Plus, while Hitchcock is the master of suspense, he is also known for comedy: https://medium.com/life-and-the-performing-arts/humor-hitchc...

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.

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

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.

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.