Excuse me, have you seen 848 tons of explosives...

[CJvR]

...around here?

It seems India have managed to misplace almost a kiloton of explosives!!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11106287

Police in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh say they are investigating the disappearance of several hundred tonnes of explosives.

About 164 truckloads, sent from the neighbouring state of Rajasthan, have failed to arrive since May.

Police say they suspect the involvement of illegal mining outfits, but one officer said some explosives might have been sold on to militants.

Two men have been arrested and rewards have been offered for five others.

The explosives were sent out from a factory in Dholpur in Rajasthan.

Police say the total amount of missing explosives is 848 tonnes, besides hundreds of thousands of detonators.

It would be a bit more allarming if there only was one detonator missing.

[Temujin]

If being sold to militants, I wonder how much of that is going to be used domestically verse how much likely finds it's way to Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Kanastrous]

It would be a bit more allarming if there only was one detonator missing.

Not really. Don't you use multiple detonators as backups when wiring up a very large bomb?

And in any case thousands of detonators can mean thousands of smaller bombs. Which would not be cause for cheeriness either.

[DudeGuyMan]

How on earth would you put a single bomb that weighs almost 900 tons anywhere worth blowing up without being noticed anyway?

[Master of Cards]

How on earth would you put a single bomb that weighs almost 900 tons anywhere worth blowing up without being noticed anyway?

On a ship? Blow it up in a harbor or a dam.

[Kanastrous]

I dunno. Ask the guys who wired up the World Trade Center towers for 9/11?

[Steel]

It could be transported in 35 standard shipping containers.

So it would be pretty easy to turn a port into a giant hand grenade

[Sarevok]

If being sold to militants, I wonder how much of that is going to be used domestically verse how much likely finds it's way to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unlikely. The overland route to Afganistan goes through Kashmir, one of the most defended borders in the world. As they say one does not simply walk across the LoC while carrying a kiloton of conventional explosives. If the explosives are going to be abused they are going to be sold to locan Indian truck bombers. The explosives already do come with the trucks for free....

[Sarevok]

It could be transported in 35 standard shipping containers.

So it would be pretty easy to turn a port into a giant hand grenade

How do you propose loading 900 tons of explosives onto a ship without alerting port authorities ?

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

It could be transported in 35 standard shipping containers.

So it would be pretty easy to turn a port into a giant hand grenade

How do you propose loading 900 tons of explosives onto a ship without alerting port authorities ?

This probably wouldn't work, but I only put about five minutes thought into it. Bribe right people (security inspectors, loaders, whoever), while lying about the contents of the shipping containers ("See to it that Lot 201420 gets loaded onto the Princess Kaboom today. And here's a little bonus for you, its money.") Do it right and your convoy of Blammo gets loaded just like anything else and nobody's the wiser.

[CJvR]

How on earth would you put a single bomb that weighs almost 900 tons anywhere worth blowing up without being noticed anyway?

You get a river barge.
Load 900 tons of explosives.
Top it of with some solid scrap metal to get schrapnel.

One portable Halifax blast, sail it up or down the Ganges until you find some town you don't like...
As long as the operation is properly prepared, setting up the barge company and a magazine to operate legitemately before you start diverting the explosives.

[weemadando]

It could be transported in 35 standard shipping containers.

So it would be pretty easy to turn a port into a giant hand grenade

How do you propose loading 900 tons of explosives onto a ship without alerting port authorities ?

The same way you load containers full of illegals, drugs, weapons or other black market goods. A mix of subterfuge and good old fashioned corruption.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

And this is one of the reasons we have to have a military response for piracy. There are a lot of ships in the world, most of them poorly managed and monitored by concerns flagged in Panama and Liberia and owned in countries like Pakistan or Greece with minimal controls over what that fleet is doing--many thousands, in fact. And each one of those ships can ten, twenty, or thirty times the explosive of the Halifax disaster, and could be sent against far more densely packed cities than 1917 Halifax. And don't think they'd be trivial to stop; by the time they were being monitored for inspecton entering the harbour they could very well be too close for it to matter.

Ships do not stop quickly, and it's very hard to board one when the crew is raking you with automatic weapons fire from postions much higher than any on your own vessel. Even if every terrorist on board was dead, momentum would carry the vessel for several miles closer to its target, and it would require several miles even for a boarding party--which would be facing certain death--to bring her to a halt either. And firing torpedoes would probably just generate an explosion with a UTK blast on a ship loaded with twenty thousand tonnes of ammunition.

[Vehrec]

I...What? Duchess, what the hell are you on? Seriously, how do you jump from this to 'piracy' and then assert that pirates are going to try and recreate the Halifax explosion? What could they possibly stand to gain even with the means and opportunity?

[Kanastrous]

I think the Duchess refers to the sheer number of 'ghost' and 'zombie' ships out there - large freighters etc operating outside any real system of tracking and control, whose registrations are obscured or outright fraudulent, that could be used as platforms with which to deliver said load of explosives.

Piracy is one source for vessels like this, if'n you happen to be looking for one. Commandeer a ship, sail it into a friendly port, repaint it, re-name it, hoist up a spurious flag and file a set of forged registry papers and...voila! Someone wants to buy it off you mumbles something about explosives and the Port of Long Beach...well, it might or might not work but what do you care? You have a hot ship to sell...

[Sarevok]

You require a port to unload nearly 1000 tons of explosives onto a ship. You need papers and have to face bureaucracy at the port. I am willing to bet the idea of ship bombing is nowhere near the minds of Indian authorities investigating this. It would make a good Tom Clancy/Dale Brown novel plot though.

[Kanastrous]

I'd be willing to bet there are African and Asian ports where greasing the right palms would get the ship loaded without too much trouble.

Of course now we're talking generalities rather than specifics about this particular pile of missing bang-bang.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

You require a port to unload nearly 1000 tons of explosives onto a ship. You need papers and have to face bureaucracy at the port. I am willing to bet the idea of ship bombing is nowhere near the minds of Indian authorities investigating this. It would make a good Tom Clancy/Dale Brown novel plot though.

1,000 tons is a couple hours by lighters, that's easy. Let's say you've containerized the cargo on land--you think people don't grease palms in Lagos or Das-es-Salaam all the damn time to load ships without having the containers opened? Where the officials taking the bribes think nothing of it because it's usually cargoes of drugs or some other contraband that's not going to kill thousands of people? In this case loading it onto a barge could be done from any trivial river pier, or again by lighter.

Vehrec: Use your brain. Piracy is the act of stealing a ship on the high seas. Terrorists who steal a ship would also be pirates (duh), as they had committed an act of piracy. Just because normal pirates would not do this doesn't mean that terrorists wouldn't commit piracy to do so; furthermore, pirates like making this stuff called money, and they're not going to get a very big ransom for some rusted out hulk of a Liberian registered freighter owned by a company in Cambodia or something.

There's thousands of ships out here like this one:



An old rusted out Cambodian hulk which is quite capable of holding a cargo of several thousand tons. You think the owners know where it is at all times on multi-month sea voyages? Or even have any way of tracking it?

[Sea Skimmer]

You get a river barge.
Load 900 tons of explosives.
Top it of with some solid scrap metal to get schrapnel.

One portable Halifax blast, sail it up or down the Ganges until you find some town you don't like...
As long as the operation is properly prepared, setting up the barge company and a magazine to operate legitemately before you start diverting the explosives.

900 tons of high explosive would in fact be quite close to the tonnage of the Bombay Explosion of 1943, a repeat would not be good. The Halifax explosion was a lot bigger, but the ship was also out in the harbor at the time instead of tied to a pier, which reduced the still massive scope of the damage.

[Pelranius]

Thanks for the nightmare fuel, gals and guys!

Maybe the 848 tons of explosives was stolen by illegal mine operators? There's plenty of them in India.

[Sea Skimmer]

I’ve thought that’s more likely since I first saw this, some of the stuff also might literally just be missing from bad record keeping, but the reality is even one ton reaching Indian terrorists could be very bad. However they’ve got plenty of places they can buy significant if smaller quantities of ammonia nitrate from in the first place, its detonators, blasting caps and the skill to use them that are harder to find. Regulations is not something India is known for but they can do a little better controlling that stuff then fertilizer. Ammonia nitrate is smuggled on a massive scale in Afghanistan already; you’d have to work hard to undercut all the people already doing it! I doubt anyone is going to try moving it through Pakistan to make the attempt, even with an intermediate stop in Africa or South East Asia. Failure to control this trade is one of many reasons why the NATO effort accomplishes so little. But harsh restrictions would just make life for Afghans even worse.

[Zaune]

@Sea Skimmer: Forget smuggling as far as ammonium nitrate goes, Afghanistan and Iraq both use a hell of a lot of chemical fertiliser; Afghanistan was always a primarily agricultural economy and Iraq's industry was coventrated* by the US Air Force. Nor are restrictions on its purchase remotely practical to enforce, and the local security forces are overstretched enough without adding every fertiliser warehouse in the country to their list of places to guard.

* A word apparently invented by the Luftwaffe for what they did to Coventry.

[Kanastrous]

I think I prefer Dresdenized.

[Zaune]

True, but we never used that as an actual neologism as far as I know.
Then again, I've only heard the word 'coventrate' in one book (The Few, a history of the US citizens who fought in the RAF whose author's name escapes me), so it might be entirely apocryphal. It's the sort of thing that would have made Goering laugh by all accounts, though.

[Thanas]

It does not work in German. In German it would have to be "coventrieren", which just sounds bad.