“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:
