I don't think I'd ever considered prior to now how much more economic it would be to release "The one nuclear bomb [TerroristOrganisation] can afford to muster" in a shipping choke-point, rather than a city.
So, another thing to worry about :)
So, another thing to worry about :)
Blow up the locks for the Panama Canal and you have some seriously inconvenienced shipping companies.
But even in both cases the result is that they have to take the long way around. It makes the shipping slower and more expensive, but it was a tiny fraction of your costs to begin with so most companies survive just fine.
I would think someone with a bomb on some kind of bulk Hazmat carrier and the threat of blowing it up would shut down traffic for a lot longer. Nobody is going to want to get close to do anything about it.
LNG or Oil are the two I can think of, but there's probably a lot of other bulk Hazmat carriers.
Someone hijacks a LNG carrier, parks it in the canal and says they have a bomb on the pressure vessel.
Regardless of what infrastructure it would damage or not, it will shut down shipping.
Who would be willing to get close to it to do anything about it? What do you do, stand off and launch a missile and definitely destroy it?
A huge bomb to one side of the canal would displace rock and mud in to the channel and make it shallower. That would be enough to close it to large ships until it could be dredged again.
Although, if terrorists really wanted to wreak havoc in the canal they could scuttle a large ship while it's sailing in it. That would necessitate dismantling and removing the entire thing.
I'm surprised no one has made a movie of that.
> In time, it was possible to reduce the number of crew members on board the ships, and in 1969 the ships were gathered into several groups to further reduce the number of crew necessary for their upkeep. Those crew that were left to maintain the vessels were rotated every three months. In 1972, the last crew members of the German ships were finally sent home, with the maintenance of the ships left to a Norwegian company.
They even introduced a postal system!
That is pretty cool.
I remember back in the early 90s attending a CEBIT trade show (at the time perhaps the largest computing show in the world -- the show floors covered acres) and being astonished to see that the Bundespost delivered mail, including the usual trade show flyers, to each display booth. Yes, uniformed postal workers wheeling the usual delivery carts up and down the aisles.
I think we forget how important transporting physical media (usually just paper) was back in those days. The penny post used to deliver twice a day in cities. Now I check my mail every 4-6 weeks and there's rarely anything important in it.
Well, it terrorizes. Terror not achieving anything is a bold statement. Maybe you'd prefer to argue that it's not efficient or productive.