American WWII bomb explodes at Japanese airport, causing large crater in taxiway

[ortusdux]

Link to the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9GDn-cl1og

[pimlottc]

It's funny how often these videos are from a camera pointed at a monitor, instead of a direct digital copy. I assume extracting the actual file is logistically tricky due to both technical and bureaucratic reasons.

[globalise83]

That was pretty impressive! Thanks for finding it.

[Dalewyn]

It is really, /really/ dumb, miraculous, fucking luck that nothing was taxiing nearby when it went off. This could have ended so much worse.

[jrnichols]

We have a bunch of those here in our area still from a train accident in 1973.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Roseville_Yard_Disaster

It's believed that many of them are still buried and likely under homes & businesses. We just assisted detonating one of the mark 81s last week.

[creeble]

Good short video about the Roseville yard explosion by Fascinating Horror:

https://youtu.be/fyzw-1yuUB0

[ccorcos]

Whoa, that’s really close to where I live. I’m in Roseville right now, actually. Can you tell me more? Where was this mark 81 last week? Do you work at McClellan?

[louthy]

London fairly regularly has WWII unexploded bombs to deal with. When you look at all the bombs dropped [1] on the city, it's hardly surprising!

[1] http://bombsight.org/#13/51.5008/-0.0536

[beloch]

It would be great to think that littering the countryside with unexploded ordinance was a thing of the past and we no longer do such things, but the conflict in Ukraine is just one example to the contrary.

Has any effort been put into making duds easier to find after the fact? e.g. Has anyone thought of putting something like an upscaled RECCO reflector on bombs? i.e. A passive radar reflector that would allow searchers to just hit a field with radar and get reflections back from unexploded ordinance.

Obviously, this wouldn't work for cruise missiles, etc. that need to have a low radar profile while in flight, but why not for bombs (especially cluster munitions) that are used in much greater numbers?

This is just one idea. I'm sure other methods could be used to make duds easier to find. Is there military value in leaving stealthy duds in your enemy's territory?

[btbuildem]

> Is there military value in leaving stealthy duds in your enemy's territory?

In all fairness -- probably, yes. It's the enemy's territory, and now you've made it more deadly, like an accidental minefield.

But I don't think any consideration is given to what happens to duds, what are the civilian consequences or environmental impacts of any part of the weapons lifecycles. It is an industry of death and destruction after all.

[jopsen]

I think it'd be pretty hard to convince North Korea, Iran, or Russia to alter their munitions.

We can't even convince them not to throw bombs at other countries.

War should be a thing of the past.

[andrewflnr]

Radar is sometimes used for detecting incoming artillery rounds, so yeah, no need to make it easy for the enemy by filling it with radar reflectors.

[1659447091]

Duct tape an AirTag on'em.

I'm only half joking. "not even Apple knows the location of your AirTag"

[SoftTalker]

I'm always a little surprised to realize that the explosives are chemically stable enough to still explode nearly 100 years later.

[SapporoChris]

“We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.” ― Alfred Hitchcock

[smiley1437]

Over time, the explosive chemicals in the both the detonator and the main charge can frequently get MORE sensitive to disturbance, which is kind of perverse.

That's why if you ever come across any old UXO (UneXploded Ordnance) you should call the bomb squad and never touch it

[jdietrich]

Hundreds of tonnes of unexploded ordnance from the First World War are collected every year in Belgium and Northern France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

[jowdones]

Lots of unexploded ordnance. Reminds me of the story of the guy who tried to weld an artillery shell (and blew up), he was sure it's safe coze his father used it for 40 years as a gardening tool:

https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/eveniment/accident-stupid-a-mu...

[jajko]

Slightly off topic - if you want to see how explosion looks like in vacuum, here is recent (less than 1 day old) Iranian ICBM interception (either by Israeli Arrow 2/3 or Patriot) in cca outer space [1] or direct video link [2]. Expanse wasn't so far off

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1fu1bc1/iran...

[2] https://packaged-media.redd.it/1p1ueyie38sd1/pb/m2-res_848p....

[hilux]

It's not the same thing at all, but if you enjoy reading about "abandoned military hardware," you'll love this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash

[jackdh]

Ha, that is definitely not type of abandoned that I was expecting. That poor chap who was killed, what an incredibly unlucky event for him.

[Der_Einzige]

I have an irrational fear of dying from an airplane crashing into me. It doesn't help that friends of friends of mine were victims in this from just a few weeks ago:

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/03/fairview-plane-crash-...

[giarc]

Didn't that happen in DC recently? Remember that US military plane that went missing and was found many kms away from where the pilot ejected?

[micromacrofoot]

Every bomb, gun, and mine we make has impacts like this... AK47s manufactured by the Soviet Union are still in circulation in Africa and the Middle East, mines in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War still maim children decades later, cluster munitions in Syria and Ukraine continue to cause civilian casualties long after conflicts have subsided... weapons of war often outlive the wars they were created for, perpetuating violence and suffering for generations... yet we never learn.

[partiallypro]

The first time I ever went to Munich there was a bomb that had been discovered from WW2 under one of the buildings during a renovation and they had to do a controlled detonation. Despite their efforts there was visible damage everywhere, broken glass, etc. I feel terrible for Ukraine, Gaza and others, have unexploded ordinances that (probably more so in Ukraine than Gaza, just given scale/age of munitions) will be there for generations.

https://www.munichre.com/en/insights/infrastructure/munich-b...

[karlzt]

In Germany, unexploded bombs are discovered on a weekly basis.

[sjm]

In Cambodia too, where the US dropped 540,000 tons of bombs during the Vietnam war.

[Gazoche]

I grew up in a South Pacific country that served as an advanced American base during WW2. A few years ago a massive stockpile (over a hundred) of artillery shells was found at the bottom of the capital's port, right under the dock of a big ferry that shuffles people between islands every day. I can´t imagine the carnage if one of those had gone off during the 70 years or so they had been sitting there.

[onemoresoop]

Its surprising to me that bombs explode after being buried for such a long time. The chemicals remain contained but I imagined the fuse would rust away.

[bmitc]

When I read the headline, I was wondering why in the world a bomb was being taxied on a runway, like on a cargo plane. However, now I'm wondering how a bomb wasn't discovered when the airport was built. From the video posted elsewhere in the comments, it looks like the bomb was buried under the runway. Are there no ground surveys done with radar before building a plane runway?

[bluetidepro]

Slightly off topic but when I read the headline, I assumed "large crater" would be much more large than you see in the picture. The article reports "7 meters (23 feet) in diameter and 1 meter (3 feet) deep." For a bomb that doesn't seem that "large."

Luckily no one was hurt or nearby when it went off.

[aidenn0]

The US 500lb bombs had about 270lbs of explosives in them. If this location were a WW-II airfield, it is the sort of bomb that would have been dropped on airplanes on the ground to destroy them.

Most of the damage to Japan's cities was actually done by napalm-filled bomblets combined into cluster-bombs[1], partly because weather made precision bombing difficult.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M69_incendiary

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Did historical bombs typically make big explosions? Reading some numbers from the war, it seemed like the strategy was more to dump enormous volume of ordinance and hope to get lucky hitting something vital.

[sholladay]

It would have done considerably more damage if it had gone off when and where it was intended. The runway is designed to have enormous, heavy planes takeoff and land on it routinely, it undoubtedly absorbed a lot of the bomb’s energy. Not to mention the earth underneath it.

[anon_cow1111]

That's likely a stock image completely unrelated to the actual explosion. Blame reporters(or the sites they work for) for normalizing this behavior.

If it's not, I can't tell because it's hard to get a sense of scale from the video and image. The crater only appears maybe 2 or 3 meters wide judging by the grass, the painted stripes, and the overall taxiway width.

[WorkerBee28474]

A crater that size can hold 80,000lb of dirt.

[MengerSponge]

That's a lot of earth though. Most bombs detonate above the ground because rock is really heavy.

[bradgessler]

Agreed, seems very very small for 5000lb of explosives. Guessing it didn't reach its full yield given that its been buried under ground for decades.

[cynicalpeace]

Watch the video- it was a large bomb

[marshray]

Apparently it was sized appropriately to shut down the airport.

A larger probability of a small crater(s) requiring repair would seem better for this purpose than a smaller probability of a large crater.

[kragen]

that's a little bigger than my old apartment. i think it doesn't look big in the picture because nothing is visible nearby to give it scale

[riffic]

a large crater the size of a small crater.

the reference: https://time.com/5772944/large-small-boulder/

[AStonesThrow]

Headline says "taxiway" and the crater is located on the edge, but runway 9/27 markings are very close by. Aircraft should not be at speed, departing or landing on a taxiway. "Taxi" is how they go between gate and runway at low speed.

[blackeyeblitzar]

Mines and cluster ammunition are horrifying. They are invisible or look like toys even, and it is impractical to clean all of them up. They’re just waiting there, in the dirt, ready to kill some innocent child. Horrible.

[coding123]

Large? Maybe 3 yards of gravel 8 sticks of rebar and some drill in pins to connect and 5 yards of Crete and they're good to go.

[ulrischa]

Os the USA paying for the damage?

[1317]

already back open - https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20241002_20/

[adammenges]

> Miyazaki Airport was built in 1943 as a former Imperial Japanese Navy flight training field from which some kamikaze pilots took off on suicide attack missions.

> A number of unexploded bombs dropped by the US military during World War II have been unearthed in the area, Defense Ministry officials said.