MULTIPLE incidents, all showing what a pile of ANFO can do. If they can do that much damage accidentally, and such accidents happened repeatedly, it's NOT a stretch for someone to say "hey, I'll do that intentionally!".
not a bomb in the OKC bombing sense.
What part of "large quantity of ANFO ignited in a confined space equals an OKC type bomb" don't you get? The only difference between the listed accidents and OKC is intent and a rented truck!
what is common knowledge today was not then common knowledge.
BS. That was common knowledge in farming country (gee, lots of fertilizer & desel around: AN + FO + spark = BOOM). I learned it in high school out of the chemistry teacher's textbooks. Farmers used it regularly.
A couple of ANFO bombs have been used in the middle east since OKC, but I don't know of any before then and appearently neither do you.
Didn't you read my post? I listed numerous instances! That they occurred accidentally is largely irrelevant, as they HAPPENED on an OKC scale. Maybe Nichols/McVeigh was the first time it was used intentionally on that scale, but the accidents show that it was simple to do on that scale; was just a matter of time before motivation converged.
Wrong. A shipload of amonium nitrate is a far cry from a ryder truckload. As I stated above, name one time a ANFO bomb was contructed to blow up a buiding before OKC.
'Texas City just blew up'
The second explosion, 16 hours after the Grandcamp blew up, came from another ship loaded with fertilizer.
The High Flyer, its turbines down for repairs, had been loaded with 961 tons of ammonium nitrate Ñ slightly more than what exploded on the Grandcamp.
X pounds versus several tons. Exponential?