American WWII bomb explodes at Japanese airport, causing large crater in taxiway
cnn.com
cnn.com
This is why HDCP enforcement may be the dumbest legal-technical mandate ever. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Conte...
"Someone has a recording device they can point at a screen" is a low bar.
Indeed. Because of HDCP common use cases like splitting, converting or sending a video signal are unsupported or afterthoughts by most consumer devices, even when dealing with non-protected signals. Of course, the HDCP flag can be removed by some shady devices but these are not commonly available and are often poorly documented.
Of course they aren't called "HDCP strippers", but ever since the master key was leaked/cracked, many anonymous devices with HDMI inputs will strip HDCP.
Or just point the phone at the screen, record, click the share button and select YouTube or whatever.
[1] the store clerk later remembered the defendant had been drinking a pop when he entered the store and they found the bottle had been left behind, which had his DNA on it, and his DNA was on file
Those DVR/NVR (including networked cameras) should be among the first things hackers should liberate from their proprietary firmware: they all use Linux but keep it tight closed and quite often phone home somewhere in China, officially to allow users connect via the phone app (another big security concern) to their cloud service, which also means the feed goes through there.
One can buy the board alone by searching for "dvr board" on aliexpress and other shops; they're cheap and could be repurposed for other interesting uses because of their fast ADCs for example.
https://www.nextchip.com/en/ahd/ahd.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDcctv
edit: just found some data about a manufacturer of high res video sampling chipsets, along with some open source software for them.
https://www.unifore.net/product-highlights/nvr-dvr-hisilicon...
This was true back in the CRT and cheap Sony camcorder days, and it is even more true in the wide viewing angle, high quality phone image sensor, and image stabilization days.
But nobody cares to take five extra seconds to get good framing, or reduce glare, or hold their damn phone steady, or match the damn aspect ratio!
It's infuriating how little people seem to care in general
(I'm probably way late in becoming aware of this. It still simultaneously 1) blew my mind, 2) annoyed me, and 3) terrified me.)
There was a direct video feed, but that was being transmitted to Australia (facing the Moon at the time), and it wasn't possible to patch that directly through to US-compatible video feeds. The first images that Nasa received were upside down. The ultimate video, broadcast live internationally, was from a camera pointed at the CRT / television image at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canbera, ACT, Australia.
I'm having trouble finding a full retelling of this though here's a story of Honeysuckle Creek's role and a bit about the TV image:
<https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-19/nasa-apollo-11-moon-l...>
On the Parkes dish (Aus): <https://apollo11.csiro.au/the-australian-connection/live-fro...>.
The wind problem: <https://apollo11.csiro.au/the-australian-connection/delay-an...>.
More on the technical aspects of the video feed, but without my "camera-on-a-TV-screen" bit: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=tIogywOrv8s>
That is all.
(And to spoil the joke: the inverted image actually originated from the Goldstone station in Southern California, not Oz.)
.. featuring the brilliant hack of when stumped by hand solving parametric differential orbital calculations for orientating a radio telescope to the current module position: Just aim it at the moon
( Also; Landline Australia looks at the Danish FarmDroid bot (and names Australian contacts for reviewing such tech)
https://thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/10668842
Geolocked Free to Air episode: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/landline/series/2024/video/RF2... (needs an AU proxy)
https://www.youtube.com/@FarmDroid/videos
)
And “aim it at the moon” hah yeah. The Dish looks cool! I hadn’t heard of it I will give it a watch.
It appears to be a 'dumb' (but accurate) weeding and seeding solar powered battery backed "runs all day and much of the night" platform.
I say dumb as the major feature seems to be highly accurate (sub inch) positioning ( I'm guessing on site grounded in GPS differential base station as an error broadcast | local reference ) with a taunt bright red bit of heavy string sprung out around the four corners .. ie no vision processing and a simple "detect tree or human" stop moving trip wire.
It'll seed, remember seed positions and "weed" (disturb soil) about the remembered seed position .. but I'm guessing it'll weed out planted seeds if there's an origin or axis positioning error in re-calibration.
Still, it's being used in several countries - the 58 minute weekly Landline program devotes 10 or 12 minutes to it and the name is given of the Queensland(?) Ag. Dept. officer who's trialing it out (along with other systems).
That'd be the main point of interest for you if you ever get to wanting to officially test your rig in Australia.
Landline is free to view in Australia - it's just yt-dlp.exe that-url-I-gave-above with an AU proxy .. I can always drop it or just the relevant transcript if want either the .MKV or .SRT
Or as we like to call our nations capital, Canberra.
It's a miracle nothing besides the taxiway was damaged and nobody was harmed or killed.
I reiterate this was sheer dumb miraculous luck that nothing and nobody was harmed or killed.
If you look at the photo in the article, the bomb seems to be at the very edge of the taxiway, where a plane is unlikely to drive directly over it. If it would have been a little bit closer to the center, it might have happened just as you described...
I would also like to mention that the wings carry most of the jet fuel.
Yeah. I'm glad RNGesus decided to be on humanity's side this time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Roseville_Yard_Disaster
It's believed that many of them are still buried and likely under homes & businesses. We just assisted detonating one of the mark 81s last week.
Edit: The easiest way I found to see photos and video is in Getty's archive: https://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/image?family=editorial&...
I lived in London for 20 years and never knew or saw anything like that?
The main thing you notice when you walk around London is the old/new mix. If you see a concrete monstrosity, nestled next to a Victorian/Edwardian/Elizabethan building, you're probably guaranteed that the newer building was built on top of a bomb site.
If you had an "anderson shelter" in your garden you were lucky. Many poor working class families got a "morrison shelter" which was basically a steel table you could use in a dining room or kitchen and then hide under. In some ways more convenient I guess? (Anderson shelters got cold and damp)
He was bombed out of a house in Stepney. They lost everything. I can't decide if he missed more the entire collection of the first 50 penguin books, or a lump of melted glass he scavanged from the fire of crystal palace in the 1930s: these are the two things he remembered in the 60s and 70s talking about it.
He was studying electrical engineering and maths at university by the end of the war and so not called up. He said they trained in how to manage live power cables with wooden "tongs" and were part of rescue crews when buildings collapsed. My mum was tracing maps for D-Day, and packing munitions and my Aunt did technical drawing on the "mulberry harbour" concrete caissons floated over to the beaches for D-Day.
A good read on the blitz would be "the people's war" by Angus Calder, which in large part is made up from "mass observation" recruited/organised diaries kept during the period, and donated to the University of Sussex. My mum kept one of them.
A standing joke in Architecture circles is that the greater london council destroyed more Wren churches in London than the Blitz. UCL used to say the basements where compsci was sited were kindly dug by the Germans.
Postwar housing was a mess. My aunt lived in a 5 story block of flats in Paddington she got on a long lease as bomb damaged property, my Uncle bought into commercial premises around Farringdon in a deal which demanded he do structural repairs immediately. There was a huge housing shortage and for years you could still see the pre-fabricated houses around Lambeth Palace which were a godsend of temporary housing but persisted into the 60s. Stepney where my dad grew up was a wreck, anywhere around the docks basically. It was a patchwork.
The pseudo-documentary film "Fires were started" by Humphrey Jennings has some iconic footage of the dock firestorm (not to be compared with Dresden, but it was severe) You would recognise the shots of the fronts of builings collapsing and firemen holding hoses wearing brodie helmets.
Comparisons are evil. Coventry was really badly affected and the modern day cathedral stands next to the wreck of the original gothic one. It's like the Kaiser Wilheim spire in Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a very pale shadow of the reality at the time. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Rotterdam were all significantly worse affected than London in the end, but to anyone in London I doubt it felt like it. The bombing in Japan was on an altogether different scale.
It's quite beautiful.
Guess bombing civilians wasn’t a good idea. Sorry about that
Right back atcha. Let's learn from this and stay friends!
Alas, this has never stopped to be part of warfare. When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?
Right, it was always bad and continues to be bad.
The whole of the past year Hezbollah also saved it's high quality missiles (the ones that would make it past the Iron Dome) for targeting military structures.
A year ago, Iranian militias staged an attack on civilians - which this strike on Israel by Iran was retaliation for Israel killing the leaders of Iranian proxies as Israel’s retaliation. Hence part of a war that started with an intentional attack on civilians.
As for Hezbollah - they definitely destroyed a lot of civilian houses with missiles that passed Iron Dome. The whole area is empty of civilians, which is why there often weren't casualties.
>...When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neither an airplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used during the war by barrel length, and qualify under the (later) formal definition of large-calibre artillery.
>...The German objective was to build a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians, not to destroy the city itself.
>...The projectile flew significantly higher than projectiles from previous guns. Writer and journalist Adam Hochschild put it this way: "It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of 40 km (25 mi) at the top of its trajectory. This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where the shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth. For the first time in warfare, deadly projectiles rained down on civilians from the stratosphere"
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-air-raids-that-shook-brit...
These are very different. Yeah, yeah, I know, "tell that to the mother who lost her child", but you would much rather be a civilian in a war in which the military is not intentionally targeting you.
So, when was the last war of which civilians did not die at all? Maybe the Cod Wars between the UK and Iceland.
Except there is war and no one has yet figured out a way not to have war. Given the reality of war, we are profoundly lucky to live in an era where civilized nations have agreed on rules for war, and many of those rules forbid the intentional targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.
This is unprecedented. And fragile. There are uncivilized nations which do not follow those rules. They find the idea of not targeting civilians quaint at best. They love those rules, only because those rules hamstring their enemies, not themselves. They happily target civilians. Not coincidentally, these are the most venal, corrupt and incompetent of nations, and fortunately they are handily beaten by their moral betters, rules notwithstanding.
Still, implying as you did that one is like the other is confused, at best. On principle I disagree with conflating the two kinds of civilian deaths: collateral damage (unironic, no scare quotes) and intentional atrocity are not the same. Conflating the two gives aid and comfort to bad actors, to morally confused souls who support uncivilized nations in their adventurism.
> I did not claim they were not different.
I claimed only that you conflated them, and you did, quite casually. The stakes are too high for that.
Also, "collateral damage" is on a spectrum, in my opinion. How much collateral damage is acceptable before you can call it an atrocity in itself? So, that is much less of a black-white distinction as it seems to be in your statement.
Collateral damage (no scare quotes) on the other hand, like consent (no scare quotes), has a very precise and important meaning with real, binary values. A civilian death is either collateral or intentional. Consent is either knowingly given or withheld.
Let's live in a world where these distinctions are clear.
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
They regularly conducted bombing raids at night in almost complete darkness, with a guy looking out the top of the plane with a sextant measuring the location of stars to decide when to drop the bombs. So anything within, say, 3 miles of a tank factory was at risk of being bombed.
Improved technology had a great impact in this area, because if 90% of your bombs are missing the target, a perfect targeting system is like having 10x as many planes.
"Haunting" is right.
We've learned at school that more people died to bombs in Italy post WW2 than during the war itself, it wasn't even close. I remember in the 2000s a single year made around 6 victims.
Most of the bombs are really at sea and lakes, and we still have around 250000 to a million unexploded bombs on our territory.
Most would not explode, but some are very dangerous because the triggers are the only parts that corrode and get ruined more easily thus making the bombs unstable.
Has any effort been put into making duds easier to find after the fact? e.g. Has anyone thought of putting something like an upscaled RECCO reflector on bombs? i.e. A passive radar reflector that would allow searchers to just hit a field with radar and get reflections back from unexploded ordinance.
Obviously, this wouldn't work for cruise missiles, etc. that need to have a low radar profile while in flight, but why not for bombs (especially cluster munitions) that are used in much greater numbers?
This is just one idea. I'm sure other methods could be used to make duds easier to find. Is there military value in leaving stealthy duds in your enemy's territory?
In all fairness -- probably, yes. It's the enemy's territory, and now you've made it more deadly, like an accidental minefield.
But I don't think any consideration is given to what happens to duds, what are the civilian consequences or environmental impacts of any part of the weapons lifecycles. It is an industry of death and destruction after all.
I understand in these cases and other ones such as scattering mines that a timer can be set so the mine or munition deactivates after a set time (say, a week) by deactivating the fuse.
Not all are designed in this way of course. And apologies, I'm looking for source links, but I can't find them at the moment. Edit: Here's an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATOR_mine_system
It's not fool-proof, but a lot better than chemical/mechanical mechanisms that try to go inert.
On the contrary. Duds causing UXO is the reason the US and most of NATO chooses not to build cluster munitions anymore, preferring instead pre-formed tungsten balls that are fired like a shotgun when the munition is over it's target.
The dud rate was something like 2%, not that much but enough to make the US decide that leaving tens of thousands of UXOs in formerly enemy territory isn't okay.
Russian cluster munitions being used in Ukraine right now have a much much higher dud rate, and that's before any bad storage or handling.
For similar reasons, many NATO countries have given up types of landmines
[1] http://characterisationexplosiveweapons.org/studies/annex-e-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer-bonded_explosive [3] https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2979... [4] https://sdquebec.ca/en/news/fmu-139-db-replaces-three-legacy...
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jan/31/2002242359/-1/-1/1/DOD...
The other way would be have fuse that shows reflector after hitting something but not detonating.
I'm only half joking. "not even Apple knows the location of your AirTag"
We can't even convince them not to throw bombs at other countries.
War should be a thing of the past.
https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/eveniment/accident-stupid-a-mu...
That's why if you ever come across any old UXO (UneXploded Ordnance) you should call the bomb squad and never touch it
They are capable of energetically exploding because they are not chemically stable.
And "shelf-stable and safe for many decades" is never a priority feature for high-volume wartime production of explosives.
Maybe not on the order of decades, but 'shelf-stable and safe for handling' is a definite concern in any ordnance production. Last thing you want is your whole ammo stockpile blowing up because a tired soldier set an artillery shell down a little too hard.
Many of the explosives used are actually fairly stable chemically and require either severe degradation to become unstable, or an external force applied to them that is sufficient to trigger their explosive effects. C4, as long as it hasn't been sitting around too long, is pretty safe to light on fire. And yet it's one of the more energetic commonly used explosives out there.
Or you kill yourself, when your round detonates in the gun.
There are explosives that need other explosives to set them off. If someone gave you a pound of C4 and then evacuated your neighbors, you would probably need to do some research to set it off. With the amount of explosives moved around in the world wars, easy storage and fairly safe logistics even by minimally trained soldiers are very much a priority.
On the flipside, there are explosives which won't let you finish a sneeze in the same room. Or which decompose into the latter. You wouldn't want to move thousands of tons of these around.
The problem is that those minitions do get used many years later. Often because after a war ends there is a huge surplus of munitions you want to save till the next war.
Russia is using decade-old shells in Ukraine for instance.
The USS Forrestal fire was partially caused by 14 year old bombs that had been improperly stored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire
Incredible.
Well for smaller amounts of explosive chemicals, they'd wear the blast suit, because it could save them and might keep them a bit presentable otherwise. That'd be nice for the family. If the bomb is several times heavier than you are though, they'd just do the job right and go home after - and no one needs safety equipment on a job done right.
https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2024-09-28/bomb-disposal-t...
Plus, while Hitchcock is the master of suspense, he is also known for comedy: https://medium.com/life-and-the-performing-arts/humor-hitchc...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1fu1bc1/iran...
[2] https://packaged-media.redd.it/1p1ueyie38sd1/pb/m2-res_848p....
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/03/fairview-plane-crash-...
I don't, but sometimes I have dreams like that, whether it's an aeroplane or a helicopter or whatever.
But alas, if it crashes while inside, it does not really matter...
https://www.munichre.com/en/insights/infrastructure/munich-b...
In a way I think Ukraine has a somewhat better handle on big unexploded munitions from ballistic or cruise missiles and drones: They have an active air defense and the big stuff can be followed on radar - so they know the possible point of impact and EOD teams know where to look.
I worry more about unexploded cluster munitions and small mines. Some of the latter look like something I'd definitely had picked up as a child just for curiosity.
There were craters just outside the village I grew up in. We used to go sledding down them when I was a kid. The story I heard was it just dumped bombs from a raid on a larger city so they didn't have to carry them back.
For anyone who is curious, there's a wonderful short video on PALs and how they isolate a nuclear warhead from the outside world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1LPmAF2eNA
http://web.archive.org/web/20040404013440/http:/www.cdi.org/...
Luckily no one was hurt or nearby when it went off.
Real WWII historians could probably determine the date on which the bomb was dropped, its intended target, etc., etc.
But with the condition that most of Japan was in, later in WWII - I'm thinking that "gone off where & when intended" would probably have had little effect. Most of the country was burned-out rubble.
Bomb findings during construction is nothing especially rare in these countries.
It's just part of doing business, really. Same story with archaeological remains, chemical contamination, or threatened animal species.
> If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. [...] At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan. According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.
Allegedly.
It's possible it's true, but claims like this have the incentive of selling the "atom bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and justified" narrative behind them, so that should be taken into account as a factor.
It doesn't even have to be consciously disingenous - the more one can convince oneself (and thus eventually others) of how destructive and costly conventional warfare would have been, the more digestible the nuclear option becomes, so there's a lot of motivation to fuel some motivated reasoning.
Not if you go by the kiloton rating of those two bombs: they were each in the kiloton range (around 10-15 kT IIRC), so if you add a generous 30,000 tons to the 160,800 you mentioned before, that's 190,800 tons, still far short of the 623,000 tons dropped on Germany.
Most of the damage to Japan's cities was actually done by napalm-filled bomblets combined into cluster-bombs[1], partly because weather made precision bombing difficult.
There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.
(Let's rephrase the success part. The campaign was destructive and deadly for the civilian population but did nothing to end the war earlier. Bomber Harris and the Lord Lindemann got a career boost, though.)
Really? To assert this, you need to show not that Axis production didn't decline, but that the damage done didn't prevent production from increasing even more. How does one show that?
Axis production continued increasing, according to this, it tripled after the bombing campaign started.
Actually, it's even worse than that, since one must also subtract from this production the resources Germany was putting into air defense. This effort was massive.
The Germans ended up devoting 1/4 of their war production and a million men to antiaircraft defense.
There is a lot of speculation why emperor and generals surrendered, even atomic bombs may not have been the triggering point as much as soviet declaration of war to Japan at 8 August 1945. Most probably it all compounded.
To assert that the bombing campaign did nothing for the war in the Pacific flies in the face of recorded history. We literally have the imperial Japanese equivalent of meeting minutes where they talk about this stuff and toward the end the sheer destruction of the bombing campaign did affect the credibility of the militarists "yeah we can still pull this off" claims in the eyes of many of the others.
BS
the reference: https://time.com/5772944/large-small-boulder/
A larger probability of a small crater(s) requiring repair would seem better for this purpose than a smaller probability of a large crater.
If it's not, I can't tell because it's hard to get a sense of scale from the video and image. The crater only appears maybe 2 or 3 meters wide judging by the grass, the painted stripes, and the overall taxiway width.
> A number of unexploded bombs dropped by the US military during World War II have been unearthed in the area, Defense Ministry officials said.
The article was a bit lacking. How do they know that it was a 500 pound bomb from WW2? Is it the shrapnel or is there a different way to determine it?
Let me repeat that, hundred-year-old shells are still underground, intact, and the explosives in them are just as powerful as when they were manufactured.
Chemicals in fuse can slowly combine until they detonate.
The odds of someone planting more explosives in a field potentially containing a dozen WWII bombs from multiple attacks are remote.
So basically you're asking for forensic evidence to prove that this bomb wasn't the result of time-travelers or teleporters or something equally fantastical. It's a ridiculous question. Of course it's an unexploded WWII bomb, what the hell else would it be?
There is a buch of forensic methods around this.
The WWII explanation is much more plausible. It happens at Schiphol too that they find them (luckily not by them exploding randomly but usually during construction efforts)
Yes, someone could have snuck into an airport and buried a bomb underneath the runway, then cleaned up the digging operation so as to not be noticed, but horses, not zebras.
My question was more of, how do they determine this sort of thing or is it just an assumption because it is the most likely scenario?
We are still finding unexploded artillery shells from the first world war in France. Germans are still finding bombs in cities.
The chemicals in the fuses mix and become unstable over time. The explosives don’t degrade as much.
If you wanted further verification, the bomb casing leaves fragments and explosives leave residue.
For it NOT to be a WW2 bomb would mean somebody sneaking in another bomb and paving it under the runway without being noticed.
It could've also been intentionally buried there by bored soldiers, or placed there by airport maintenance people as a prank, or ended up there due to a freak teleporter accident. Maybe it was even put there by Godzilla. Maybe the Infinite Improbability Drive spontaneously materialized it, together with a bowl of petunias.
If you find a bomb in an area which is known to have been bombed, without any evidence to the contrary it is pretty safe to assume it's there due to the bombing.
I don't think they did any exhaustive research. They didn't have to.
You would be able to look at the crater and see sizable pieces of a military air-dropped bomb. Normal bombs don't disintegrate. If they send it to a lab they can tell what explosive was used in it, which will roughly tell you when it was manufactured. (Assuming they don't find a serial number.)
That by itself is hardly conclusive, but that completely changes when you find identical unexploded bombs buried in the same area.
It would be rather odd if somebody came along later and put the same kind of bomb used in WWII in the ground. When the bomb got there isn't that important.
Cool. Now, how did you figure that out? Did someone analyze the shrapnel and conclusively date it to allied bombing campaigns in WWII, or is that what a source close to the events said, or did the reporter just... look at the picture and shoot from the hip? Any of these is an acceptable answer, so long as readers know which one it is.
In last 2 years the quality of submission/discourse on this forum hasn't gotten worse per say, but definitely is becoming more like r/worldnews.
¹ in Germany, "remote" means something like "2km from the next settlement".
That said, I'm sure there's a few farmers who have a pretty strong inkling where one is and are actively not looking to disturb that problem.
They would do that, the pencil detonators the Allies used to disrupt rescue and firefighting efforts after a carpet-bombing run become ever more touchy as time wears on. A bomb that is found is disarmed or exploded, else there will be a repeat of this incident down the line.
One of the reasons that the explosives have not been removed was the unfortunate outcome of a similar operation in July 1967, to neutralize the contents of the Polish cargo ship Kielce, that sank in 1946, off Folkestone in the English Channel. During preliminary work, Kielce exploded with a force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, digging a 20-foot-deep (6 m) crater in the seabed and bringing "panic and chaos" to Folkestone, although there were no injuries.[5]: 2000 survey, p21–22 Kielce was at least 3 or 4 miles (4.8 or 6.4 km) from land, had sunk in deeper water than Richard Montgomery, and had "just a fraction" of the load of explosives.[10] According to a BBC News report in 1970,[12] it was determined that if the wreck of Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 300 metres (980 feet)-wide column of water and debris nearly 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) into the air and generate a wave 5 metres (16 feet) high. Almost every window in Sheerness (population circa 20,000) would be broken and buildings would be damaged by the blast.Very surprised I haven't heard of a movie involving this, or a least a Doctor Who episode.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Richard+Montgom...
Might just be my algorithm
For reference the state of NRW (Germany) alone found 2811 bombs in 2018 so it’s much more common than you’d think.
Laws seem to differ by state but afaik new construction must include some kind of bomb assessment, often done via aerial photos to quickly filter out areas that were not bombed at all
Hindsight being 20/20, maybe they (the Japanese) could have used metal detectors when they were updating the runway? But, given that they didn't find this, I suspect it wasn't practical back then.
Perhaps now there will be an effort to use modern technology to find these?
So, no, this unexploded munition has nothing to do with “democratisation”