The Annual Iron Harvest of Unexploded Shells from the WWI battlefieldsCan you imagine ONE TON per ten square feet and 2/3 is unexploded?
Nov 11, 2016. By Ian Harvey."According to some estimates, one ton of explosive material was fired for every square meter of the West French front’s territory. Two thirds of these explosives ended up un-detonated and laid there, later being buried in the chaos of the war."
"In Ypres alone, an estimated 300 MILLION explosives belonging to German and British forces were buried, most were duds and have not yet been discovered. As recently as 2013 a total of 160 tons of munitions, including 15-inch naval gun shells, were meticulously unearthed from the regions around Ypres.
Back in the '70s I attended a speech given by some talking head about the nuclear confrontation we had with Russia.
One person asked him what about China setting off a nuclear explosion on either side in order to start a war between Russia and the U.S.
The guy stunned everyone in the audience (some gasped), when he said "The first bomb is free." WTF????
He said both sides were aware of tactics like that, or even of accident, and had basically come to that conclusion. The Russians pointed to a situation outside of Stalingrad, where rebuilding was going on, and a bulldozer uncovered an abandoned German ammo dump. They said it was the equivalent explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb and had the bulldozer hit a shell the wrong way, over 20K tons of high explosives would have gone up.
I was glad to see that cool heads prevailed.