I hope this isn’t a stupid question, but why didn’t it go off when it was dropped? If it managed to hit the ground from a plane w’out exploding, is that any indication it could be a dud?
Yea it’s a dud, go ahead billy-bob dig er up and I’ll hold yer beer.
Problem with the fuse, or, they missed yanking the safety pin, best guesses.
In the “Strategic Bombing Survey of 1947”, they estimated that 60% of the Bombs dropped in Europe were either off-target or did not explode.
faulty fuse...
TNT is a stable explosive. No indication what the explosive was in this bomb but all explosives in the TNT class are stable and are intended to not explode just because of sudden deceleration.
The fuze is what makes the bomb go boom and for whatever reason, the fuze failed to function. So yes, the bomb was a dud.
I wonder what the intended target was of such a large bomb?
Three of four years ago, there was a thread here on FR about someone in Virginia area who was killed by a civil war shell that exploded.
Even if it did not explode, there is still 1,100 pounds of high expolsives in the corrosive casing.
Not something you want people shaking and rocking in your back yard.
By dud you mean that the explosives are harmless. NO it had a fuze mechanism that did not properly function the first time so it has been sitting in the ground all these years alert & ready to go BOOM if someone decides to disturb it .
Heck the French still are losing around 8-12 people a year to accidents with unexploded ordnance from world war one,especially dangerous are the chemical shells because they often still have real chemical weapons inside like liquid mustard gas.