of the ordinary for the war is Russian fiction. Stalin begged for Dresden to be bombed, we have the letters to the Americans to back that up.
[flagged]
[flagged]
You don’t have to struggle. There are plenty of videos and photos of that time that you can check out. Also if you visit London you can go around and see a bunch of buildings they haven’t rebuilt and just left them in semi destroyed state as monuments
> Also if you visit London you can go around and see a bunch of buildings they haven’t rebuilt and just left them in semi destroyed state as monuments
I lived in London for 20 years and never knew or saw anything like that?
The main thing you notice when you walk around London is the old/new mix. If you see a concrete monstrosity, nestled next to a Victorian/Edwardian/Elizabethan building, you're probably guaranteed that the newer building was built on top of a bomb site.
I have been in London a few times but never noticed.
What? Where are these semi-destroyed buildings left as monuments? I am not aware of any in London.
Mostly churches, it seems.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-ruins-of-st-dunstan-...
https://flickeringlamps.com/2015/03/06/the-ruins-of-christ-c...
https://beyondthepoint.co.uk/st-clements-church-blitz-damage...
Yeah sorry I was specifically referring to Christchurch Greyfriars. Basically it was as the article said, I was staying in the area (near uh a pub Samuel Pepys I believe) and was walking around and that was definitely one of the things that caught my eye. Maybe such things aren’t as common as I thought
I spent a bit of time in Budapest, something like 80% of the buildings were damaged during WWII and neglected behind the iron curtain afterwards. Even walking around today it is very common for a building to have a restored facade but a lot of historical damage on the sides.
My mum and dad were teenagers during the war and did fire-watching, notoriously avoided if at all possible (they said) so given to anyone biddable or old. It got a bit hair-raising according to my dad, he stood in a doorway near Imperial College watching a plate glass sheet decide if it was going to fall on him or into the building. Walking through labs with bombs dropping was .. intense.
If you had an "anderson shelter" in your garden you were lucky. Many poor working class families got a "morrison shelter" which was basically a steel table you could use in a dining room or kitchen and then hide under. In some ways more convenient I guess? (Anderson shelters got cold and damp)
He was bombed out of a house in Stepney. They lost everything. I can't decide if he missed more the entire collection of the first 50 penguin books, or a lump of melted glass he scavanged from the fire of crystal palace in the 1930s: these are the two things he remembered in the 60s and 70s talking about it.
He was studying electrical engineering and maths at university by the end of the war and so not called up. He said they trained in how to manage live power cables with wooden "tongs" and were part of rescue crews when buildings collapsed. My mum was tracing maps for D-Day, and packing munitions and my Aunt did technical drawing on the "mulberry harbour" concrete caissons floated over to the beaches for D-Day.
A good read on the blitz would be "the people's war" by Angus Calder, which in large part is made up from "mass observation" recruited/organised diaries kept during the period, and donated to the University of Sussex. My mum kept one of them.
A standing joke in Architecture circles is that the greater london council destroyed more Wren churches in London than the Blitz. UCL used to say the basements where compsci was sited were kindly dug by the Germans.
Postwar housing was a mess. My aunt lived in a 5 story block of flats in Paddington she got on a long lease as bomb damaged property, my Uncle bought into commercial premises around Farringdon in a deal which demanded he do structural repairs immediately. There was a huge housing shortage and for years you could still see the pre-fabricated houses around Lambeth Palace which were a godsend of temporary housing but persisted into the 60s. Stepney where my dad grew up was a wreck, anywhere around the docks basically. It was a patchwork.
The pseudo-documentary film "Fires were started" by Humphrey Jennings has some iconic footage of the dock firestorm (not to be compared with Dresden, but it was severe) You would recognise the shots of the fronts of builings collapsing and firemen holding hoses wearing brodie helmets.
Comparisons are evil. Coventry was really badly affected and the modern day cathedral stands next to the wreck of the original gothic one. It's like the Kaiser Wilheim spire in Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a very pale shadow of the reality at the time. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Rotterdam were all significantly worse affected than London in the end, but to anyone in London I doubt it felt like it. The bombing in Japan was on an altogether different scale.
I can't imagine the record keeping to provide the data for this. And of course, they have weasel words at the bottom: "The National Archives give no warranty to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of the information provided"
In other words: "if you get blown up by a bomb that we haven't listed here, it's not our fault!"
[flagged]
[flagged]
It would be great to think that littering the countryside with unexploded ordinance was a thing of the past and we no longer do such things, but the conflict in Ukraine is just one example to the contrary.
Has any effort been put into making duds easier to find after the fact? e.g. Has anyone thought of putting something like an upscaled RECCO reflector on bombs? i.e. A passive radar reflector that would allow searchers to just hit a field with radar and get reflections back from unexploded ordinance.
Obviously, this wouldn't work for cruise missiles, etc. that need to have a low radar profile while in flight, but why not for bombs (especially cluster munitions) that are used in much greater numbers?
This is just one idea. I'm sure other methods could be used to make duds easier to find. Is there military value in leaving stealthy duds in your enemy's territory?
> Is there military value in leaving stealthy duds in your enemy's territory?
In all fairness -- probably, yes. It's the enemy's territory, and now you've made it more deadly, like an accidental minefield.
But I don't think any consideration is given to what happens to duds, what are the civilian consequences or environmental impacts of any part of the weapons lifecycles. It is an industry of death and destruction after all.
I’m not sure there’s much value in blowing up some poor farmer years after the fact, and the impact for either government is pretty much zero.
It'd likely to be more accurate to say that some are left that simply don't explode yet. A good example would be certain cases of cluster munitions that are designed to hit airfields. A most of the explosives will go off and crater the concrete and asphalt, but others will remain unexploded and sensitive to detonation. As runway repair work cannot commence until those unexploded munitions are cleared, the airfield is out of action longer than it would be otherwise.
I understand in these cases and other ones such as scattering mines that a timer can be set so the mine or munition deactivates after a set time (say, a week) by deactivating the fuse.
Not all are designed in this way of course. And apologies, I'm looking for source links, but I can't find them at the moment. Edit: Here's an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATOR_mine_system
>But I don't think any consideration is given to what happens to duds
On the contrary. Duds causing UXO is the reason the US and most of NATO chooses not to build cluster munitions anymore, preferring instead pre-formed tungsten balls that are fired like a shotgun when the munition is over it's target.
The dud rate was something like 2%, not that much but enough to make the US decide that leaving tens of thousands of UXOs in formerly enemy territory isn't okay.
Russian cluster munitions being used in Ukraine right now have a much much higher dud rate, and that's before any bad storage or handling.
For similar reasons, many NATO countries have given up types of landmines
Modern US munitions have a mechanism that bricks the warhead after a certain amount of time from being fired (years). That way they retain use on the battlefield as a threat to enemy soldiers even if they don't properly detonate but will not pose a long term risk to civilians.
Modern US policy is a maximum of 30 days. [1]
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jan/31/2002242359/-1/-1/1/DOD...
Maybe something useful happens to disable the fuse? The hundreds of pounds of high explosive are still hundreds of pounds of high explosive, in a rusty container, no?
I think it'd be pretty hard to convince North Korea, Iran, or Russia to alter their munitions.
We can't even convince them not to throw bombs at other countries.
War should be a thing of the past.
Maybe the US and its proxies should lead by example before trying to convince anyone else, given they are the ones who dropped far more bombs than all of those combined.
We can't even convince our own military.
Radar is sometimes used for detecting incoming artillery rounds, so yeah, no need to make it easy for the enemy by filling it with radar reflectors.
I wonder if you could put the radar reflector on the end of the shell or bomb. It would only be visible from behind which is only possible when in ground.
The other way would be have fuse that shows reflector after hitting something but not detonating.
Duct tape an AirTag on'em.
I'm only half joking. "not even Apple knows the location of your AirTag"
I'm always a little surprised to realize that the explosives are chemically stable enough to still explode nearly 100 years later.
“We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.” ― Alfred Hitchcock
That is an excellent quote, thanks for sharing it. But I'm not sure why he told us the exact date of detonation. Wasn't he supposed to be the master of suspense?
He didn't tell you the location, that's the suspense.
For the joke to work, the listener needs to picture a highly advanced, evolved civilization far in the future. Saying a big number gives the imagination a concrete starting point. Like a writing prompt.
Plus, while Hitchcock is the master of suspense, he is also known for comedy: https://medium.com/life-and-the-performing-arts/humor-hitchc...
The date of intended detonation is very much not going to be the actual date anything explodes with how stable our bomb chemistry is over long intervals.
Well the year 3000 is 365 days long, so plenty of room for suspense.
The bible says that no one knows the day or the hour of the apocalypse. But plenty of christians are eager to tell you the week or the minute! It's been on my mind lately due to several billboards in my area pointing to october9th.com
Mormons be hoarding all the wealth and supplies just in case it is sometime soon. Jesus would be real mad if he came back and they only had a measly 5 billion.
Over time, the explosive chemicals in the both the detonator and the main charge can frequently get MORE sensitive to disturbance, which is kind of perverse.
That's why if you ever come across any old UXO (UneXploded Ordnance) you should call the bomb squad and never touch it
There was a great discussion I read here a year ago from a chemist who went into the details on why this occurs. I'll link the comment. Really great read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34755399
thanks for the link! A great read as promised
Even if it's inert many explosives decompose into toxic compounds. Other explosives use mercury compounds for detonators, which at the worst can make the soil itself toxic to the touch. There are also gas shells, some of which had arsenic. Areas affected in that way will be poisonous for a very long time.
This. Though I would not call explosives "chemically stable", nor their degrading with time "perverse".
They are capable of energetically exploding because they are not chemically stable.
And "shelf-stable and safe for many decades" is never a priority feature for high-volume wartime production of explosives.
> And "shelf-stable and safe for many decades" is never a priority feature for high-volume wartime production of explosives.
Maybe not on the order of decades, but 'shelf-stable and safe for handling' is a definite concern in any ordnance production. Last thing you want is your whole ammo stockpile blowing up because a tired soldier set an artillery shell down a little too hard.
Many of the explosives used are actually fairly stable chemically and require either severe degradation to become unstable, or an external force applied to them that is sufficient to trigger their explosive effects. C4, as long as it hasn't been sitting around too long, is pretty safe to light on fire. And yet it's one of the more energetic commonly used explosives out there.
> And "shelf-stable and safe for many decades" is never a priority feature for high-volume wartime production of explosives.
The problem is that those minitions do get used many years later. Often because after a war ends there is a huge surplus of munitions you want to save till the next war.
Russia is using decade-old shells in Ukraine for instance.
The USS Forrestal fire was partially caused by 14 year old bombs that had been improperly stored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire
Mh, chemical stability is usually meant in a more delicate way.
There are explosives that need other explosives to set them off. If someone gave you a pound of C4 and then evacuated your neighbors, you would probably need to do some research to set it off. With the amount of explosives moved around in the world wars, easy storage and fairly safe logistics even by minimally trained soldiers are very much a priority.
On the flipside, there are explosives which won't let you finish a sneeze in the same room. Or which decompose into the latter. You wouldn't want to move thousands of tons of these around.
Re: your last paragraph called to my mind the great french thriller "The Wages of Fear" from 1953, in which two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin need to cross rough terrain, and the viewer finds himself holding his breath quite a lot...
Hundreds of tonnes of unexploded ordnance from the First World War are collected every year in Belgium and Northern France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest
Here's one in Oxfordshire 4 days ago, although I'm a little confused how a First World War bomb got all the way there. Dropped from a Zeppelin? (It's also sadly possible that the news reporter got the wrong war.)
https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2024-09-28/bomb-disposal-t...
Probably. The village I lived in wasn’t as far over as Oxfordshire, but had a zeppelin raid: https://guildford-dragon.com/terror-zeppelin-raid-on-guildfo...
> Since 1946, approximately 630 French ordnance disposal workers have died handling unexploded munitions.
Incredible.
I still have some german documentary about a man defusing these things burned into my head. He was asked why he wasn't wearing any safety equipment while working on these large bombs.
Well for smaller amounts of explosive chemicals, they'd wear the blast suit, because it could save them and might keep them a bit presentable otherwise. That'd be nice for the family. If the bomb is several times heavier than you are though, they'd just do the job right and go home after - and no one needs safety equipment on a job done right.
The way they figured out how to defuse the bombs was pretty rough, too. The person that did the defusal would call out what they were about to do next to a person taking notes at a safe distance. If the bomb exploded, they knew not to do that again.
More specifically such large bombs will kill you with the pressure wave if nothing else. They are not survivable. Either you diffuse them successfully or you die.
It would be interesting to see a graph over time, because presumably the vast majority of those happened in the immediate years following the war. That Wikipedia link mentions two deaths in 2014, which may be the most recent fatalities.
I can recommend a lovely short video in French documenting the work that I recently watched: Meet the team still cleaning up after World War I | Zone Rouge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB-Ncob1gDk)
Lots of unexploded ordnance. Reminds me of the story of the guy who tried to weld an artillery shell (and blew up), he was sure it's safe coze his father used it for 40 years as a gardening tool:
https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/eveniment/accident-stupid-a-mu...
It's not the same thing at all, but if you enjoy reading about "abandoned military hardware," you'll love this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash
Ha, that is definitely not type of abandoned that I was expecting. That poor chap who was killed, what an incredibly unlucky event for him.
Can you imagine the odds? Literally ... any of us could go, at any time. That's what gets me whenever I think about this.
Ça plane pour moi
Didn't that happen in DC recently? Remember that US military plane that went missing and was found many kms away from where the pilot ejected?
I have an irrational fear of dying from an airplane crashing into me. It doesn't help that friends of friends of mine were victims in this from just a few weeks ago:
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/03/fairview-plane-crash-...
I think I know the feeling. I had these nightmares as a kid about wolfes or 'cartoon heatseeking missiles' hunting me, like it was the same nightmare/feeling.
>> I have an irrational fear of dying from an airplane crashing into me.
I don't, but sometimes I have dreams like that, whether it's an aeroplane or a helicopter or whatever.
I live near am airfield and just recently I asked my assurance company if they would assure agains airplane crash which they indeed do!
But alas, if it crashes while inside, it does not really matter...
> Miyazaki Airport was built in 1943 as a former Imperial Japanese Navy flight training field from which some kamikaze pilots took off on suicide attack missions.
> A number of unexploded bombs dropped by the US military during World War II have been unearthed in the area, Defense Ministry officials said.
In Germany, unexploded bombs are discovered on a weekly basis.
Same in the UK. I'd hope we as a species would learn from things like that, but I fear we'll be seeing the same thing centuries from now even if the details change.
There were craters just outside the village I grew up in. We used to go sledding down them when I was a kid. The story I heard was it just dumped bombs from a raid on a larger city so they didn't have to carry them back.
In Cambodia too, where the US dropped 540,000 tons of bombs during the Vietnam war.
When I was in elementary school in Lower Saxony I „often" couldn't go home after school because there was some defusion of WW2 bombs in my area going on. „Often“ means something like 10 times in 4 years. Was quite used to this and didn't think much about it back then. Now that I have kids myself I would be glad to know that they won't have to deal with the fails of my generation. But the older I get, the less confident I am.
Verdun, France too, though I don't think they build an airstrip on top of one.
Odds are the airport is on the same land an old Imperial Japanese airfield was on.
Yes the article supports that.
I grew up in a South Pacific country that served as an advanced American base during WW2. A few years ago a massive stockpile (over a hundred) of artillery shells was found at the bottom of the capital's port, right under the dock of a big ferry that shuffles people between islands every day. I can´t imagine the carnage if one of those had gone off during the 70 years or so they had been sitting there.
Its surprising to me that bombs explode after being buried for such a long time. The chemicals remain contained but I imagined the fuse would rust away.
The irony here is that nuclear weapons are actually safer to have lying around than conventional weapons; The amount of work that it takes to actually arm and activate a warhead is higher and you get basically one chance to get it right or it locks you out and self-defeats.
For anyone who is curious, there's a wonderful short video on PALs and how they isolate a nuclear warhead from the outside world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA
Nukes are full of conventional explosives, plus the radioactive pit. A failed nuclear detonation is still a dirty bomb.
Nukes are also not very stable long-term Their fissile payload is radioactive after all, and as it decays it becomes harder and harder to achieve prompt criticality.
Everyone knows about PALs. You have to warm them up in the steel mill and then cool them down in the freezer room.
However, that does not stop adversaries with physical access from dismantling the warhead and extracting the enriched fissile material. In a practical sense, easily obtained nuclear weapons are probably more dangerous than TNT UXO, or at least possess the potential to be used for greater harm.
It can be caused by the explosives degrading over decades into much more unstable compounds which begin the explosive reaction and detonate the rest. In other words degrading into a new sort of fuse which spontaneously triggers.
Slightly off topic but when I read the headline, I assumed "large crater" would be much more large than you see in the picture. The article reports "7 meters (23 feet) in diameter and 1 meter (3 feet) deep." For a bomb that doesn't seem that "large."
Luckily no one was hurt or nearby when it went off.
The US 500lb bombs had about 270lbs of explosives in them. If this location were a WW-II airfield, it is the sort of bomb that would have been dropped on airplanes on the ground to destroy them.
Most of the damage to Japan's cities was actually done by napalm-filled bomblets combined into cluster-bombs[1], partly because weather made precision bombing difficult.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M69_incendiary
Also Japanese construction was conveniently, for the US, extremely flammable so you could do way more damage starting a firestorm than you could with the same number of bombers filled with traditional bombs.
There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
Similarly, the Japanese launched over 9000 incendiary balloon bombs against the US & Canada, but they were generally ineffective. Six civilians were killed in Oregon in 1945.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
Yeah one of the few instances of damage on the US side of the world from WW2 and it barely did anything. The US was incredibly fortunate to not have to fight basically any of the war on the home front. We rode that wave for a couple decades as Europe and Japan etc rebuilt.
It was the great success of the Allied firebombing campaign that inflicted suburbia on the United States. US construction is just as flammable but fire is less likely to spread when the houses are farther apart.
(Let's rephrase the success part. The campaign was destructive and deadly for the civilian population but did nothing to end the war earlier. Bomber Harris and the Lord Lindemann got a career boost, though.)
There are many contemporary sources on the Japanese side that suggest the firebombings did hasten the (inevitable at this point) surrender. The US certainly had a strategic desire for Japan to surrender to the US rather than the USSR.
Yeah it turns out the whole idea of morale bombing is pretty flawed, it largely just galvanizes the population it turns out; Japan, England and Germany all reacted similarly, maybe for different cultural reasons but it was ineffective everywhere.
> but did nothing to end the war earlier
Really? To assert this, you need to show not that Axis production didn't decline, but that the damage done didn't prevent production from increasing even more. How does one show that?
The war in Europe is highly arguable in both directions.
To assert that the bombing campaign did nothing for the war in the Pacific flies in the face of recorded history. We literally have the imperial Japanese equivalent of meeting minutes where they talk about this stuff and toward the end the sheer destruction of the bombing campaign did affect the credibility of the militarists "yeah we can still pull this off" claims in the eyes of many of the others.
Here is a good critique of the concept of strategic airpower: https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
Axis production continued increasing, according to this, it tripled after the bombing campaign started.
Which, of course, proves nothing. What matters is how much it would have increased without the bombing.
Actually, it's even worse than that, since one must also subtract from this production the resources Germany was putting into air defense. This effort was massive.
Did you read the ACOUP article? I remember reading it when it was published, and it changed my mind on the topic.
You are completely ignoring Japanese mindset during that time. Absolute devotion to emperor, casualties could be in millions and that wouldn't change anything. Their suicidal charges and not giving up alive are pretty famous and this comes from certain place, same as kamikadze. Some rational counting of outputs may be for bureaucrats but those were not holding any real power in Japan empire.
There is a lot of speculation why emperor and generals surrendered, even atomic bombs may not have been the triggering point as much as soviet declaration of war to Japan at 8 August 1945. Most probably it all compounded.
> It was the great success of the Allied firebombing campaign that inflicted suburbia on the United States.
BS
Did historical bombs typically make big explosions? Reading some numbers from the war, it seemed like the strategy was more to dump enormous volume of ordinance and hope to get lucky hitting something vital.
That strategy was not because the bombs weren't very destructive, but because they just could not be placed accurately. So they had to drop a lot of bombs and hope a few of them hit the strategically important targets.
Yep. The US did drop around 160,800 tons of conventional bombs on Japan during WWII, thought that's still relatively tame compared to the 623,000 tons they drop on Germany. Though the two nukes more than made up for it, I guess.
Bomb findings during construction is nothing especially rare in these countries.
The conventional bombing of Japan was scheduled for massive increase. To quote Ian Toll's "Twilight of the Gods":
> If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. [...] At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan. According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.
> The conventional bombing of Japan was scheduled for massive increase.
Allegedly.
It's possible it's true, but claims like this have the incentive of selling the "atom bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and justified" narrative behind them, so that should be taken into account as a factor.
It doesn't even have to be consciously disingenous - the more one can convince oneself (and thus eventually others) of how destructive and costly conventional warfare would have been, the more digestible the nuclear option becomes, so there's a lot of motivation to fuel some motivated reasoning.
There's no reason to doubt it. The resources that had been devoted to Europe were freed up and now could be fully focused on Japan.
Professionals talk logistics indeed. To imagine what kind is pipeline would be required to enable such a venture. Producing, assembling, and shipping millions of tons of explosives as a continual operation.
'Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II.' - https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390b...
So like, is “no unexploded ordinances detected” a checkbox/service for those “call before you dig” organizations in those places?
Absolutely. In my country it is mandatory to submit an UXO report as part of getting the building permit for nontrivial stuff. Most of the time this is boring office work (Was there a strategic target nearby during WWII? Are there any records of bombing happening here? Have there been earthworks in the last 70 years significant enough to rule out anything still remaining?) and you get a report noting that there's no risk expected, but sometimes you have to call in the cavalry and go searching with ground-penetrating radar.
It's just part of doing business, really. Same story with archaeological remains, chemical contamination, or threatened animal species.
In some parts of France, you can’t dig without getting a specialized surveyor inspection and certificate it’s safe to dig this deep in that place first.
It would have done considerably more damage if it had gone off when and where it was intended. The runway is designed to have enormous, heavy planes takeoff and land on it routinely, it undoubtedly absorbed a lot of the bomb’s energy. Not to mention the earth underneath it.
> It would have done...
Real WWII historians could probably determine the date on which the bomb was dropped, its intended target, etc., etc.
But with the condition that most of Japan was in, later in WWII - I'm thinking that "gone off where & when intended" would probably have had little effect. Most of the country was burned-out rubble.
A crater that size can hold 80,000lb of dirt.
Agreed, seems very very small for 5000lb of explosives. Guessing it didn't reach its full yield given that its been buried under ground for decades.
~270lbs of explosives in a US 500lb bomb.
Article says 500lb.
If the crater is only 1 meter deep then the bomb was likely more shallow than that (although some of the ejected dirt will fall back into the crater). So much of the bomb's energy went into the atmosphere.
Watch the video- it was a large bomb
Apparently it was sized appropriately to shut down the airport.
A larger probability of a small crater(s) requiring repair would seem better for this purpose than a smaller probability of a large crater.
that's a little bigger than my old apartment. i think it doesn't look big in the picture because nothing is visible nearby to give it scale
That's a lot of earth though. Most bombs detonate above the ground because rock is really heavy.
a large crater the size of a small crater.
the reference: https://time.com/5772944/large-small-boulder/
Slightly off topic - if you want to see how explosion looks like in vacuum, here is recent (less than 1 day old) Iranian ICBM interception (either by Israeli Arrow 2/3 or Patriot) in cca outer space [1] or direct video link [2]. Expanse wasn't so far off
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1fu1bc1/iran...
[2] https://packaged-media.redd.it/1p1ueyie38sd1/pb/m2-res_848p....
For those without a reddit account: https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1fu1bc1/iran...
Every bomb, gun, and mine we make has impacts like this... AK47s manufactured by the Soviet Union are still in circulation in Africa and the Middle East, mines in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War still maim children decades later, cluster munitions in Syria and Ukraine continue to cause civilian casualties long after conflicts have subsided... weapons of war often outlive the wars they were created for, perpetuating violence and suffering for generations... yet we never learn.
already back open - https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20241002_20/
Which was also the common story when WWII Pacific theater airfields were cratered by bombing. It took very little time to re-open.
Wow, so lucky there was no plane passing at that time.
The first time I ever went to Munich there was a bomb that had been discovered from WW2 under one of the buildings during a renovation and they had to do a controlled detonation. Despite their efforts there was visible damage everywhere, broken glass, etc. I feel terrible for Ukraine, Gaza and others, have unexploded ordinances that (probably more so in Ukraine than Gaza, just given scale/age of munitions) will be there for generations.
https://www.munichre.com/en/insights/infrastructure/munich-b...
That must have been this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O0lO_j6Ngc
In a way I think Ukraine has a somewhat better handle on big unexploded munitions from ballistic or cruise missiles and drones: They have an active air defense and the big stuff can be followed on radar - so they know the possible point of impact and EOD teams know where to look.
I worry more about unexploded cluster munitions and small mines. Some of the latter look like something I'd definitely had picked up as a child just for curiosity.
Modern bombs tend to be more reliable about exploding when we want them to, and we now have some bombs that if they don't explode will degrade. So not quite as bad as you would guess. However still going to be a big problem for decades.
Large? Maybe 3 yards of gravel 8 sticks of rebar and some drill in pins to connect and 5 yards of Crete and they're good to go.
Mines and cluster ammunition are horrifying. They are invisible or look like toys even, and it is impractical to clean all of them up. They’re just waiting there, in the dirt, ready to kill some innocent child. Horrible.
Headline says "taxiway" and the crater is located on the edge, but runway 9/27 markings are very close by. Aircraft should not be at speed, departing or landing on a taxiway. "Taxi" is how they go between gate and runway at low speed.
The red box runway markings are actually warning you that you're approaching the runway 09-27 and are on the taxiway side of the taxiway/runway demarcation line (the one that's two solid lines and two dashed lines). You can also tell which side is which by the demarcation line, since the dashed lines are on the runway side and the solid lines are on the taxiway side. So technically the bomb actually exploded on the runway, although on a portion of the "runway" where aircraft would be transitioning to or from a taxiway and traveling slowly as you said. Also it's very close to the edge on a part aircraft shouldn't normally roll directly over with their tires, but it certainly could have been under a wing.
When I read the headline, I was wondering why in the world a bomb was being taxied on a runway, like on a cargo plane. However, now I'm wondering how a bomb wasn't discovered when the airport was built. From the video posted elsewhere in the comments, it looks like the bomb was buried under the runway. Are there no ground surveys done with radar before building a plane runway?
I haven't fact-checked anything about this, but this bomb (and its friends) were probably dropped here because it was an active military airport during WW2 and the US was desperate to put a dent in Japan's air power. After the war, thorough ordinance disposal was very likely a secondary consideration rebuilding the country. (And its runways.)
The airport was built in 1943.
Ah, I guess that makes sense. According to a quick search, it seems ground-penetrating radar didn't reach common use until the 70s.
> Officials said an investigation by the Self-Defense Forces and police confirmed that the explosion was caused by a 500-pound US bomb
The article was a bit lacking. How do they know that it was a 500 pound bomb from WW2? Is it the shrapnel or is there a different way to determine it?
Thousands of tons of bombs were dropped on Japan in WW2. Many of them didn't explode. This airport was apparently an active airfield at the time the US was bombing Japan and 500lb bombs were the sort of thing used to destroy parked planes.
Yes, someone could have snuck into an airport and buried a bomb underneath the runway, then cleaned up the digging operation so as to not be noticed, but horses, not zebras.
They're just asking on what basis the article is confident that it's a specific bomb from a specific era. Is it based on a forensic analysis of the shrapnel, something like that? If it's just an assumption based on the context, you'd want to say "an explosion, believed to have been caused by an unexploded WWII-era bomb...".
In how many eras were bombs being dropped on this airport?
An explosion goes off under a runway. The article says "it's a bomb, it was dropped on the runway 80 years ago, buried with dirt, paved over, then it went off".
Cool. Now, how did you figure that out? Did someone analyze the shrapnel and conclusively date it to allied bombing campaigns in WWII, or is that what a source close to the events said, or did the reporter just... look at the picture and shoot from the hip? Any of these is an acceptable answer, so long as readers know which one it is.
If it wasn't from the war, then the more likely scenario is the bomb feel off a plane after the war than somebody snuck into the airfield. Bombs do fall off planes.
My question was more of, how do they determine this sort of thing or is it just an assumption because it is the most likely scenario?
You’re assuming the bombs like this were removed after the war. They weren’t. No one knew they were there.
We are still finding unexploded artillery shells from the first world war in France. Germans are still finding bombs in cities.
The chemicals in the fuses mix and become unstable over time. The explosives don’t degrade as much.
If you wanted further verification, the bomb casing leaves fragments and explosives leave residue.
I'm not doing anything of the sort. I know bombs are still there from WW2. Just because there are still bombs from WW2 does not mean that every bomb that goes off is from WW2. While it is likely that the bomb is from the war, I haven't seen what evidence they have confirming that. That is all I am asking for.
The evidence is likely simple deduction, as in asking "when was the last time this area was bombed" combined with the history of the airport (built for the military in 1943, later converted to civilian use) and also noting other unexploded bombs have been unearthed in the area.
For it NOT to be a WW2 bomb would mean somebody sneaking in another bomb and paving it under the runway without being noticed.
There is a perfectly plausible alternative. A bomb fell off a plane after the war. This happens from time to time and has even happened with a nuclear bomb!
Yes, and it results in a huge amount of paperwork. You can't just randomly show up at your destination missing a bomb - especially during peacetime. They'll be combing over every part of your flight path to find it.
It could've also been intentionally buried there by bored soldiers, or placed there by airport maintenance people as a prank, or ended up there due to a freak teleporter accident. Maybe it was even put there by Godzilla. Maybe the Infinite Improbability Drive spontaneously materialized it, together with a bowl of petunias.
If you find a bomb in an area which is known to have been bombed, without any evidence to the contrary it is pretty safe to assume it's there due to the bombing.
Sorry about that. The article obviously doesn't explain. Here's my thoughts on it.
I don't think they did any exhaustive research. They didn't have to.
You would be able to look at the crater and see sizable pieces of a military air-dropped bomb. Normal bombs don't disintegrate. If they send it to a lab they can tell what explosive was used in it, which will roughly tell you when it was manufactured. (Assuming they don't find a serial number.)
That by itself is hardly conclusive, but that completely changes when you find identical unexploded bombs buried in the same area.
It would be rather odd if somebody came along later and put the same kind of bomb used in WWII in the ground. When the bomb got there isn't that important.
Likely because no one's dropped bombs on Japan since then
Somebody could have planted a bomb (if it was actually a WW2 bomb that doesn't seem likely) or it could have fallen off a plane before (not sure if there 500 pound bombs before the war?) or after the war.
That absolutely can be a WWII bomb. They are still finding unexploded artillery shells from the first world war in France!
Let me repeat that, hundred-year-old shells are still underground, intact, and the explosives in them are just as powerful as when they were manufactured.
Chemicals in fuse can slowly combine until they detonate.
The odds of someone planting more explosives in a field potentially containing a dozen WWII bombs from multiple attacks are remote.
You are not addressing anything of my question. I don't care if 99.9999999% of bombs that go off are from WW2. Not every bomb that goes off is from WW2. How did they determine if this bomb was actually from WW2? Is it just an assumption or did they check something? The article did not clarify that point and just stated it as a fact.
Usually shrapnel, working out the depth at which it exploded, the nature of the explosion (recorded on video), and historical evidence of bombing.
There is a buch of forensic methods around this.
I understand that is what is usually used, but I was asking for the actual details which was scanty in the article. Is this what they did or are they still looking into the forensics?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test
It's pretty easy to identify from the shrapnel.
I understand that it is easy, but is this what they did? That was my whole question and nobody is actually answering my question
Because it's a silly question. The airport was bombed in WWII by the US, just like the rest of the country, and Japan wasn't in any war since then, nor was it in any war before then when it would have had such bombs dropped on this location (there was a naval war with Russia in the 1900s, but that didn't result in bombs dropped on Japan).
So basically you're asking for forensic evidence to prove that this bomb wasn't the result of time-travelers or teleporters or something equally fantastical. It's a ridiculous question. Of course it's an unexploded WWII bomb, what the hell else would it be?
Forensics identified a valid digital certificate matching ww2.co.jp. The issuing CA is currently denying responsibility.
Planting a bomb especially of that size (needing a vehicle and multiple men to move) in the ground under a paved taxiway at a major airport without anyone noticing? Not very likely.
The WWII explanation is much more plausible. It happens at Schiphol too that they find them (luckily not by them exploding randomly but usually during construction efforts)
[dead]
Similar to software, sometimes it’s safer to leave the bombs buried to avoid accidental detonation from attempted removal.
This bomb was buried. Nobody knew it was there...which is sort of crazy, considering that they built a runway over it and it didn't detonate until now.
Some types of explosives (e.g. detonators) become more unstable with age. See for example: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231344
Do they (Japan, Germany) ever purposely leave unexploded ordnance in place? I see a news story about once a year about them finding a bomb, and in every case they have their bomb squad disarm and remove it. I’ve never heard of them knowingly leaving a bomb in place.
A load has been left in the Thames. The risk of accidental detonation causing a tsunami is one factor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
Once there's any sort of record that there's UXO somewhere it pretty much has to be removed because nobody wants the liability that would be incurred by being the party that dropped the ball. Even if that wasn't the case they generally get found because they're in the way of some construction. You have to remove it for the same reason you have to get every other rock out of the hole you're digging.
That said, I'm sure there's a few farmers who have a pretty strong inkling where one is and are actively not looking to disturb that problem.
I know of some remote¹ forest in Germany that used to be a training area. It is so bullet- and bomb-riddled that they just decided clearing it wasn't worth it, put a fence around it and declared it off-limits.
¹ in Germany, "remote" means something like "2km from the next settlement".
Similar in France from WW1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge
Same in some parts of France, from WW-I bombs that are still there.
Not just bombs but also lots of chemical warfare pollution and buried canisters.
I don’t think so. Bombs are usually found during construction so leaving them in place would not work if they block progress on a hole/tunnel etc
For reference the state of NRW (Germany) alone found 2811 bombs in 2018 so it’s much more common than you’d think.
Laws seem to differ by state but afaik new construction must include some kind of bomb assessment, often done via aerial photos to quickly filter out areas that were not bombed at all
And you only hear about the more problematic cases. Hundreds or thousands of WW2 bombs get removed in Germany every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexploded_ordnance
This sunken ship in the Thames estuary is packed full of explosives, and they don't dare mess with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
Whoa!
That's amazing.
Very surprised I haven't heard of a movie involving this, or a least a Doctor Who episode.
It's all over youtube, I've seen a number of recommended videos about it
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Richard+Montgom...
Might just be my algorithm
Tom Scott has covered this exact ship, many years ago
oooo, free explosives!
in every case they have their bomb squad disarm and remove it
They would do that, the pencil detonators the Allies used to disrupt rescue and firefighting efforts after a carpet-bombing run become ever more touchy as time wears on. A bomb that is found is disarmed or exploded, else there will be a repeat of this incident down the line.
Under active runway, 1 meter deep, intentionally? That would be the most moronic "safety measure" I can imagine.
Looking at the article, this was a WWII air base converted to a civilian airport. The bomb was not paved over due to laziness; no one knew the bomb was there.
Hindsight being 20/20, maybe they (the Japanese) could have used metal detectors when they were updating the runway? But, given that they didn't find this, I suspect it wasn't practical back then.
Perhaps now there will be an effort to use modern technology to find these?
A bomb like this could be pretty deep though. They're pretty aerodynamic and heavy yet compact. They'd go through mud pretty easily. If it's a few metres deep I doubt it would show up on a metal detector. This is why so many are still found.
I'm not sure. What is to be gained over leaving a bomb buried, if you know about it? Because then, it could go off at any time versus doing a controlled detonation or remotely disarm it.
It was probably buried during WWII where the concern was get this airport working fast so it can be used and deal with the consequences latter. Of course nobody bothered to write down where hidden bombs are (that would take time they didn't have) and so they couldn't deal with it latter.
we have the machines to sacrifice now
[flagged]
[flagged]
Another reminder of USA "democratisation" history.
Japan declared war on the USA during WWII. Famously attacking first at Pearl Harbour.
So, no, this unexploded munition has nothing to do with “democratisation”