3 ms·

While that's certainly true, nothing beats the First World War for the sheer volume of unexploded ordinance.

herge 10y ago
Three times as many tonnes of bombs were used in Indochina that in the whole of WWII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombs_in_the_Vietnam_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombs_in_the_Vietnam_W...), so I suspect there's a bit more by volume. I think we hear more about the ordinance in WWI because was dropped in such a small part of France and Belgium that is so heavily populated.
- alejohausner 10y ago
  These are not fair comparisons, because you are talking about bombs dropped from the air, whereas WW1 was about shells fired from artillery. According to wikipedia [1], about 1 ton of explosives was fired per square meter of combat territory. If the Zone Rouge originally covered 460 square miles (= 1200 km^2 = 1.2 billion m^2), this works out to 1.2 x 10^9 tons of explosives (can that be really true? wow! [2]). In Vietnam, "only" 7.6 million tons were dropped from the air. That's a few orders of magnitude less. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest 2. My numbers don't add up. I just saw a BBC story about WW1 industrial production (tl;dr: allies vastly outproduced the central powers by more than 2 to 1). There's a graph showing that Germany produced 400,000 tons of explosives from 1914 to 1917. Four times that amount is less than 2 million tons, so the number in wikipedia (1 ton per m^2) is definitely wrong.
- yread 10y ago
  They are also a lot more "effective" than ww1 munitions. Each bomb could contain up to 7500 gravel mines each capable of wounding or killing a person http://www.inertord.com/subgravelmines.html http://www.inertord.com/subgravelmines.html or here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43_Dragontooth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43_Dragontooth weighing 20g, looking like a fucking toy, 4800 of them in a cluster bomb.
  - kragen 10y ago
    There's no reason gravel mines have to weigh that much. Those 20g include 9g of explosive. A .22 short cartridge still contains enough explosive to kill you if it's aimed in the right place, but that's 250mg of black powder, which is half as energy-dense much less brisant than modern explosives. So you could easily imagine "mines" that were a tenth of that size, 2g, with an embedded microcontroller to trigger them under arbitrary conditions, and enough explosive to maim you if you picked them up or stepped on them. A 1kg-payload weather balloon could carry 500 such "mines". It's going to be difficult to keep having civilization.

herge 10y ago

Three times as many tonnes of bombs were used in Indochina that in the whole of WWII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombs_in_the_Vietnam_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombs_in_the_Vietnam_W...), so I suspect there's a bit more by volume. I think we hear more about the ordinance in WWI because was dropped in such a small part of France and Belgium that is so heavily populated.

alejohausner 10y ago
These are not fair comparisons, because you are talking about bombs dropped from the air, whereas WW1 was about shells fired from artillery. According to wikipedia [1], about 1 ton of explosives was fired per square meter of combat territory. If the Zone Rouge originally covered 460 square miles (= 1200 km^2 = 1.2 billion m^2), this works out to 1.2 x 10^9 tons of explosives (can that be really true? wow! [2]). In Vietnam, "only" 7.6 million tons were dropped from the air. That's a few orders of magnitude less. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest 2. My numbers don't add up. I just saw a BBC story about WW1 industrial production (tl;dr: allies vastly outproduced the central powers by more than 2 to 1). There's a graph showing that Germany produced 400,000 tons of explosives from 1914 to 1917. Four times that amount is less than 2 million tons, so the number in wikipedia (1 ton per m^2) is definitely wrong.
yread 10y ago
They are also a lot more "effective" than ww1 munitions. Each bomb could contain up to 7500 gravel mines each capable of wounding or killing a person http://www.inertord.com/subgravelmines.html http://www.inertord.com/subgravelmines.html or here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43_Dragontooth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43_Dragontooth weighing 20g, looking like a fucking toy, 4800 of them in a cluster bomb.
- kragen 10y ago
  There's no reason gravel mines have to weigh that much. Those 20g include 9g of explosive. A .22 short cartridge still contains enough explosive to kill you if it's aimed in the right place, but that's 250mg of black powder, which is half as energy-dense much less brisant than modern explosives. So you could easily imagine "mines" that were a tenth of that size, 2g, with an embedded microcontroller to trigger them under arbitrary conditions, and enough explosive to maim you if you picked them up or stepped on them. A 1kg-payload weather balloon could carry 500 such "mines". It's going to be difficult to keep having civilization.