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Supertanker is not so useful for terrorist to hijack. But LNG - liquified natural gas - could explode to destroy a large city. Explosion could be like that of Hiroshima. If one were in port of New York, a million people could die.

Take the bomb used against the Marine barracks in Beruit, multiply it by 1000 or so and that'll give you an idea of how effective it could be. The gas is dispersed by using a very fast large charge, then the gas is ignited with a slow charge. In Beruit they used 4 acytelene tanks a few kilos of c4 and an igniter. Nasty business.

Personally, I wouldn't want to be around when it goes off. Definitly make your ears ring.

The complete explosion of the largest LNG tanker in the world wouldn't even APPROACH the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. There's no conceivable way you could kill MILLIONS with one. As I mentioned, the whole exploding LNG thing is massively overhyped.

And they're actually a lot harder to blow up than people think; simply leaking and burning is far more likely.

And another thing people seem to be unaware of is that there's basically "air traffic control" for all large vessels such as tankers, and also all large ships entering US waters have Americans guiding them into port.

Every ship entering a port, while it is WELL offshore, takes on a "harbor pilot" from a small boat; for example, a ship going to Baltimore will take on a pilot at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, a ship going to Philadelphia takes one on in the ocean off of Delaware. This is done because the local pilots know the local currents and sandbars.

Each location the pilots leave from has a radar. All large ships are tracked.

And tankers don't move any faster than about 15 miles an hour at best and usually a lot slower while they're entering a bay or estuary.

This is REALLY slow.

Any tanker takeover would be known and fairly obvious, either from refusing a pilot or losing contact with the pilot, or maneuvering strangely.

And there would be hours and hours and hours to react to such a takeover.

And the final thing is that in general, though it varies from city to city, our major cities don't really have working cargo terminals that are all that near the downtown areas of the cities anymore.

A supertanker could also hold a couple of nuclear devices. God forbid!

A good military sea borne target in the general area would be Diego Garcia

I agree - a large LNG tanker would level a wide area if it got into a port. Those old enough to remember - please recall Texas City

The Texas City explosion of 1947

During the morning of April 16, 1947 a seemingly fine rain of oily mist fell upon Galveston, Texas while in Houston a rumbling reminiscent of a small earthquake was felt. What the inhabitants of these cities didn’t know at the time was that a giant explosion and fire had ripped though the booming town of Texas City.

Anchored in the harbor of Texas City that morning was a cargo ship named the “Grand Camp.” In its holds was tons of an ammonium nitrate fertilizer that was to be shipped to Europe. There has been much speculation over the years as to what caused the initial fire upon the Grand Camp but fifty-three years later there has been no definitive answer.

Texas City in 1947 was a booming town whose many residents worked in the nearby refineries and chemical plants. It also was a place with a small town air in which everyone was a friend with everyone else and each knew the business of the other. On April 16th word spread through out the community about the fire upon the Grand Camp and the “pretty orange color that was coming from the black smoke.” As with any accident or fire a crowd of onlookers appeared to watch the Texas City firefighters in action. As word of the fire traveled, the crowd of onlookers grew in number.

The Grand Camp’s crew and possibly the harbor crews knew that the ship was carrying the highly explosive ammonium nitrate but the crowds didn’t or if they did, they were not aware of its highly volatile condition. Of course the standard procedure for dealing with a dangerously burning ship was to tow it by tug as far from the harbor as possible. For some reason this didn’t happen and at 9:00a.m. “The Texas City Disaster” as it will forever be remembered happened.

At 9:00 there was an explosion and a giant column of black smoke rose approximately 2,000 feet into the air. A mere ten to fifteen seconds later a second explosion rocked the ship, which created a violent shockwave, and fire quickly engulfed the Monsanto Chemical Plant in flames due to broken gas lines and containers. Within these few seconds almost the entire Texas City Fire Department was killed as well as the hoards of civilians and children still standing near the docks watching the excitement.

The industrial complexes around the Texas City area were at that time (and still are) connected by pipelines that caused the fires and explosions at the Monsanto plant to quickly spread to the surrounding plants. As at Monsanto entire buildings collapsed trapping workers within the flaming inferno.

Although the shockwave caused a displacement of the water in the harbor and created a small tidal wave that washed inland over one hundred and fifty feet, it did little to save the people from the fires.

News of the explosion quickly spread to Galveston, Houston, Conroe, La Port and Pasadena. Firefighters and police officers from all these towns went to aid in the work at Texas City and by dusk the town was full of rescue workers. Ambulances from all over the area were making repeated trips to John Sealy in Galveston as well as Ben Taub and other hospitals in Houston.

By night though new fears arose as another ship, the “High Flyer” had been burning all day since the original explosion and word was reaching the workers and towns people that she was carrying sulfur and a cargo hold full of ammonium nitrate. All during the day tugs had tried in vain to move her, all to no avail.

The fear of another explosion didn’t keep the rescue workers from removing the injured from the harbor and Montesano areas until 1:00 a.m. when all workers were ordered away. At 1:10 a.m. the High Flyer exploded with greater force than any by the Grand Camp.

As the High Flyer exploded she took another ship, the “Wilson B. Keene,” with her. A concrete warehouse and a grain elevator went up in even more fires and explosions.

On April 16, 1947 the town of Texas City had 16,000 registered inhabitants but by the time the last body was found a month later, six hundred were known dead. The exact number will never be known as many of the victims were incinerated in the blast and there were no remains to be found.