Old soviet munitions detonating

[ghbucky]

https://strategypage.com/htmw/htpeace/articles/20201031.aspx

This article discusses cold war era soviet munitions going off. Granted, it seems several of the incidents were due to unrelated fires, but I'm wondering why the western world doesn't seem to have these issues.

Its not like there is a huge difference between the actual manufacture of the stuff, is there? I've heard that the US had pretty big stockpiles of WW2 era bombs that were used during the mid-east wars, so why is our stuff still stable and safe?

 

[LeverGunFan]

The US and most of the NATO countries probably do a better job of using or disposing of old munitions. I doubt that there were any WWII era munitions left by the time of the mid east wars; at the start of the Viet Nam war the US was short of munitions and was sending F-105 fighter bombers on missions with just two 500 pound bombs while a normal load was a dozen or more. When I was in the Air Force - mostly in the 1980's - we would do live drop missions with old and expendable munitions. Some would only detonate at low order because they were too old.

 

[Jim Watson]

In 1994 I worked on a project to study a more environmentally conscious method of disposal than OBOD (Open Burn, Open Detonation) for obsolete munitions.
Our test pieces included 175mm mostly dated 1973, 5" from who knows when, and some 3" that I think very old.
And some naval mines of unknown age. Not the movie type globe with horn fuzes, but something about the size of a couple of 30 gallon drums end to end in an angle iron framework.

 

[50 shooter]

My guess would be that our munitions aren't made in forced labor camps. Where there's no quality checks, no one cares if a worker falls over dead...

Reminds me of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon, the one where he's hitting bombs with a hammer. If it doesn't go off, he writes dud on the side! Classic!

 

[Jim Watson]

During that early '90s program, a group of our engineers went to Europe to see what they did with obsolete munitions. In France and Belgium, they were still finding unexploded ordnance from WWI not to mention WWII. Farmers scrounged scraps of armor plate to put under their tractor seats.

The drill was, plow up a shell in the field, leave it in a pocket of the honeycomb concrete utility pole, and put the standard form in your mailbox. A truck would come around two or three times a week and pick up the UXO. The assistant would shake each shell. If it sloshed it was gas and he would put it on the bed of sand on the right side of the truck bed. If it didn't slosh, it was explosive and he would lay it on the sand on the left side of the truck. At lunch time, they would pull the canvas tilt over the truck bed and park with the tailgate right up to the cafe wall so it would not be disturbed while they had lunch and a beer.

We were tracking the chemical fill. They had a system to drain and incinerate the fill, get the fuze and bursting charge out for disposal, then run the shells through a furnace to burn the residue off. One of our guys sent back a picture of a table at the facility. A steel table with a pair of gloves, a hammer, and a wire brush, so the shells could be cleaned up enough to identify. Funds were short, they had a yard stacked with shells and nobody working on them.

 

[dogtown tom]

ghbucky .... I've heard that the US had pretty big stockpiles of WW2 era bombs that were used during the mid-east wars, so why is our stuff still stable and safe?

Not all of it is.
Pine Bluff Arsenal has had several fires/leaks/incidents over the years. A giant fire caused by leaking WP several years ago.

PBA took years to build and implement a facility to dispose of chemical and nerve agent weapons. Some were so fragile that they broke apart during handling.

 

[Dfariswheel]

The Soviets and their allies were totally unconcerned about environmental dangers or dangers to nearby civilians.
Their production factories were not nearly up to our standards, so they had more then a few duds and accidents, and the munitions often didn't stay nearly as stable as ours.

Then too, their storage conditions were very often substandard and since they had literally mountains of munitions, losses due to accidents or explosions due to defective weapons were of no real concern to Moscow, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

This all comes down to a general disregard for any concerns about accidents and the affects on civilian or even military personnel.
If you want to read some horror stories, do some reading on the wildly careless way the Soviets treated nuclear waste or even failed detonations of atomic weapons.

One store described the Soviets under threat of death from Stalin to quickly develop atomic weapons and how they did things like stick experiments in gullies and when it melted down they had a bulldozer just bury it.
The fact that the dozer operator quickly died of massive radiation poisoning was totally of no bother to them, and that the dozer itself was virtually glowing with radiation was no reason not to assign another operator to bury the next experiment.
Bulldozers are expensive, workers.... not so much.

Possibly the ultimate Soviet attitude to these sort of things is the story about what they did after the Chernobyl disaster.
The Soviet Way is a lethal combination of disregard and incompetence, with accountability only used on scapegoats.
These attitudes carried over to all the Soviet bloc.

 

[thallub]

For 20 years i was a US Army EOD guy. For an additional 30 years i made a living destroying military ammunition, etc. Among other stuff, i managed the destruction of 20,000 tons of unserviceable ammunition from Desert Strom.

Military explosives are very stable. Except for rare cases involving old artillery propellant, this stuff don't self destruct. In the vast majority of cases human error is to blame.

In the aftermath of Desert Storm a fire and explosions took place in an ammunition dump at Camp Doha, Kuwait. The Army Colonel in charge of the place had his ammunition stored in the same area with diesel fuel, etc. An ammunition truck with hot brakes arrived, caught on fire and the whole area self destructed.

 

[ghbucky]

Possibly the ultimate Soviet attitude to these sort of things is the story about what they did after the Chernobyl disaster.

The book "Midnight at Chernobyl" is a haunting read.

 

[ghbucky]

In the aftermath of Desert Storm a fire and explosions took place in an ammunition dump at Camp Doha, Kuwait. The Army Colonel in charge of the place had his ammunition stored in the same area with diesel fuel, etc. An ammunition truck with hot brakes arrived, caught on fire and the whole area self destructed.

I knew nothing about this. Interesting article about it is here

That article says it is one of the largest one day vehicle losses in the US since WW2.

 

[thallub]

i was in the Damman office of the company when the Doha debacle happened. i was told by several soldiers that a truck with hot brakes started the fire. A senior US Army general officer wanted me to investigate the debacle at Doha. My boss said no. The general said "then I'll be lied too".

The M42 submunitions were dispensed in the fire because the 155mm M483 rounds were fuzed, at the order of the brigade commander.

An unfuzed M483 round has a fusible nose plug. A hole in the plug is filled with something like Woods metal that melts at a low temperature when exposed to fire. That causes the ejection charge to vent, preventing ejection of the submunitions.

Some of the ammunition dump explosions in Russia may well be terrorist actions.

 

[Ignition Override]

Dfariswheel: We might know, if "it" happens, by this February whether those old Soviet attitudes might soon occupy a couple of seats in the US Presidential Cabinet.

ghbucky: Interesting.
My wife won't accept the term "Murphy's Law".

 

[Scorch]

No doubt many of those munbitions were left over from the little skirmish they had there a few years earlier. I remember when the Soviets were in Afghanistan they has trouble getting munitions they needed becasue they had not yet used up the quota of munitions from weapons that were no longer in service.

I lived in Europe in the early 1960s, and there were lots of munitions scattered about after WW2, something US citizens do not fully comprehend. They are still finding unexploded ordnance 75 years after the end of the war. Germany caught the brunt of it, but we seeded the combatant nations very liberally with high level explosives. And the Germans and the Russians and the British all did the same.

Soviet citizens were not eager to complain, it was seen as unpatriotic. When your citizens can be disappeared without anyone asking questions, you get a little callous about public sentiment. Also, nationalism was at an all-time high after the Great Patriotic War.

The Soviet Way is a lethal combination of disregard and incompetence, with accountability only used on scapegoats.

Before you start thinking that was just a Soviet attitude, you should look up the history of the US nuclear programs. Jackass Flats comes to mind. Open-air explosions 30 miles from Las Vegas. Down-winders. The residents of Enetowak. I remember fabtastic light shows in the sky in Southern California when I was a kid from the atomic tests in the South Pacific. So we did it, too. Hopefully we learned something.

 

[ghbucky]

you should look up the history of the US nuclear programs

Little known historical tidbit: The planning for the invasion of Japan included using nuclear weapons to clear the beaches ahead of the amphibious invasion.

It wasn't that they were cavalier with nuclear weapons in the beginning, it was they just were ignorant of the long term effects.

 

[T. O'Heir]

"...heard that the US had..." Nope. W.W. I and II vintage bombs are found fairly regularly in Europe but the U.S. doesn't use or store 50 plus year old ordnance.
"...two 500 pound bombs..." Standard USAF bomb in VN was a 750 pound bomb. A Thud could carry 16, M117 general purpose bombs, which actually weigh approximately 820 pounds each. Pay load was done according to the mission, distance and fuel requirements.
Anyway, the Russians never scrapped anything. Old tanks became gun emplacements. However, due to a near total lack of funding, maintenance of anything is virtually non-existent.

 

[dogtown tom]

T. O'Heir .... but the U.S. doesn't use or store 50 plus year old ordnance.

The US sure as heck has stored 50 plus year old ordnance.
As I mentioned above, the Pine Bluff Arsenal had a program that ended in 2010 that destroyed M55 VX rockets from the late '50's and stocks of mustard gas, GB/VX nerve agents and other chemical weapons that were manufactured during WWII.

 

[Mk VII]

The fire/explosion on the Forrestal was made worse by the old M65 bombs they had taken on board, some of which dated back to the Korean War and were leaking/corroded.