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[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Hank, I'm glad that we managed to destroy lots of explosives. By the way, what kind of explosives did we destroy and/or keep? Apparently the stuff we found, then abandoned, and then "lost" were especally toxic stuff.

• HOW MUCH BANG FOR THE BUCK? Most people have probably never heard of RDX, HMX, and PETN, the types of explosives that were looted from al Qaqaa. (Neither did I until I started researching this recently.) Depending on how you ask, these are either the most powerful or among the most powerful conventional explosives that exist. So how much boom do you get for 380 tons of the stuff? My friend and fellow blogger Phillip Carter, a former Army captain, e-mails with an attempt at a back-of-the-envelope calculation, using a "how many Oklahoma City bombings" metric. Here's the result:
  OK City = 5,000 pounds/2,300 kg of ammonium-nitrate and nitromethane.
  This mix has a TNT equivalent ranging from 3%-10%, i.e. the OK City bomb is the equivalent of 150 - 500 pounds of TNT.
  
  AQQ = 380 tons of RDX, HMX and PETN. RDX and PETN have a TNT equivalent value of 170%. Converted into TNT, the AQQ stockpile equals 646 tons or 1,292,000 pounds of explosives.
  
  Convert this back into my OK City metric, and this means that the lost material at AQQ equals betwen 2,584 - 8613 OK City-size bombs. That's one hell of a lot of material to be on the street -- enough to fuel a car-bomb and IED-based insurgency for years, if not decades.
  
  Chilling thought. Even if the order of magnitude is off by, say, two decimal places.

TAPPED

Exactly, and it begs the question, how could the UN have left him with this? Dual use? that's a lot of oil pipeline projects. seems to me that you now have to agree it is a good thing we went in and starting destroying all this stuff, even if a few percentage points got stolen.