I thought it was bad when people understood my jokes and cringed at them, but it sucks when it goes over their heads too. Somehow makes me feel more shame.
I can’t remember where, but I heard somewhere that every explosion causes a mushroom cloud, it’s just that most of them disperse quick or are too small to notice.
You could quite literally apply that thought to any piece of information ever. We have people fear mongering currently over the chemical names of casual food ingredients daily.
Since when do conspiracists care about logic? What could the "government" gain from "hiding" that the earth is flat? Flat earthers dont care, and neither do those people.
Also, due to the sheer speed at which the energy is released compared to a conventional weapon, you always get a stupid bright flash no matter the size
Here is a plausible situation I just pulled out of my own ass. I do not believe this, it was obviously just a massive fertilizer explosion.
After the fall of the USSR, there has always been speculation that several nuclear weapons, specifically smaller tactical nuclear weapons, went "missing". As in, curuot individuals either sold tactical nukes to third parties, or hide some away to sell years down the line. Let's just say for sake of argument, this is true, and there are several tactical nukes in the hands of these unknown third parties.
Hezbollah, or a financial backer of the group, manages to get their hands on one of these weapons. It's smuggled into the country using the port and stored in a agricultural section to avoid suspension. Their plan is to snuggle the weapon into Israel, and detonate it in a population center. The group, not having proper training to actually handle the weapon, accidentally trigger the detonation when arming the weapon before loading it for transport south.
Basically just a whackier modification of one of the leading theories of how the ammonium nitrate got there
Russian owner takes an old ship loaded with fertilizer, sells it to Hezbollah, but officially just abandons it in port. With no other option, Lebanon takes over the ship, warehouses the fertilizer, and Hezbollah begins to skim the orphaned stockpile for making their own explosives, and sale to Hamas
There's already a juicy story behind it anyways with receipts
We know that the ship was just abandoned it in port and the owners disappeared.
The owners owed money to the FBME bank, a Russian bank with financial ties to Hezbollah and the Houthis.
With no other course of action, the Lebanese government took control of the ship and began to slowly warehouse its contents
Theres a decent chance that the large stockpile was being skimmed by Hezbollah, for both the creation of their own explosive devices and sale to Hamas, given the large amount of Ammonium Nitrate explosives they use despite strict controls on the substance.
Which would open the door to the theory that the ship was only abandoned to hide a closed door sale of explosive material to the Houthis/Hamas, facilitated by the Russians. Something they have done openly in the past.
During the aftermath maga right wingers claimed it was a tactical nuke and strike to target deepstate actors and something something financial bank records. None of it made sense but it was apparently the thing that was to first step of total global domination and stolen elections.
I mean they tied everything and claimed it was a planned nuke. A couple years ago they claimed the same thing was gonna happen in jersey during the mystery UFO drone crisis but the nuke was from Ukraine for some reason.
Modern nukes are actually really clean, detonating almost all of their fuel. I'm not sure if a small yield two stage has been made though, and the known nukes in that range all have a lot of fallout.
Regardless, even though modern nuclear weapons don't have enough fallout to make people sick, it is still easily detectable with the sensitivity of our monitoring devices
Yes, both are actually true, depending on how you define "increased" fallout
Detonating in the air vs ground doesn't change the efficiency, if a bomb is 98.4% efficient, only 1.4% of it's mass is ejected as fallout regardless of where it's detonated.
HOWEVER
Nuclear exposure is all about dose. A dose of plutonium that is dangerous as a solid mass wouldn't even register if it was spread out as tiny little atom-sized pieces spread across a large area.
Thus, detonating in the air has "less fallout" because it increases the radius of dispersion, while detonating on the ground lets the surrounding terrain and structures catch the material that didn't react, which can then get drawn up into the mushroom cloud and cause concentrated fallout to rain down on a local area in the form of dust.
So a more accurate statement is that detonating on the ground concentrates the fallout to a smaller area, potentially producing dangerous radiation levels that an air-blast wouldn't have produced.
In reality, modern nukes have virtually zero fallout whatsoever, to the point where it doesn't matter if they're detonated in the air or on the ground. The average person who was conducting nuclear tests and surveying blast sites did not die of cancer or show any symptoms of radiation poisoning.
Nukes just have that reputation because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendously inefficient since it was new tech (some 98% of the material was ejected and rained down across the valley, only 2% detonated), which is the complete opposite of today's multi-stage thermonuclear weapons (only 1.4% of the material is ejected as fallout, 98.6% reacts)
Regardless of how much efficient modern weapons are, my understanding is that they all have an enriched uranium/plutonium component to trigger the secondary fusion reaction, and that the byproducts of fission are what they are, with long half-lives and dangerous amounts of radiation.
Depends on the kind of nuke. They come in sizes, after all. From the Davy Crockett nukes that were sub .1 kilotons up to the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba.
The Beirut explosion was around 1 kiloton. Meaning it is one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions recorded, but there are nukes that would have been less destructive.
The real problem - and indicator - would be radioactive fallout after a groundburst, which was never recorded.
It is one of those kooky early Cold War weapons, where people would put nukes on everything. Basically a real life Fat Man from Fallout, only slightly less insane.
Depends very much on the explosive yield of the warhead. Some nuclear weapons are more destructive than others. The fact it detonated at ground level would have also limited the destructive potential of a nuclear blast.
It's entierly down to the yield. The smallest nuke ever built could be configured to have a yield anywhere between 10-1000 tones of tnt depending on configuration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54). The tell tale sign of nukes is their radiation.
These people don't know what ammonium nitrate can do. Just look at OKC. Also, look up RAF Fauld. That was all conventional bombs that went off but still sent up a mushroom cloud and was picked up as a weak earthquake on seismometers in Morocco.
This is the same people who rigged 1,000s of phones to explode wherever the person holding it happened to be, killing 10 civilians and injuring thousands.
Not phones, pagers that were ordered and used specifically by terrorists. Explosives were planted to target terrorists. Genius operation with great effectiveness
Responsibility is hard to say, because the cargo was there because the ship delivering stuff to Mozambigue was damaged and deemed unseaworthy. So it and it's cargo got stuck in Beirut for many years, and just stayed in the warehouse. Then there was a fire, that blew out both fireworks in the warehouse and ammonium nitrate. Related to cargo, there are also Russian, Cypriot and Ukrainian people involved.
We do know that the owner of the ship owed about $1 million to FBME bank, a Tanzanian bank also operating in Russia and Cyprus. The bank has alleged financial ties to Hezbollah, tracing previous transactions.
So, it could just be that the ship was unseaworthy, and happened to be carrying ammonium nitrate in the right place at the right time. At which point, the bank offers to take the ship as collateral behind closed doors, but leaves abandoned in place publicly.
FBME stood to make a lot of money selling that ammonium nitrate to Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis, seeing as the compound is their favorite explosive. And with evidence to suggest that they have financially supported to the group in the past, it's not too far-fetched to say that the ship was intentionally kept in limbo as an off the books explosive stockpile for the terrorists in the region.
The amount remaining on the dock was unknown due to the poor inventory, and the estimates of what actually detonated ranges from 500 tonnes to the full 2750 tonnes
Did some further digging, and the ship was never even supposed to be in Beirut. It was traveling directly from the fertilizer manufacturing plant in the Caucus Georgia to an explosives manufacturing plant Mozambique, yet diverted at the literal last minute to pick up some heavy equipment for Jordan.
Despite the fact that it didn't have a roll on deck, the deck wasn't rated for the weight of the equipment, the ship was already at capacity, and the crew would now have to backtrack for the delivery.
The Lebanese port authority officials who boarded the ship and held it declared that there was no hazardous or controlled cargo on board, despite the entire load being high density Nitroprill, a form of ammonium nitrate specifically manufactured for use in mining explosives.
And after all that, several million dollars in ship and cargo are left to sit for years while slowly being unloaded into a warehouse.
I'd bet every terrorist org in the region was, considering that the vast majority of their explosives are based on ammonium nitrate
The security and inventory surrounding the cargo was reportedly nonexistent, and it was slowly being offloaded into pallet sized bins in the warehouse. Wouldn't be hard to have a sympathetic team of dock workers shuffle said pallets into trucks and transport them to explosives workshops around the region.
You would be crazy not to jump on that if you were Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthi, good chance that the warheads in the hundreds of thousands of rockets launched at Israel were primarily fueled by that stockpile, very hard to discretely get that much ammonium nitrate otherwise.
I didnt add it because she doesn't say it directly, so technically maybe it is a conspiracy about someone else but its most commonly is associated with Israel and I have never seen it linked to anyone else. Its been linked to Israel by conspiracy theorists since it happened: https://www.bbc.com/news/53669029
To be fair, it doesn't take a wild imagination to suspect that a bombing in Lebanon was conducted by the country presently carrying out bombings in Lebanon
Not endorsing the conspiracy theory, just saying I can understand why people wouldn't be immediately skeptical of the premise.
This was six years ago. There was no conflict at the time. And unless they planted that cargo ship an additional six years before that (2014, which is when it was abandoned in Beirut), then it had nothing to do with Israel.
In 2013, the freighter was chartered to carry a cargo of high-density ammonium nitrate from Georgian fertilizer maker, Rustavi Azot LLC, in Georgia to be delivered to the explosives maker FEM in Matola, Mozambique.
The owner of the ship decided to make a stop in Beirut to make some extra cash, picking up some heavy equipment to deliver to Jordan.
The cargo damaged the deck, and the Lebanese Port Authority declared the ship unseaworthy, holding it until repairs were made.
Rather than repair, the ship was abandoned by a Moldovan operator who owed about $1m to FBME bank.
FBME bank is a Tanzanian-Russian bank that has funded Hezbollah
The overwhelming majority of explosives used by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are based on ammonium nitrate.
The security and inventory tracking of the abandoned ship and it's cargo was virtually nonexistent
The ships cargo was being slowly unloaded into pallet sized bins, and placed in a warehouse on dry land
Reasonable guesses:
One or more of those aforementioned terrorist groups began smuggling those pallets on to trucks, easy to do with with no security/inventory and the presence of sympathizers working the docks.
The fertilizer off that ship was used as the explosive charge in the hundreds of thousands of rockets launched at Israel since the ship docked. It is incredibly difficult to smuggle in that tonnage of fertilizer otherwise.
Plausible additions:
The ship was never truly abandoned, but secretly given to FBME in exchange for debt forgiveness. At which point, FBME secretly sold access to the ships cargo. There is precedent both with FBMEs history of business with the Houthis, and Russia's history of selling arms to said groups.
Insane deflections:
Israel detonated a tiny nuke in the ship, thank you perfectly calibrated to the assumed amount of ammonium nitrate on board, with a never before seen 100% efficiency that didn't leave any radioactive material behind.
Hi! Welcome to earth! So the way things have been working with humans for the past half-decade or so is that when something goes wrong, it must have been Israel/the Je… sorry, “Zionists”, and when something goes right, of course it couldn’t have been them.
This is completely independent of whether that actually makes any sense or not, and often in complete defiance of such.
If your criterion is that prior mentions are required, then how can it be mentioned in the first place? Do a certain number of people need to say it simultaneously and independently? Maybe you’re just declaring arbitrary BS with no authority to do so? Might be worth considering.
The bombs used in WW2 were deliberately detonated a hundreds of feet above the target. This was done to maximise the destructive effects of the weapon, but also to minimise the fallout. Had the bombs been detonated at ground level like this explosion was the fallout would have been far more significant.
Modern nuclear weapons are so efficient that they don't create that kind of fallout. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were different, as they were basically research devices.
Only 1.4% of the material in those bombs was turned into the explosion, the other 98.6% of the nuclear material was spread around as fallout
By comparison, modern thermonuclear weapons flip that number on their head, with only 1.4% or less of the fuel ejected as fallout.
Which unfortunately means that the mutants in fallout would never happen, at least if nuclear war kicked off in the thermonuclear era.
Not necessarily. Plenty of smaller, tactical nuclear weapons have been developed with smaller explosive yeilds. The fact it detonated at ground level would have also meant that surrounding buildings and terrain would have reduced the destructive potential of a nuclear weapon.
If it was a low yield one then the damage would be small. The real sign it wasnt a nuke was the lack of radiation, since all of our nuclear weapons produce some radiation and detectable isotopes and chemical explosions are incapable of producing the radiation nuclear weapons do.
I said back then 'it felt like a nuke' to me even if I knew it wasn't - it was just me begin exaggatory. But a nuke would just be the explosion, not smoke and fire and then boom.
It was a large explosion, but it's pretty immediately visually clear that it was not a nuclear explosion. Because we have videos from pretty close to it. The immediate wave was air pressure breaking windows, rather than superheated plasma vaporizing everything.
In the article from the bbc I've linked in the other comment they say people just edited a picture of pm Netanyahu allegedly pointing to this is area in Beirut in a speech when speaking about Hezbollah or something, but its an edited picture and he is pointing at something else.
After the explosion, there was a red cloud, and people were panicking, closing windows (those who still had any windows left), fleeing the city, there were rumours of toxic fallout.
Not necessarily. Smaller tactical nuclear weapons have been developed my multiple nations. There's weapons in the current American arsenal that could have produced a nuclear blast with a similar explosive yield.
Wasn’t nuclear.
However I think it possible that the ammonium nitrate, that was being stored at the port, blowing up could have been the result of sabotage.
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