No injuries were reported
Phew. That’s a relief.
A total of 2,348 bombs weighing 41 tons were disposed of during fiscal year 2023, the Reuters news agency reported, citing the Self-Defense Force.
Holy shit. Other than the obvious, I never learned much in school about the Allied bombing campaign in Japan during WWII… which, now that I think about it, was probably on purpose.
This is going to be one of the horrors of Ukraine. A legacy of landmines that will not be cleared in most of our lifetimes, even if the war ended today.
Not the same as unexploded airdropped ordinance, but significantly worse.
Not just mines, but sleeper drones with onboard AI that just sit there for decades due to an extra zero in a config variable before suddenly activating as if the war is still happening.
If this is a real and documented concern, please provide sources so I can take a look.
Otherwise, no, batteries will not hold a charge for decades. Landmines and unexploded ordinance are analog. They will last as long as the mechanisms and explosive payload aren’t damaged, or corroded.
They will have tractors that run on explosive charges I’m sure. The Ukrainians get ruzzian lemons and they’ve been making lemonade 🍋.
No amount of copium is going to clear those minefields, or save the coming generations Ukrainians, who will continue to be maimed and killed by these for the foreseeable future…
The only real hope, is that there is a significant technological development that that both dramatically expedites the complete mapping of minefields, and allows demining personel to rapidily destroy the ordinace, while being outside of the blast and shrapnel radius.
They’re referring to landmines, leftover from that region’s wars of the mid-20th century: America’s Vietnam & Cambodian war, French-Indochina war, Cambodian civil war, etc.
The legacy of landmines and chemical warfare is still regularly killing, maiming, and causes significant increases in fetal birth defects and other rare illnesses.
Not just in Japan, in Europe as well.
We’re still finding random shit from all sides, IIRC there is a fully loaded German heavy bomber on the bottom of the lake near where I grew up
A few years ago, near where my family lived in New Jersey, there was a small newspaper article mentioning that construction on a set of mid-rise condominiums on the Delaware River was being notably delayed, with the vague implication that there was some trouble with financing or construction or something. [To be fair, both of these were true, but for very not-obvious reasons.] But then you start tracing back through the history of the site:
They had selected the site for the condos because it had been the site of a large flea market from the late 1970s to early 2000s, so all they’d have to do was dig up the parking lots, lay in utilities, and compact the soil to be ready to build. The flea market was there because it was the site of a massive drive-in movie theatre built in the early 1950s, so all they had had to do was put up some cheap buildings that were eventually condemned and torn down. The drive-in movie theatre was there because the land had already been cleared and flattened by the US government, so it was cheap to put in a parking lot and big screen.
Why had the government so kindly cleared and flattened the ground? Well, the site was right next to a small bridge across the Delaware; on the other side of the bridge was Frankford Arsenal, where they produced munitions during both World Wars. And they had to test the munitions, so they’d drive over the bridge and test them at this site in New Jersey. And it turns out that sometimes they were either high or lazy or careless or something, because sometimes they didn’t bother driving across the bridge, they’d just shell New Jersey from across the river instead.
The shelling led to a bunch of unexploded ordinance being in extremely unexpected places, until it started showing up eighty years later, when the condo people actually started digging up the ground to lay in their utilities. Of course, the condo association was quietly and casually referencing vague construction delays, because if people knew it was a munitions testing site and they’d recently found a bunch of UXO, no one would buy the condos.
[Also, while trying to look up details for this comment, I discovered three other cases of UXO in New Jersey in the past couple years. This is all very weird to me.]
Damn, I’m from Jersey, though Central, and this is all news to me. And I’m aware of the Frankfurt Armory explosion and all of that, but never did any research beyond. Very interesting.
I used to live in an area that was one of the biggest targets for bombers in Germany during WW2. I remember every few months there was a bomb alarm. We had to leave the house for a few hours while it was being defused. No bomb ever blew up luckily and it just became routine.
There’s potentially up to a few kilotons worth of munitions (about half a hiroshima bomb) sitting right next to Kent (England) in a sunken liberty ship.
Sounds like a good movie story line where aliens invade and we need older ordinances to fight them off and we have to go to this bomber to get them and win the fight
That’s close to the original Space Battleship Yamato. By the time earthlings got FTL travel and super weapons, they ran out of proper shipyards and material. They did have enough to retrofit the sunken battleship Yamato from the underside(they already had underground cities to escape the orbital bombings).
The Doolittle raids are fairly well know but the fire bombings carried out after that were not. The E-46 cluster bomb was pretty terrible 3 - 5 seconds after hitting the ground a small explosion would ignite and spread flaming napalm. The updraft from the fires was so bad some bombers lost control and crashed.
If you’re interested in the worst of it you should look up firebombing and why it was so effective against Japan.
Meanwhile, in a nursing home in Iowa, a man sits bolt upright in bed and says, “I told you I hit the target!”
Huh? A timetraveling bomb was dropped?
It was a dud; normally when bombs get dropped and don’t explode, they’re considered to be a potential hazard at any time, but most people think that these duds are so old they can’t possibly be able to explode anymore.
Me, realizing she was flirting with me at that party 15 years ago.
