My Analysis is Complete: Beirut Explosion was approx 10 Kilotons

Before I detail my conclusion, I will explain some facts regarding Ammonium Nitrate.

Ammonium nitrate(AN) does not burn on its own. Instead, it acts as a source of oxygen that can accelerate the combustion (buring) of other materials. For combustion to occur, oxygen must be present. Ammonium nitrate prills (industrial term synonymous with pellets) provide a much more concentrated supply of oxygen than the air around us. This is why it is effective in mining explosives, where it's mixed with oil and other fuels.

Those bags of AN prills sitting in the Beirut warehouse could not have been mixed with any kind of fuel because the ratio required for an explosive is 94 parts AN and six parts fuel and it needs to be mixed quite thoroughly and homogeneously in order to maximize the explosion.

It's relatively difficult for a fire to trigger an ammonium nitrate explosion. The fire would need to be sustained and confined within the same area as the ammonium nitrate prills.

Also, the prills themselves are not fuel for the fire, so they would need to be contaminated with, or packaged in, some other combustible material.

What some shills have suggested here on GLP is that ammonium nitrate by ITSELF can chemically decompose, which releases the oxygen molecules bound up in the little pellets...this is true, and this release is very energetic...and, under the right circumstances, can be something like an "explosion"...in the same way you can use ordinary compressed air to "blow up" your bicycle tire if you insist on putting 100 psi into it.

But this is NOT an explosion...an explosion means that a fuel BURNS...there must be COMBUSTION. AN by itself cannot burn.

BUT if you take some AN and pack it into a SEALED container like a pipe, and then heat it up until the material starts decomposing, the release of the oxygen gas inside will cause a massive increase in pressure until the pipe bursts...just like the bicycle tire…

Obviously there was no huge pipe in that Beirut warehouse for the AN to be packed into and then heated with the world's biggest blowtorch until the thing exploded.

There was also no mixing of all those hundreds of tons of AN bags with any kind of fuel in order to create a HOMOGENOUS combustible mixture…

These are the basic PHYSICAL FACTS.

Satellite photos online show the devastation for several kilometers from the blast center.

Buildings have simply been flattened for literally many hundreds of meters in every direction...that requires a HUGE explosion...in fact even if that entire 3,000 tons of AN was professionally mixed with fuel to make a bomb, it would not be nearly powerful enough to cause the damage seen.

I will link to a blast calculator on the UN website where anyone can enter one million or two million or whatever amount of TNT and see immediately how far that kind of blast will cause a destructive OVERPRESSURE:

[link to www.un.org (secure)]

Also, I will link to a FEMA publication that on page 4-19 has an important Explosive Blast Damage Approximation Chart, which gives estimates of damage relative to destructive overpressure calculated from the UN Blast Calculator: [link to www.fema.gov (secure)]

From the photos of the devastation, combined with the blast calculator info, it is clear that the explosion was absolutely huge. By increasing the amount of high explosives in that blast calculator we can see how far such a massive bomb would wreak building damage

When I enter 10 million kg of TNT into the Blast Calculator, we see that at a distance [range] of 1000 meters [1 km, about two thirds of a mile] we have about 50 kilopascals of incident pressure, which is about 7 psi...just enough to knock down buildings (according to the FEMA Chart I linked to above.

It's pretty obvious from the pictures that the explosion was even bigger than that...the sat photo shows buildings RAZED to the ground for many hundreds of meters.

How big was the bomb then?

The ten million kg of TNT we entered above is 10 kilotons. Hiroshima was 12 to 15 kilotons.