You lost /what/?
About 380
tons of high-density chemical explosives, mostly HMX and RDX, have
gone missing from a munitions dump in Iraq.I'll just say that a fist-sized lump of either of these is enough to make a fairly impressive crater, one in which you could easily park your car.
So, anyone want to play "guess where the explosives are now, and what kinds of uses they'll find?"
Edit: Some side computations, just for amusement. The legal max GVW of a semi in California is 40 tons, which translates to about 30 tons of cargo space, so this is maybe 12 semis' worth. In a Trauzl block test, RDX is about
186% the explosive power of TNT, (it's the active ingredient in most plastic explosives) so if you set this all off at once it would be about 0.7kT equivalent explosive force. This should be enough to
level unreinforced buildings at a distance of about 0.9km, and which should be
audible (~1Pa overpressure) at a distance of about 550 miles. (Using Sublette's formula that the radius (in km) as a function of blast overpressure is about Y
1/3(P/P
0)
-0.7, where Y is the equivalent blast power in kT, P is the overpressure of interest and P
0 is 3psi) So if that blast were to go off in New York City, you would hear a quiet little "thump" (well, 60dB, but down at 90Hz, far in the bass where human hearing isn't very good. Elephants would hear it from about 10 times farther away) in Lansing, MI. Or from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, your choice. That's really a lot of high explosives.
