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Comment by nelaboras | Hacker News Reader

The big story for me is in the last paragraphs: this wasn't the full shipment exploding:

> According to three European intelligence sources investigating the blast, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, the amount still stored in the warehouse by August may have been smaller than the initial 2,750 tons. They said the size of the explosion was equivalent to as little as 700 to 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate.

That means to me someone, somewhere is building bombs.

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1000 tons of CLEAN ammonium in good shape. It's rather hard to explode all mass of pure ammonium or even ANFO in mines, it's routine to find unexploded pellets all over the place. It's even harder to explode whole mass of ammonium which sat for several years in humid conditions (ammonium nitrate is VERY higroscopic).

I was wondering about that too, especially since when investigating the state of the cargo they found out that already in 2015 "most of the one-ton bags containing the ammonium nitrate — approximately 1,900 — were ripped and had their contents spilling out". So some of it may have surely been stolen over the years, but not 1500-2000 tons...

Yeah, consider logistics of stealing 1000 tons of something. If it's not organized big truck removal, you are looking at ferrying max 200-300kg at a time with small car, loading one ton of fertilizer with shovel will also take more than a hour during which thieves can be nabbed. After two years in humid environment you can't use shovel anymore, you have to use pickaxe to split it apart into large chunks (and explosion risk is relatively high for such operation). That's why no company was interested, it was not easily useful for anyone.

Ammonium nitrate is incredibly common. It has applications both in agriculture (fertilizer) and commercial blasting ops - so not hard to come by in general. That said, in this case you may be right.

I believe Hezbollah's use of ammonium nitrate for explosives is well documented.

I don't know why this is downvoted. I think it would be pretty naive to think that Hezbollah or some other terrorist group in Lebanon wouldn't be massively excited to have a few thousand tons of the main ingredient of explosives fall in to their lap.

TFA also mentioned the Mozambique explosives company buying it had links to Hezbollah but I'm guessing a lot of people didn't read the article, which is too bad, it's a really good article.

Thank goodness for those thieves. Imagine if it had all been left there.

Will they use it somewhere even more devastating?

Maybe, and it's very well possible

I'm not sure how accurate the explosion size estimate is, but I suppose, not so much. And there are several factors that might have dampened the explosion (proximity to ground, water, etc)

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