Why would you do that…?
Its an unexploded artillery shell, for gods sake!
Maybe its because I am German, and our ground is full of unexploded ordinance (I had to be evacuated from my apartment due to unexploded gifts from the Royal Air force twice in the last 5 years), but the correct approach to finding unexploded ordinance is do not move or touch it under no circumstances, go to a safe distance and call the authorities.
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Maybe? It’s presumably got some “flaw” or a short that prevented detonation, and while it’s apparently at equilibrium at the moment, any change (temperature, pressure) could correct that flaw. Or it could be completely inert. Or reduced air pressure could make it less likely to explode, in the same way that giving a device a good shake or a swift kick might defuse it. It’s not prudent to move unexploded bombs about or change their physical parameters unless the area has been cleared and you’re trying to detonate it.
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You’d have to know what type of fuse/detonator* is there - and ideally how/why it failed in the first place to make an educated guess. Knowing what type of explosive wouldn’t hurt either.
Which is why bomb disposal is one of the least boring jobs there are.
* Maybe a proximity/impact fuse combination. Artillery shells come in various types, depending on what they are supposed to do - shred people to bits, punch holes in tanks, put craters in runways, and so on.
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“I can’t hear the sea… …more like ticking”
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A barometric fuze is a device that can trigger a bomb to detonate at a certain atmospheric pressure. Air pressure has also been used as part of the circuit that arms the primary fuze at a certain altitude. So yes, mechanisms exist to do precisely that.
However, they are/were generally used with munitions dropped from planes, not artillery shells. Artillery shells are usually triggered by time, deceleration, impact, a proximity sensor, or some combination of those.
There have long been fears that a barometric fuze could be used by terrorists to detonate a bomb when it reaches a certain altitude (in the unpressurized cargo hold of a plane.)
When we were flying out of Tel Aviv in 2011, a friend got pulled from the security line because a sensor detected “something”. His luggage was not only hand-searched and X-rayed, but run through a blast-proof decompression chamber to test if there was a pressure trigger in it. The Israelis take their airport security way more seriously than the TSA.
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I suspect that this would be a bit of an edge case; but without specialist knowledge of a fair bit of Six Day War logistics trivia and fiddly chemistry I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a non-barometric design acquiring pressure sensitivity(or some combination of pressure, humidity, and temperature sensitivity that disagrees with air travel).
Basically any chemical equilibrium will shift at least a little if you change the pressure, temperature, or humidity under which you are examining it; and between damaged bits of detonator, main charge, manufacturing impurities, unintended metal compounds from the case, etc. who knows what sort of chemical equilibria are living in that thing now?
From my safe distance over here I would bet that the risk is fairly low; but not low enough that I’d want to bet my continued ownership of hands on it; or appreciate someone trying to board with it.
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Yes, I can imagine such a fuse being used in say anti-aircraft munitions prior to the advent of the proximity fuse.
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When I first heard of this story on other media I thought that the American tourists were taking a shell INTO Israel.
Was it in their carry-on, or were they going to check it in?
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Out of curiosity, do you know how long they left it in the test chamber? I’d imagine that there are practical limits on how long the test can last; but I’d also imagine that whoever designed that security arrangement would be the sort paranoid enough to think back to other examples of trigger systems designed to ignore spurious inputs(like some of the more hideously creative land mine designs that resist detonation from sudden pressure, like that from demining charges or flails; but respond to the more gradual pressure of a footstep); and worry about someone using a pressure sensor that is mostly sealed so that a few minutes of pressure change will have minimal effect; but a couple of hours at cruising altitude will allow it to leak enough to pass the threshold.
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They were allowed to board…
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Sorry, no. IIRC, we arrived at the airport around midnight for a 6 AM flight, and my friend was their “guest” until about 4. At least they comped him into their first class lounge, where he got a couple glasses of wine for his inconvenience.
Exactly.
Of course nobody wants their soldiers to die because of some clumsy handling incident, or in a lightning storm, or in transit. These munitions are usually designed to be stored safely for years or decades before being fired. Stability of the compounds is critical.
However, we’re seeing (again) that Russia is experiencing the results of their completely corrupt system. Every component of every weapons system is subject to theft of stock, resale of valuables, and replacement with cheap substitutes by people up and down the chain. It’s especially easy to deliver defective armaments because they may not be used in battle for decades. Just look at all the unexploded ordnance the Ukrainians are finding in their cities as evidence of Russian war crimes, and all the non-functional Russian tanks being abandoned.
Weapons-grade chemicals are not exempt from this corruption. The people responsible for quality checking are just as corrupt, and a couple thousand rubles here and there will ensure that quality testing happens on “this batch” and not “those batches”. So maybe the toluene in that Soviet surplus warhead was pure, or maybe it was contaminated.
That artillery shell has been buried in the Golan for a while so it’s probably stable in the desert’s temperatures, but what about its chemical stability in the sub-freezing temperatures of a jet’s cargo hold?
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Not nearly precise enough (and how would you know the proper setting anyway, ask the bombers to do a couple of laps while you send up the weather balloons?), they used timers.
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Yes true, but you see, these were American tourists. I have no doubt at all that Buffy and Grayson thought said ordinance was just a giggle and packed it away in a leftover bag from shopping only to avoid it touching their clothes. Think of the hoot they’d be back at the club!
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