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Comment by terramex | Hacker News Reader

There is forest not far away from my parents home (central Poland) where people were constantly finding unexploded bombs. Finally, in 2012 a team was hired to clean it. It took them 9 months and they found "tens of thousands" of missiles, bombs, munitions etc.

https://dzienniklodzki.pl/tony-bomb-i-pociskow-z-ii-wojny-sw...

If you are into First World War memorabilia sometimes you don't even need metal detector to find shrapnel balls in local forests if you know where to look.

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Makes one wonder how much of it has found its way into illicit hands. Yes, it's more dangerous to the owner than to any target at this point, but if you know what you're doing it could be a source of explosives that is otherwise completely untraceable.

I think it would be more cost and time-effective to just make explosives than go around searching for them, hoping they don't blow up when you dig them out, then concealing them and bringing them back to wherever your base of operations is. Explosives are (somewhat) easy to make, it is setting them off reliably without blowing yourself up that is difficult.

There was a scare with TriAcetone-TriPeroxide in shoes a few years ago; I think this is why we are still taking off our shoes.

Modern solutions make the safety aspect quite simple, exhibiting stability until hypersonic shockwave conditions.

A munition with a fuse is nothing terrorists etc would want. There's no way to know when it would explode, nor any way to control it.

I’d imagine most people with the knowledge to safely handle these types of explosives already have access to modern weapons grade stuff (black market munitions, etc.). For your run of the mill domestic terrorist type it really isn’t that hard to make explosives (fertilizer and diesel fuel), so probably not worth the risk of messing with unstable 100 year old bombs.

It has actually happened: in 1992 the italian judge Paolo Borsellino was killed in a car bombing organized by the mafia.

The explosive was sourced from unexploded bombs recovered in the Mediterranean sea.

I stayed in Verdun for a couple of nights on a trip through France last year. I explored the forest a bit, and noticed there are two kinds of rocks on the ground: White, chalky ones and brown ones. The brown ones are fragments of artillery shells.

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