TSA, DHS Order 1,400 Pounds of High Powered Explosives Set to Deliver August 31

Originally posted by Pervius
Things like maybe shelf life.....will we start seeing TSA dog handlers going BOOM because they improperly stored high powered explosives for years and past a shelf life leading to a scenario where it became unstable?

We've been using bomb-sniffing dogs for decades. This is not a new thing. Don't you think they would've developed procedures by now so as not to blow up their dogs? How many stories of exploded bomb-sniffing dogs can you find on peta.org?

Well crap... Is Cryptoagent correct in his assumption of
this news? Or is it Nucleardivers' take on it?
Which alludes to a more sinister possibility?

They each seemingly have the credentials
to give us a better idea of whether this is odd,
or standard operations.

reply to post by TheProphetMark


The amount is trivial. It's insufficient to do much damage; certainly it isn't sufficient to control or destroy more than a small group of people. I might be worried if this were 1400 tons; or if there were several more zeros in the number. But whatever they're doing (my guess is training dogs), they're simply not asking for enough explosive to blow up many people.

Ooh... I hadn't seen Brother Stormhammer's comment before I wrote this...

I also ring the 1,4000 pounds of explosives being used for training to be suspect. As another poster mentioned around 10-15 grams is more than suffecient for training purposes. I figure that 1,400 pounds is enough explosives to severely disable a vast majority of the bridges in this nation. Not destroy them but make them unpassable.

I think your numbers are off. Now, admittedly I have no clue as to how much ammonium nitrate or RDX is required to damage a bridge. However, I am fairly certain that 1400 pounds of explosives aren't enough to damage more than a tiny fraction of the nation's bridges. My thinking is as follows:

A quick search tells me that there are about 600,000 bridges in the US, give or take. Dividing 1400 by 600,000, you get about 0.0023 pounds per bridge, which works out to 0.037 oz per bridge. That's roughly a gram of explosive per bridge. That's just not going to do much damage to anything. I'm not sure you'd even get a decent firecracker out of a gram of explosive.

OK, so maybe we're only talking about special bridges, ones that carry lots of traffic. There the numbers get hazier. I would imagine that there probably is some percentage of bridges that carry most of the traffic in the US - maybe 1% of the bridges carry 50% of the traffic, something like that. Even so - 100 grams of explosive still isn't going to cause enough damage to interfere with traffic. These bridges are built to survive massive trucks running over them all day long. I don't see how even a well-placed explosion of 100 g of explosive is going to cause significant damage.

If a pound of explosive could damage a bridge, then maybe we've got something. Taking out 1400 strategic bridges would be enough to disrupt traffic throughout the country, I imagine. But - is one pound of explosive enough to do it?

Besides that, I have to wonder why it would be better to damage a bridge, than to either take it down completely, or (if you want to use it in the future), just post guards to block it. If traffic control is the goal, and if the bridges are only damaged, then I would expect a sufficiently desperate citizenry to just go ahead and risk driving over the damaged bridge, unless guards were posted anyway.