My Analysis is Complete: Beirut Explosion was approx 10 Kilotons

BS. Initiation doesn't work like that. To cause that large of a pile to detonate would require several detonators. Otherwise the first ignition would blow the other material away without detonation.

OK, If a nuke was really responsible for the blast, then where are all the reports about flash burns and radiation sickness caused by the fallout that would have fallen on large parts of Beirut within 20 - 30 minutes of the explosion?

And how is it possible that a picture of the blast site published by the Times of Israel days after the blast shows earthmoving machines, and construction/clean-up workers on the ground at the site? If a nuke really was responsible for the blast, then the blast site would be too radioactive to allow anyone to work there for a long time to come.

Yes, radiation decays, but not that quickly at ground zero.

Occam’s Razor is a construct that says the simplest answer is the most likely one, therefore the blast was caused by the detonation of ammonium nitrate. Any other explanation fails because it forces you to induce, not deduce, additional details to explain what happened. Inductive reasoning is always fallacious.

Everyone citing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to discredit Beirut, are failing to mention that those WWII nukes detonated 600m (in the case of Hiroshima) above the ground. That was by design and in order to inflict orders of magnitude greater damage than a nuke that detonated after impacting the ground.

Right? He doesn't even know that kilotons are thousands and mega tons are millions.

Except AN doesn't burn brown. And unless it's mixed with fuel and contained it won't detonate. Other than that who knows? Maybe they welded thick steel plates behind the walls of the warehouse and thoroughly mixed in the right percentage of fuel oil. Incredibly unlikely in any case.

Occam's razor doesn't apply if the easiest thing won't possibly do the damage created.

Think people

if it were a nuke, with a cloud that size,
i'ld say more like 2.5kt (2,500 tons of TNT equivalent).

and, even at that, you're still missing the unmistakable
signature of a Nuke: the momentary blinding flash of white light. (no matter how small the nuke)

How many Kilotons is ten million kg of TNT?

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.

This is the only intelligent comment I have read so far in this thread.

am not,trolling and don’t said OP is wrong , but got one question , how can 10kt blast create not,heat at all ,

What is the accuracy of the UN blast calculator. It is, after all, a political instrument.

I did the simulation at the city and both the damage and body count are roughly what you'd get with a .25 kiloton bomb. It wasn't a nuke. It was rocket fuel. AN does not make brown smoke. HMX does. Israel blew up the factory that was making the rockets the palestinians (Jordanians) like to shoot into Israel every day.

10 Kiloton? No way. Not even close.

nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap for blast simulation internet for body count and damage pictures

Everyone citing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to discredit Beirut, are failing to mention that those WWII nukes detonated 600m (in the case of Hiroshima) above the ground. That was by design and in order to inflict orders of magnitude greater damage than a nuke that detonated after impacting the ground.

The explosions at Fukushima were not nuclear fission or fusion explosions, so in general they would not produce a NEMP.




.

OK, If a nuke was really responsible for the blast, then where are all the reports about flash burns and radiation sickness caused by the fallout that would have fallen on large parts of Beirut within 20 - 30 minutes of the explosion?

And how is it possible that a picture of the blast site published by the Times of Israel days after the blast shows earthmoving machines, and construction/clean-up workers on the ground at the site? If a nuke really was responsible for the blast, then the blast site would be too radioactive to allow anyone to work there for a long time to come.

Yes, radiation decays, but not that quickly at ground zero.

Occam’s Razor is a construct that says the simplest answer is the most likely one, therefore the blast was caused by the detonation of ammonium nitrate. Any other explanation fails because it forces you to induce, not deduce, additional details to explain what happened. Inductive reasoning is always fallacious.

Thanks OP, very good analysis and I bookmarked your thread. What chance do you think there is the bomb was a thermobaric bomb?

A nuke would have left a radiation signature picked up by satellite. Seems to me the explosion and damage could have been done by a thermobaric bomb.

The next question is why?

Except AN doesn't burn brown. And unless it's mixed with fuel and contained it won't detonate. Other than that who knows? Maybe they welded thick steel plates behind the walls of the warehouse and thoroughly mixed in the right percentage of fuel oil. Incredibly unlikely in any case.

Occam's razor doesn't apply if the easiest thing won't possibly do the damage created.

Think people

Your theory is the most plausible alternative explanation for the blast.

Why would Israel use a tactical nuke, given the collateral damage that would cause, when a conventional bomb would do the same job? Plus, by using a tactical nuke, Israel would finally be admitting they possess nukes, something that they’ve kept secret for a long time.

Even a 2.5kT nuke would distribute a significant amount of radioactive fallout over Beirut, and we’ve seen no reports, official or otherwise, that the city was exposed to any fallout.

Yep they got hit with a mini nuke. Thank you MOSSAD.

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.

In simple terms....

A Nitrate needs a Glyceride to become an explosive. Fuel oil works. Diesel works. Engine oil works.

Petroleum based Paraffin wax works also.

If this stuff was to be used in ditching, quarrying, mining, etc., it could have been mixed with Paraffin to make it functionable, but with the benefit of shape. When mixed with Parrrafin, it could be cast or molded into any convenient shape, say blocks of any size, or cylinders, etc., and then stacked and stored in a convenient spot, like in a shipping container(s) on a cargo vessel, or maybe a warehouse where the temperature was reasonably stable.

The problem I have with any of the proposed theories is that AN needs a high order shockwave to make it function in practical applications, like ditching, mining, or quarrying, etc... That means, of course, that just sitting there next to a fire probably wouldn't make the stack blow.

But, I wasn't there.

Tannerite is AN, doesn't use any FO and it detonates fine with just a bullet because there is a sensitizer added. You don't need a FO, it just helps it stay anhydrous and greatly increases the detonation velocity.

Tannerite is AN, doesn't use any FO and it detonates fine with just a bullet because there is a sensitizer added. You don't need a FO, it just helps it stay anhydrous and greatly increases the detonation velocity.