My Analysis is Complete: Beirut Explosion was approx 10 Kilotons

Russian vacuum bomb.

^^^this^^^

It probably got went in the harbor also.

Since you’re obviously an expert, you most know that a surface detonation would cause orders of magnitude more damage to a localized area. Please explain to us shills how buildings are still standing around the blast site. Hint: you can’t.

The fact is that even if there was twice that amount of ammonium nitrate in that Beirut warehouse, AND it had been carefully mixed with just the right amount of fuel, it still would NOT have made an explosion that can break glass 10 km away and knock down walls 5 km away.

The key thing here is the DISTANCE. Any decent size of bomb blast will cause pretty much the same kind of devastation UP CLOSE, but when you get two or three or five km away then that is a whole different ballgame and this is where the OP's argument is rock solid.

Think distance and think what kind of energy release it takes to travel that far. This is well established and pretty exact science as the OP noted and you will notice that the media is not saying anything about that aspect of it.

I agree with you, AC. The apparent destruction miles away is indicative of a much larger release of energy than the stockpile of Ammonium Nitrate could have possibly produced, even under ideal conditions.

I also pointed out earlier in the thread that in order for a bomb to have significant impact, the released energy needs to have some sort of containment. Its the same reason gasoline engines perform combustion inside a cylinder chamber with a piston. Steel buildings would make a very poor containment - even a small car can easily drive through a wall with minimal damage.

The simple fact is, its takes a lot more than a plain stockpile of Ammonium Nitrate to make a bomb. You need a fuel... you need an ignition source... you need some uniformity... you need a containment. It just doesn't add up. Even watching videos of fireworks factory explosions.. I can agree that the they are spectacular by themselves, but you just don't see the level of damage present in Beirut.

In my opinion, it was either an implausibly large conventional explosion, or a small tactical nuke. I believe the amount of conventional explosives necessary to pull this off would be... infeasible to install without detection.

You are ignoring important details about the circumstances of those other explosions which are very different. For instance, there is the Texas City disaster of 1947 involving a ship with about 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate inside its hold. That is a big difference, because the ship's steel hull and deck is going to act like a pressure container that does not allow those gases to simply vent out as the AN explosively decomposes. Also, that AN in that disaster was mixed with petroleum products, manufactured in a patented process, mixed with clay, petrolatum, rosin and paraffin wax to avoid moisture caking. So it was basically a readymade bomb. Petrolatum is used in plastic explosives for instance.

In the Oppau disaster in Germany in 1921, the substance was in a 20 meter high silo - another pressure vessel - plus they then stuck dynamite into it, in order to break it up because it had turned rock hard.

So as I have been trying to explain to certain shills here, it is important to understand the science involved.
Ammonium nitrate was used in car air bags for the very reason that the instant release of a huge volume of gas if heated up to a certain temperature if this is confined in a CLOSED space where those gases can't escape, then the result is a huge increase in pressure which, in turn, causes even more of the material to start reacting and this is called thermal runaway in chemical engineering.

But a thermal runaway CANNOT happen under just any conditions. In the case of AN it absolutely requires a closed space that can hold PRESSURE.

So a lot depends about the PRECISE circumstances which you shills are ignoring.

In the Oppau explosion, the AN was mixed about 50/50 with ammonium sulfate. In mixtures containing 50% nitrate, any explosion of the mixture is confined to a small volume around the initiating charge, [dynamite] but increasing the proportion of nitrate to 55–60% greatly increases the explosive properties and creates a mixture whose detonation is sufficiently powerful to initiate detonation in a surrounding mixture of a lower nitrate concentration which would normally be considered minimally explosive.

Changes in humidity, density, particle size in the mixture and homogeneity of crystal structure also affect the explosive properties.

So details are important in science, and it is not something that is cut and dry, as some people who have no idea how chemistry and thermodynamics actually works.

Other shills have brought up the presence of the reds smokes. Yes, this is a signature of NO2 gas, which is nitrous oxide - laughing gas, used by dentists as an anesthetic, and also used by car enthusiasts to squirt into the engine, along with additional fuel, in order to make more power.

But the presence of that smoke only means that those bags of fertilizer were heated up enough to release the gas, it doesn't mean that the fertilizer blew up.

Again, it would be very difficult for that fertilizer to even get into that thermal runaway because that requires a CLOSED space, and that warehouse is basically open to the atmosphere, as soon as pressure started increasing in there, the roof would pop off and it would be like a bonfire...nothing more.

If you had decided to pack a whole bunch of explosives right in the middle of that pile, then it would be different...the heat and pressure from those explosions would have nowhere to go in the middle of that pile and would start setting off neighboring bags of the stuff in a thermal runaway, until the pressure in there built to a high enough level that it would just explode like a volcano.

But sticking explosives in the middle of that pile is very very different from simple negligence, where a fire supposedly started next door and then just set that big pile of fertilizer alight; it would NOT explode under that scenario.

The Beirut devastation was caused by a massive shockwave which only happens from a supersonice detonation not a deflagration, which is subsonic.

Ammonium nitrate can only "explode" when it is mixed with a combustible fuel, making a true bomb, or the ammonium nitrate is inside a pressure vessel like that ship in the Texas City disaster, or the silo in Oppau Germany; in the latter case they also used the mass of the rock hard AN as its own pressure vessel by drilling boreholes in it to place high explosives inside, in order to break it up because it had solidified.

The only energy AN has all by itself is its energetic release of gas, namely oxygen and water vapor, which happens at those high temperatures of about 300 C. If that gas is confined and cannot escape to atmosphere then it can blow up just like an overinflated tire.

Additionally, if the chemical reaction is started inside a large mass of AN, then the relatively minor heat release, combined with the very large expansion of gas will cause neighboring AN to also decompose and release even more gas, building even more pressure, until it overcomes its confinement.

Obviously you have no confining forces if you just have bags of AN sitting in a pile and the fire is outside the pile, as opposed to set off inside the confining mass itself.

In this case you have no means to contain that release of gases as the surface ammonium nitrate gets heated up and simply shoots its gases into the air.

It's like taking an air hose and simply blowing it into the air. Big difference from blowing that air into a tire or other pressure vessel: given enough air pressure any pressure vessel will explode just from compressed air.

It's the same with AN: it doesn't produce anything other than compressed air [well, nitrous oxide and water vapor to be precise].

But the biggest issue in my mind is that even if someone stuck explosives in the middle of that fertilizer and caused an explosion, that explosion could NOT have made the kind of damage that we see. Blast pressure calculations is an established science.

And those blast calculations indicate UNAMBIGUOUSLY that this explosion would have to be something on the order of Hiroshima: 10 to 12 kilotons of TNT, which is 10 times bigger than what the media is saying.

The meteor explosion over Russia a few years ago broke windows so that might be compared.
The US has had a few plants blow up, the one that produces red smoke is a plant that makes rocket fuel. The rocket powered ejection seat in Neal Armstrong's Lunar Trainer produced red smoke, same fuel the plant made.
The red glow close to the grain elevators was a consistent fire and producing white smoke. Thermate does that and 9/11 has a similar looking fire in the segment where a liquid metal is pouring out of the building just before the collapse.

If you look at photos of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, several buildings were still standing, and both those nukes were detonated above the surface which causes much more devastation than one detonated at surface level. Try again, shill.

The speed of the expanding blast wave can be determined by using the various vids that can be plotted onto a map.
The rate of expansion is known for various explosives, either from data or vids of this certain type of explosion. Bleve (boiling liquid expanding vapor Explosion)


In 'related news' the cause is being blamed on a corrupt government. That is the former PM Saad Hariri and his brand of governing Lebanon. That style for the billionaire is to keep all his holdings in the KSA (as did his father, also a former PM) and anytime France wants a 'private meeting' he goes there for weeks at a time.
That is the background for the Government that has been in charge of Lebanon except for a brief period where Hezbollah was voted in. The senior level Politicians resigned instead of staying to clean up 'the mess they created'.
Any deep investigation would result in treason charges and that simply does not happen if you are an NATO/Israeli stooge. The 'solution is to ask the former PM to take over even though the place was a shit-hole all through the time he was in power.
The reconstruction will be at the same speed Haiti was rebuilt as the same entities are looking after that angle. I'm surprised Hillary was not in a photo-op in an add for donations be made to the Clinton Foundation for all the good the money will do. The IMF was front and center if the financial rape over the last year and they are already mentioned as being the one in charge of any money earmarked for 'relief'.