August 29, 2024 • 47 mins
Out of all the jobs a person can have, few are as overtly dangerous as making sure bombs don’t go off and if they do, making sure they’re away from people. Learn how bomb technicians do it safely, without a 100% turnover rate.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kaboom Clark, and
there's Chuck Wow Bryant, and Jerry's not here. She's a
dud and this stuff you should know about bomb disposals.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's right, and specifically a dud meaning a thing that
doesn't go off right.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, a dud.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah. I think you're a kid playing with fireworks and
you light one through it at your friend. Nothing happens,
and you start crying because it's a dud.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
You're like, I don't have two cents to waste, black cat,
give me my two cents back.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah, when you're a kid, two cents matter back in
the eighties.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
You can put that together with three other cents and
buy yourself a stick a butter.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Throw it at your friend.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
So we should shout out. Speaking of friends, are Newish
writer Kyle Houkstra, who's writing for us from the UK
makes us an international podcast of mystery, and he helps
us out with this one. It's a pretty interesting topic
if you ask me, and I don't remember where I
got the idea, but it's been on the list for
(01:24):
a little while and I finally pulled the trigger mechanism
on it.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
No, wow, you're in a roll today.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I guess. So that's one way to put it.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Had you just seen the hurt Locker or something.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I've never seen the hurt Locker. Really, yeah, you check
it out.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
It's great movie.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Oh. I know, I've heard nothing but good things. I
just have not ever gotten around to seeing it. I'm
not crazy about war movies. The last war movie that
I saw that I really liked was probably Uncommon Valor.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Oh wow, see like terrible war movies.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
No, are you crazy, that's one of the best war
movies of all time. Oh okay, you don't like an
Uncommon Valor?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I mean I liked it as a kid in the eighties,
But I mean it was very much that I don't
think it's regarded as one of the great war movies.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
You don't think it'd hold up now, huh?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Well, I mean I think it would hold up as
an eighties war movie.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
I mean he was a guy in it, Gene Hackman.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Randall Tech Cobb, he was Patrick Swayze. Yeah, okay, great movie.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
It was a great movie. So yes, But no, I
haven't seen hert Locker I from what I understand, it's
about as accurate a depiction of how bomb disposal technicians
or EOD technicians explosive ordnance disposal technicians, I should say,
for those who don't know the lingo, it's about as
(02:49):
accurate as is what they do. Is is that correct?
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I mean, I've never done that job, so I don't know,
but judging from reading this, it seemed pretty spot on.
And I know that Catherine Bigelow makes heck of a movie,
so I'm in her corner no matter what.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
What else does she made besides Zero Dark.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Thirty, Well, she did movies. I mean those two were
kind of later in her career as far as like
a big time recognition, but she did. You know, she
did a movie, a vampire movie called Near Dark back
in the day. It was great. Oh yeah, and yeah
you should see that one too.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
That's the trilogy Near Dark, the hurt Locker, and Zero
Dark thirty.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, Vampire's Bombs and Osama bin Laden.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
So okay, so we're talking about people who go near bombs,
unexploded bombs, and try to disable them, try to diffuse
them so that they can either be taken somewhere and
disassembled or they can be safely removed from an area
where say there's a lot of people are real estate
(03:53):
around and blow them up in a much safer manner.
They walk up to bombs that have not yet did
and they have no idea how or if or when
it's going to detonate, and that is their job. That's
who we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, and that can be you know, a military personnel
if it's in wartime or whatever, and that can obviously
be a civilian bomb squad, because bombs are not only
wartime weapons, as we've seen with things like the Boston
marathon bombing. That kind of stuff happens on the on
the streets of the USA and other places too. So
(04:30):
you've got to have cops at work, you got to
have military at work, and they have all kinds of
cool gear that just gets better and better. One thing
Kyle points out is that, you know, it's always and
we're going to talk about the history, but it's always
been sort of a race of devising bombs that aren't
you know, that that blow up when they're supposed to,
(04:52):
and then defeeding bombs from blowing up, and then new
technology and then new anti bomb technology it's just sort
of back and forth.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
What's horrif is that when new bomb technology comes out,
like they don't know until after somebody's died. Essentially, that's
that's often the case, that's how their bomb's gone off, right,
But often it's like if it's if say, like it's
booby trapped, a new kind of booby trap, that probably
(05:19):
means that they found out the hard way that there's
this new style of booby trap. That's the kind of
job that these people have.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, and since I mentioned that, we've got to throw
Kyle some love because he inadvertently came up with his
first band name for the show mm hmm, because in
describing that back and forth of technology and racing against
the bomb technology, he called it the pendulum of development.
And I think it's a pretty good band name.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Sure what kind of music?
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I mean, that's got to be some sort of like emo, right.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I guess I could also see like trance or drone
or something.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, like it too. Youre better at that than me,
I should ask you.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
That's not true. That's not true, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well. I feel like we each have our part. I
generally recognize the band names, and you're always spot on
it nailing the kind of music that it would be.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
All right, well let's move on, we'll both take the
compliment out with that.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
All right, Well, should we cover some of the history,
I guess yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
What was really surprising to me is that that bomb
disposal really started back in England in the nineteenth century,
like yeah, you know the Victorian era. I think the
eighteen seventies really was when it started to take off.
One of the reasons why is that Ireland was trying
(06:39):
to gain independence from Great Britain and one of the
ways they did that was through bombing campaigns. So essentially,
as you'll see, like you said, the pendulum of development
like situations whether it's war or some sort of struggle
or something like that, where bomb's make an appearance, that
(07:00):
leads to bomb development, and that leads in turn to
bomb disposal development. Right, and so that was I mean,
right off the bat, people started adopting this new technology
at the time, dynamite, which is a stable form of
nitroglycerim into bombs. So now it was up to people
who were in charge of disposing of these bombs to
figure out how to do that safely. Like that's the
(07:22):
kind of pendulum of development you were mentioning.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yeah, so dynamite comes along. It's a big sort of
leap forward in bombing technology, right. And the first person
to kind of pioneer this inspection routine was a guy
named Vivian durang Majindi. What was the Finnian Dynamite campaign
(07:46):
was kind of the first big bombing campaign that featured dynamite,
and Vivian came along and pioneered this field. Was the
first bomb disposal specialist because he got to work on
that anti dynamite campaign.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, and so when you think of bomb disposal, we
probably should have said this at the outset. The job
entails much more than just diffusing and disposing of bombs.
There's also like finding bombs, there's identifying the kind of
bomb you're dealing with, and so that's what Magendi was doing.
It was really low hanging fruit because it was such
a new field. He would walk into the room and
(08:24):
be like, yep, that's dynamite and they'd be like, oh,
good show, you know, like and he was like a
celebrated bomb disposal expert, but he was also a very
brave one and he would not delegate dealing with bombs
to anyone else below him, like he took on the
actual handling and attempts to diffuse bombs by himself, and
he was celebrated for that for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah. Absolutely. He was the first head of the explosives
department that they set up over there in eighteen seventy
five that would later become the Forensic Explosives Laboratory, which
basically any kind of explosive activity, like literally explosive activity, right,
not like a Beatles concert or something like that in
(09:07):
Great Britain is run through the Forensics Explosives Laboratory.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Yes, so this is going on in the third or
fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, and as the Irish
were laying bombs, so too were anarchists starting to use
dynamite as well. And that was a problem in Europe too,
but it was also a problem in New York in America.
(09:33):
And so just like in Great Britain and England, where
there were suddenly a lot of people putting bombs all
over the place, there was a huge need for people
to figure out how to make those bombs not go off,
and so America developed its first bomb squad back in
nineteen oh two under the leadership of guy named Giuseppe Petrosino,
(09:55):
and they were dealing with the mafia. Thank you. They
were dealing with the mafia at the time, and apparently
they did their job because the Bomb Squad got disbanded
and then as anarchists started to really step up their game,
the Bomb Squad, actually the Anarchist and Bomb Squad was
created in nineteen fourteen in the NYPD and it was
basically the revived Italian Squad under Petrosino.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I can see Reddit now, my friend, what's up with
Josh doing Italian names? Now after sixteen years?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Right, you can take it?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Oh no, no, no. Which you don't do is go
back and redo an Italian accent.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
So take it. I think you can under the right circumstances.
And the circumstances are these do that Italian accent as
Christopher Walkin doing Sammy Davis Junior doing the Italian accent.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
My brain just broke all right, So we're in nineteen
fourteen with the Anarchists and Bomb Squad. It's kind of
a clunky name. I guess the aabs.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah or ABS, Well, they.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Threw that and in there it's just sort of strange.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Abs are made in the kitchen was their slogan.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
So they uncovered a plot to blow up Saint Patrick's
Saint Patrick's Cheese I'm getting it all backwards Cathedral in
New York City. They basically let this thing go off.
They got all the manuals of the fuse design. It
was a timed fuse, and so they they kind of
(11:30):
let it happen and then arrested these like they wanted
to catch the people, So they let the fuse be lit,
be lit, and then they got these guys, and of
course it extinguished the fuse.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, during mass. Yeah, they they went ahead and let
the bombers light the fuse.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
I mean, I guess that's the only way to know
who the guys were, right.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, I guess. But yeah, that was I mean, that
was gutsy.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
That's the way I took it was that they were
they wanted to, you know, find out who was actually
doing this, and the only way to do that was
to see the views get lit.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
No, absolutely, I think you could also just say anybody
who's who starts to crouch down near the fuse, you
can go ahead and arrest that guy.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Or raise your hand if you're not here to blow
this place up right and then just arrest who doesn't
raise their hand yep.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So also remember we talked about Jay gar Hoover running
the Radical Division. They also had an early bomb unit
within the FBI, and the FBI probably ever since has
had bomb specialists special agent basically bomb technicians, and they
do a lot of training. We saw a really interesting
(12:41):
video on Wired I think, where a FBI bomb technician
describes like, you know, what the whole process is like.
It was pretty fascinating. Yeah, very calmly, but still, I
mean you got anarchists laying bombs, you have Irish Republicans
laying bombs, and then what really steps up the whole
game makes it necessary. Area of the world wars and
(13:01):
the First World War came along and there's a lot
of munitions that were fired on either side all over
the place, all over Europe. And anytime you're firing munitions,
just like we said at the outset with black Cat
fire crackers, some are bound to be duds. And just
because they didn't go off now doesn't mean they're not
going to go off one hundred years from now. So
it's actually, as we'll see, like a huge problem. Still,
(13:23):
we covered it a lot tangentially in our Land Mines
episode about how when bombs are you know, shot off
in war, laid in war, they can you know, kill
people a century later. Essentially that was a problem in
and of itself, and there were volunteer usually Air Force
for some reason, like soldiers, who taught themselves essentially how
(13:49):
to try to diffuse the bombs that were left over
for World War One. But it wasn't until World War
Two that the whole thing started to be formalized, both
in the UK and in the US.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, the training that they had in World War One,
the equipment that they had wasn't enough to snuff, and
I think it just sort of slowly built in everyone's
minds that like, all right, this is something we need
to officially address. Where we're not trained up, we don't
know what we're really doing, and so we got to
correct that because this is a big problem moving forward.
(14:20):
And in nineteen forty Winston Churchill said, we owe it
to these brave men to provide them with the very
best technical equipment. So equipment and training was really the
way forward, especially after Germany's blitz happened over the period
of you know, about a year or two, because there
were a lot of bombs dropped, and like you said,
(14:41):
you know a lot. I mean, I don't know if
we have an exact percentage of I guess it depends
on the war. But even today, like some of the
more recent wars, I've saw numbers like twenty thirty percent
of bombstone even go off. So those things are just
laying around waiting for you know, Unfortunately, sometimes some some
kid or any innocent person to just stumble upon it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah, and I saw something I can't remember, I send
it to you, So maybe you'll remember either hundreds of
thousands of tons or millions of tons of munitions were
dropped in Europe.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Okay, well it was one of those. It was just
a mind boggling amount. So if you think of twenty
or thirty percent of that, like that's they're still there.
They're still in Europe. Like those bombs, if they didn't
go off, they would plant themselves sixty feet underground, waiting
for some guy who like later was going to build
a sports arena on the site to find it and
(15:37):
hope that he didn't accidentally blow it up with his
earth mover. Like that's a I don't know how common
it is, but it's a frequent occurrence in Europe.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Still, Yeah, absolutely, As they got better at disabling these bombs,
of course that that race starts again the pendulum of development.
That great band takes the stage and Germany is like, well,
here's what we'll do. Then we're going to start implementing
things that will kill somebody trying to dismantle it. An
(16:05):
anti handling device. They had all different kinds, but you know,
basically most of them were just you know, if you
mess with the fuse or if you mess with the wiring,
like if you were trying to extract something to keep
it from going boom, that would make it go boom.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Right, And so yeah, I just want to like punctuate
that these anti handling devices were booby traps specifically designed
to blow up the very people whose job we're talking
about today. Yeah, that was the whole thing. That was
the point of it. And for people walking around like
me who just have always thought of fuses as that
long wick that goes to like a shiny black round bomb,
(16:45):
there are basically anything that sets off the detonator or
the thing that blows up the detonator that's a fuse.
It can be everything from something magnetic, it can be barometric,
can be like a gyroscope, so if the bomb is
tipped over, it blows up. Anything that you can use
(17:08):
to to that detects a change in the environment, a timer.
It can also be a radio, something as simple as
a garage shore opener. All those are fuses. It's not
just like there's a wick that'slit. It's anything that can
blow the thing up that triggers the explosion.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, so they started working hard again to try and
counteract this by developing, you know, new methods, new techniques
to not only diffuse bombs, but you know, figure out
what was sometimes literally making them tick, drilling holes in them,
and time bombs. They started listening to them with stethoscopes
(17:47):
so you could hear if it had a clock, and
if it did have a clock, see if there was
some sort of mechanism called a clock stopper, like it's
basically a steel collar, battery power thing, to see if
that thing's firing, to see if they, you know, had
any anti withdrawal devices. Thank you Germans. Boiling water. They
(18:09):
started using water and steam early on to render either
the powder useless or as we'll see now, like just
like flooding a thing with a lot of water very
quickly can sometimes work as well.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah, and that also didn't quite make sense to me
at first until I realized that bombs also are made up.
There's a really like the explosive part that makes the
big boom, but there's also frequently a slightly smaller explosive
that makes the big boom go off. The thing that
booms really hugely, they're usually really kind of hard to detonate,
(18:45):
so you can do things like pour water on the
whole thing, and you're you're not necessarily trying to keep
the big bomb from going off. You're trying to disable
that either explosive charge or the fuse or whatever that's
gonna make that bigger bomb go off. It's kind of
hard to jiggling around a bomb to make like say
the plastic explosives or something like that go off. It's
(19:06):
way easier to make the black powder get triggered. That's
what you're trying to disable most of the time when
you're messing with the bomb. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Absolutely, I mean, we talked about that a lot in
our episodes on nuclear bombs and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
You said we did one on IEDs. Is that right?
I genuinely don't remember that.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Oh yeah, eleven years ago.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Wow, I'm glad you remember. Oh, just we're talking about
previous episodes. I think we should take a second here, Chuck,
to correct ourselves. I don't know if you saw some
of the emails come in, but we released our Genghis
Khan episode as a Saturday select. I think I chose
it ye this past Saturday, And apparently in it we
(19:48):
say that when Genghis Khan was running around, there were
seven billion people on the planet and three billion of
them were Mongols, and that is that could not be
further from the truth. Apparently we didn't hit one billion
until the nineteenth century, and we're at seven billion now.
So we were so off that it doesn't even make
sense what we were saying. And I can't believe we
(20:10):
got it that wrong, but apparently we did. So sorry
to everybody who's like, I can never listen to Josh
and Chuck again. After that, you said, I guess you
wouldn't be listening right now.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
You kept saying we did we both say that in unison.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Hey man, if one of us said it and the
other one didn't correct it. We're both guilty.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Oh okay, all right, well we're guilty of not taking
an ad break. So we'll do that right now and
beg forgiveness when we come back right after this. All right,
(20:59):
So flash forward again. You know, the sort of technology
of defeating bomb seems to rise and fall with lots
of bombings happening, of course, and that happened between nineteen
sixty nine and really up into kind of the mid
two thousands with the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.
(21:20):
During that time, twenty three different specialists were killed in
action from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, and ordnance is
just sort of a fancy name for any kind of artillery.
But you'll hear, you know, like unexploded ordnance and stuff
like that a lot. And that's like a bomb that
didn't go off.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, And so the troubles in Northern Ireland were a
huge impetus for new bomb disposal technology. Simultaneously, bomb disposal
techs who had fought in Vietnam were sorry to come
back to the United States too, So there are two
(21:59):
different things that were pushing bomb disposal technology at about
the same time in both the UK and America. And
what's interesting is this is the second time that it happened.
Third time actually, remember there were there was the Irish
Republicans in the nineteenth century, followed closely by the anarchists
in New York. There was the Vets returning from Vietnam,
(22:19):
and in the UK dealing with the troubles of Northern Ireland.
And then in World War Two there was the there
was Churchill's push to train veterans or servicemen in World
War Two, and at the same time, the US Navy
was learning to defuse SA minds at the same time.
So it's just strange to me that the US and
the UK have run in paralleled so many different times.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, totally so. Prior to seventy two, it was basically
using your hands like a human being dismantling a bomb
with their fingies. After that, because of you know, the
new threats coming from all the bombs from the troubles,
they started saying like, hey, maybe, and the idea very
(23:04):
much now is to try and do everything as far
away from the bomb as possible, including the actual technician
obviously getting the people out of there. But they did
this by developing a bunch of new tools, one of
which is called the pig stick. I was a minute
in nineteen seventy one, and this is one of those
that sends a water jet, a really powerful water jet,
(23:27):
to try and just interrupt the circuitry and disable it.
And they're still used to this day.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, I saw one of these go off. It also
took me a minute to figure out why they call
it a pigstick, and then I remembered Anton Sugar in
No Country for Old Men. It's essentially they're kind of
saying it's the same thing as that. It's a charge
that shoots water so forcefully that I saw it slowed
down to twenty percent and it still happened too fast
to see. Yeah, Like it's so quick that it will
(23:57):
disrupt the bomb before the bomb knows what hit it, right,
So any fuse or firing mechanism or anything like that,
it's just going to get separated before it can trigger
the bomb. And the fact that it's water means that
it's not going to let the it's not going to
accidentally light any say like incendiary trigger inside. So it's
(24:18):
pretty ingenious. And the fact that they were using this
all the way back in the early mid seventies is
pretty impressive, and because it was just so effective, like
you said, like, it's still pretty much standard around the
world today.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah, for sure, they're not very effective for car bombs obviously,
so more and more car bombs started to be used.
Like again, once something is sort of figured out and
you figure out a better way to defeat it, the
enemy morphs, and so car bombs became sort of and
are still just a big problem worldwide because car bombs
(24:52):
are mobile obviously, and they're huge, Like you can have
a two hundred to three hundred pound bomb hidden in
a that's not very big without even seeing it. So
of course they had to develop even newer technology and
we all knew it was going to go this way.
But eventually robots would come onto the scene.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
I'm impressed you didn't say robots. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
That's Hodgman Steele.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
So yeah, one of the technologies that came out of
that is the early prototypes or proto robots used today
were called wheelbarrows. I think the first one was made
out of a lawnmower motor and essentially you could put
say something like a pigstick and then maybe a video
camera on there and go approach a car, and some
(25:40):
of the ones that came later you could use this
robot to hook toe ropes up to move the car
out of the area to someplace safer to blow it up.
And I think something like four hundred wheelbarrows were destroyed
just between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy eight, now,
which gives you an idea. That's six years. That's just
(26:00):
the ones that were destroyed. That's how many bombs were
laid around Northern Ireland, but also in Europe and England
to somewhat lesser extent during that period, during the Troubles
which ran all the way to ninety eight, I think
there was a lot of bombs going off around there
at the time. So the more bombs there were, the
(26:20):
more quickly they had to develop these techniques to counter
bomb measures too. That's what was going on. It was
just a huge laboratory and pressure cooker at the same time.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, to be fair, I think the purpose mostly for
the wheelbarrow was to blow it up, So I don't
think there were a ton of wheelbarrows that made it
out alive, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Oh, okay, all right, Still four hundred there is a
lot of bombs in six years.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Oh totally. There was a well, I guess we should
just sort of give the general breakdown of how this
might work back then, and it's not too dissimilar from
how it works now. But you would initially, you know,
get the call that there's a suspected device to this,
this team or the specialists, they would the first thing
they do is clear the area. They try to get people,
(27:05):
you know, they figure out what they think might be
the blast zone, get as many people as far away
from that area as possible, and then you get that
robot out. If the robot can't do the job, then
you have to get a person in a bomb suit
in there. We'll talk about bomb suits a little bit
more later. And then they go in and they explode
(27:27):
this thing if it's real.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Right, Yeah, that's another thing. Kyle found this BBC documentary
on the bomb squads working in Northern Ireland at the
time from nineteen seventy four and everything has a real
clockwork orange look to it still, but they find a hoax.
But at the end of it they're working on like
(27:50):
a real live bomb and they just have the audio
of the guy who you know, is now inside this
building trying to figure out what kind of bomb they're
dealing with, and you just hear his breath and it
just gets like more and more quickened and like like
it sounds not quite like he's going to hyperventilate, but
he's breathing way harder than the normal average person does.
(28:12):
And it's really just kind of stirring at the end there,
Especially for a fifty year old hour long BBC documentary.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
You should see the hurt Locker then. Okay, that that
turns you on.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
I don't know if it turned me on, it is
the right way to put it, but yees I definitely
noticed it.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah, it's an anxiety inducing film for sure. It's very
very tense as you would imagine.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Okay, I'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Sure you don't have to, man.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I mean, are you one of the financiers of the.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Movie or you know, just suggesting very related to this topic,
you know?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (28:44):
So IEDs again, we did a full episode on these
about eleven years ago, so we don't need to really
go through what all those are. But they are improvised
explosive devices. And the scary thing about IEDs, like this
is what you had in the boss of marathon bombing
is is like it could be almost anything, like a
pressure cooker, a pipe bomb, could be you know, something
(29:07):
just sitting in a backpack on the corner. So those
are that's you know, incredibly frightening to face that kind
of reality.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yes, so yeah, so that's something that say, like a
public safety bomb disposal tech would be more likely to
deal with, rather than say like a military grade bomb
being left somewhere. That would probably be more like a
military person that was dealing with that. But I also
saw one other thing that people in public safety have
(29:35):
to deal with are illegal fireworks. I didn't even know
there was such a thing as illegal fireworks.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Did you You mean, like the firework itself is illegal
in a legal state.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
I think the impression is that they're homemade, okay, or
they're so powerful that they're not legal.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, yeah, I've heard that. I think as a kid,
we all heard rumors of like in one hundreds and
in one twenties, it probably didn't even.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Exist, right, A black cat. The size of your forearm.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Also on those IEDs, especially in the case of Boston
that video we saw. You know, one thing you don't
think about is when you find out that there is
like a bomb, you know, or a tip that there's
a bomb somewhere, and you clear out an area, like
a lot of things can look like a bomb at
that point, because he was like, you know, people drop
(30:28):
their backpack, they get out of there there, you know,
all of a sudden, there's a lot of things laying around,
or it could be like the mailbox, you know, so
they have to check out like everything.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, I noted that too. That was pretty interesting. Another
thing that they'll do is they'll pre sweep areas, say
like there's a political rally or something like that, you
can pretty much bet that there's a bomb squad that
moved through the area already and swept it for bombs. Also,
one of the other big jobs that they have, Chuck,
is they will identify like evidence of bombs. They'll help
(31:02):
people gather evidence. They'll be like, that's a part of
a bomb, that's part of bomb. And the more that
they can collect, the more information they can take back
to the lab and figure out about the bomb, the
bomb maker, the country that it came from. And the
more they can do that, the more they can learn
to counter them as well.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yeah, for sure, you know I mentioned that in the seventies,
kind of the protocol of how you would go about
this on the scene basically being the same today. Like
some of the only differences today is like they have
X rays now, so yeah, you know, just like in
the doctor's office, they'll go and put a plate behind
the bomb and take an X ray of it. And
(31:41):
that has been a real game changer in being able
to look inside this thing safely and see what's going on.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And the other thing too that the guy in the
video really wanted to drive home is they want to
spend as less as little time around that bomb as possible.
So like if you're going in, you don't want to
go in with a couple of things and be like, oh,
let me go back and get this now and try this.
Like they want to go in there one time and
have everything at their disposal on hand to assess and
(32:10):
evaluate and decide how they're going to disrupt this thing.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah, but as it stands, because you almost exclusively across
the board, every bomb disposal unit's going to take an
X ray first, you have to put a person in
danger at least at some point. Ideally after they take
the X ray, they get the heck out of there,
and then they never go back again. It's the robot
(32:34):
that's sent in, the wheelbearer or whatever to handle the
whole thing with, say like some sort of disruptor, like
a pigstick or something. Right, But if, like you said,
the robot can't get to it, it's up the stairs,
it's over some weird debris, it's just in a place
where the robot can't get to it, that person's going
to have to go back in and deal with this directly.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, and like this is frightening when you think about,
like you have to go in to get that X ray.
And two out of the three methods for a bomb
potentially going off are threats to you at that moment.
If it's a time bomb and you have some bad
luck with your timing, you could be exploded. If it's
(33:17):
a remote controlled bomb, you could very easily be exploded.
The only one that you're I guess, relatively safe from
if you're doing your job really, really carefully, is victim
initiated or like a booby trap or something. So you
know you're not gonna want to disturb it. Basically, you're
gonna want to be really really careful when you're laying
(33:38):
when you're doing that X ray.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah for sure. All right, Chuck, I say we come
back and we talk about some of the technology that
these very brave people are using when they do this crazy,
crazy stuff. Let's do it, all right, man. So, as
(34:10):
we promised, we're going to talk about some of the
technology that bomb disposal technicians use. We already talked about
the robot and we mentioned the bomb suit a little bit,
but I think you can go into it a little
more because they're fairly complex.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, absolutely, and uncomfortable. There are variations. You know, they'll
gauge what kind of level of suit you need, like
lighter versus heavier. But if you've got on the full
heaviest kevlar plated collar, protected, helmet visor wearing suit, it
(34:46):
is clunky. You do have use of your Fingi's so like,
you know, I think if you're a one of these
kind of specialists, one thing you're going to have to
really consider is that you may at some point be
living your life without or hands right at the very least.
But they are fairly effective. I mean they're pretty clunky,
(35:09):
but like the heat is the biggest problem, especially you know,
you know, when you're disrupting a bomb, let's say in
the Middle East in the middle of summer or something
like that, they don't last long in those So the
very latest technology has actual cooling units. They all used
to have fans, but now they have actually coolant that
says they can withstand like any amount of heat for
(35:32):
an hour.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
And I don't think they want to be in there
for more than an hour anyway, So hopefully that's helped
a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah. One thing that I saw that a lot of
them don't have, though, is like communication equipment, because you
usually use radio and you can accidentally set off a
bomb that's radio controlled, so they often don't have any
sort of calm equipment in there. I also saw, and
I don't know this is not from a legitimate source
(35:59):
or vetted source. How about that it's either on Core
or Reddit. No offense to either of those sites, but
where somebody who presented themselves as a bomb technician essentially
said if you're yes, if you're dealing with a pipe bomb,
maybe illegal fireworks something like that, you're probably gonna wear
a bomb suit if you have to diffuse it yourself.
(36:21):
Not a robot, but at bomb bomb, you probably aren't
going to go to the trouble of wearing a suit
because that bomb will kill you if it goes off,
whether you're wearing a suit or not. And those suits
are definitely made to protect your against shrapnel. Projectiles. A
lot of them are literally bulletproof because they're they're so
(36:42):
tough and made of such thick kevlar and ceramic plates
and all that. But the overblast, the shockwave that's produced
is what can It can give you crushing injuries just
from hitting you that hard if you're very close to
a blast radius. So putting all that together, I couldn't help.
But wonder if they were if they were correct, or
(37:05):
if they were just talking jive.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Well, there is something called blast long. It's very common injury,
and it's basically, you know, like you said, getting just
smashed in the chest with an invisible, you know, wrecking ball.
So it's an internal injury. But that's one of the
most common and those suits, you know, they obviously stop
projectiles and stuff, but they also decreased that blast wave impact.
(37:30):
It's you know, they're made to do that. So I
would be surprised if the just sort of the rules
around it were like, yeah, he's just not gonna wear
it today.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
That was my take too, It's like, are you are
you really allowed to just say that yourself. But also
I wonder if they're in such short supply that it's
like do whatever you want. Man, Like, just hats off
to you for even trying this. They're expensive, Yeah, they're
like thirty five grand, but I stopped and thought about it.
That's because probably it's local and federal governments buying them,
(38:05):
so I'm sure they're marked.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Up, you know, yeah, you probably make one of those
for a couple hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
I bet sure. I also saw some of them have
spinal protection, so that if you're blown back by the
blast wind, the actual wind that's pushed out from the blast,
and you land on your spine, you're not automatically going
to get a spinal injury.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Oh that's that's cool, because that guy in the video
kind of indicated that the back was the least protected.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
I saw that. But this is on a site for
a manufacture of actual blast suits bombs.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Did you ever think they're just trying to sell you suit? Josh,
Come on, come on, naive.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Yeah, it was a little kind of hokey. It looked
like it was like a drawing of a tuxedo on
the front of it.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah. So the other, you know, piece of technology we
talked a little bit about is the it was called
the disruptor. Those pigsticks or disruptors. There are all kinds
of disruptors, from things that use you know, sound to water,
that that bottler thing. You know, I tried to understand
what he was talking about in that video, but I
was a little little confused.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
So essentially, which one the bottler? Yeah, so it's the
same thing as the others, except the pig stick and
the other one that shoots everything in like a v wedge.
It's it's not it's not like a hyper located on
a certain area. Okay, it blows out in a circle.
It's multidirectional. Again, the same key is it's spreading water
(39:35):
and it blows up so fast that it can disable
the trigger before it can fire. All. It's that's what
disruptors do essentially.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Okay. Uh, there's also you know, they're they're bomb carriers
that just sit on the back of a pickup truck.
You know, they're bolted to a pickup truck or pumby
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Or a cyber truck.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, oh god, I saw one in the wild the
other day for the first time.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Oh yeah, what'd you think. I was just like, it's
just the.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Dumbest looking thing to drive around in that I've ever
seen in my life. That's what I thought.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah, I mean I get that a lot of people do.
There's a subreddit called cyber stuck, and the whole thing
is just totally dedicated to making fun of people who
drive cyber trucks and all of the woes that they
have from driving a cyber truck.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
It's pretty finny if you've got one.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
I'm not trying to yuck or you. Everyone has different tastes,
but let's just say it's not my taste.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Yeah, I think that was well aesthetically. So these bomb carriers,
like I said, you know, it's kind of just a big, like,
you know, heavy chamber to put a bomb in to
carry it somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yes, And like I think they can. I've seen that
some of them can hold up to ten kilograms of
TNT the equivalent of that, right, Yeah, so like you
could blow up you could put twenty something pounds of
dynamite in this thing and blow it up, and the
thing will be like that's all you got. It'll like
get belched or something like that. It's just amazing that
we can make something that can can that kind of
(41:01):
violent force. Yeah, for sure, I'm just impressed by those things.
One other thing that I saw that it really stuck
out to me is like you would think that that
bomb disposal experts are paid like basketball stars and they
are not. Like the average bomb tech makes about fifty
thousand dollars a year in the UK or the US.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Oh yeah, that's wrong.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, okay, I just wanted to go on record as
saying that I support bomb techts being paid through the roof.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Oh yeah, I mean it's just another example of job
you do. Does it necessarily equate to money you make?
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
You know, as far as the fairness scale goes, yeap,
So unexploded ordinances. I keep saying ordinances, ordinance without any right.
It's hard to say that right for me. But like
we said, those are bombs from past wars that have
not gone off. I think you already mentioned that World
War Two has a lot of these still scattered across Europe.
(42:03):
And these are really dangerous because you know, these things
degrade over time in every way you can imagine, from
the fuses to the primers to you know, parts resting
out and stuff like that. So it's you know, it's
literally sometimes a bomb just waiting to go off, and
you never know when that might be.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Right, and this happens, I mean sometimes it goes off
and kills people, as recently is two thy ten, twenty
twenty three. I think in that twenty ten incident it
was in Germany. Three three bomb techs were killed in
that explosion. Yeah, and again this is World War two ordinance.
Like imagine being a pilot who drops a bomb, it
(42:44):
doesn't go off, You go home, you return from the war,
you buy a house in the suburbs, you have a
pick of fence, a family, you grow old, you die,
and then thirty years after that, after you're buried, somebody
comes along and that bomb you drop blows up and
kills them completely outside the context of war. That happens
in Europe.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Yeah, that happens all over the world.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Yes, for sure, that's well put.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Because you know, more recently in the nineteen seventies with
the wars in Indo China, I think Kyle found the
stat two million tons of munitions were dropped between sixty
four and seventy three, and of the two hundred and
seventy million cluster bombs dropped, thirty percent may have failed
to detonate. That's over eighty million cluster bombs potentially still
(43:32):
scattered about that area.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, and that's not including all the land mines that
were purposely laid and not cleared too, man, unbelievable. Yeah,
and kids get killed by that, the kids in I Rack.
I saw between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two, five
hundred and nineteen kids were either killed or injured in
a rock from unexploded ordinance. And then the United States
(43:54):
has its own stockpole problems too. I saw that we
dumped millions of pounds of bombs when when the stockpiles
got too big they were, and the stuff was getting old,
they just dumped it off the coast in the east
and the west.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
That's just how can that be allowed?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
It was, well, it was stopped being allowed in nineteen seventy.
But it's not like they went back and got every
fished everything out, which is funny because it does get
fished out once in a while in a fishing net
and apparently Lake Erie had Camp Perry, which was a
proving ground from munitions, and just like in war when
you're shooting off a bunch of munitions to test them,
some of them aren't going to aren't going to blow up,
(44:36):
right then, So apparently Lake Erie is littered with unexploded
ordnance as well.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
That we talked about. When wasn't it a nuclear bomb
off the coast of Savannah, right?
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah? From I think the early fifties, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Did they find that thing recently? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (44:53):
I think they did, and they were like, it's too
it's too dangerous to move. We're just gonna cross our
fingers if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, I couldn't remember because I feel like we got
email because we talked about that a long time ago.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, they made the they made the call that it's
really just Tybee Island that's in danger in there, like
Tybee Island.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
That's so mean.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Okay, since I just made fun of Tybee Allen, I'm
just kidding Tybee. Uh, it's time for listener mail. I say, you.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Know who loves Tybee jas Jerry does.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
She's a Tybee person and she's.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Not here today, so she'll hear this when she uh,
or maybe she won't, who.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Knows, No, she'll be doing something else.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
All right, So you said listener mail, right, Yeah I did.
I'm gonna call this. I have to do it. Friend.
I'm sorry, but I have to do this Minecraft correction.
Oh yeah, because the emails. And this is one where
I just tried and tried and tried to tell you
that that wasn't right, and you stuck to your guns.
Hey sure, Hey, guys, been listening for her almost as
(45:57):
long as I played Minecraft a little over a decade.
Josh repeated the point that there is one seed per
game copy, but Minecraft has more to offer than you think.
You can make as many worlds as you want concurrently,
and even pick your seed. It's gotten so popular that
entire websites are dedicated to seed sharing. That sounds gross.
If someone finds an interesting seed with something like an
(46:18):
island inside a volcano close to your spawn point, they
will often share the random string of characters that produce
that seed so others can generate that same world. There
was also a sarcastic comment made about kids learning that
the ancient ones built underwater cities. I don't think it
was sarcastic. I think it was clever quip.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Probably sarcastic. It's sardonic. It was sardonic.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Okay, but this is actually true, guys. Tons of ancient
settlements in real life are currently under the water because
the coastline changes over time, we tend to build near
bodies of water.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Absolutely true on both counts. Thank you and for day
that is Nathan, Nathan, that was great. That's pretty awesome.
You've been listening to us about as long as you've
been playing mine. That is high praise as we take it.
And thank you for so gently correcting me even though
I got it so wrong long.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
That's okay.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
If you want to be like Nathan and gently correct us,
we're always up for that. You can send it via
email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kaboom Clark, and
there's Chuck Wow Bryant, and Jerry's not here. She's a
dud and this stuff you should know about bomb disposals.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's right, and specifically a dud meaning a thing that
doesn't go off right.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, a dud.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah. I think you're a kid playing with fireworks and
you light one through it at your friend. Nothing happens,
and you start crying because it's a dud.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
You're like, I don't have two cents to waste, black cat,
give me my two cents back.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah, when you're a kid, two cents matter back in
the eighties.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
You can put that together with three other cents and
buy yourself a stick a butter.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Throw it at your friend.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
So we should shout out. Speaking of friends, are Newish
writer Kyle Houkstra, who's writing for us from the UK
makes us an international podcast of mystery, and he helps
us out with this one. It's a pretty interesting topic
if you ask me, and I don't remember where I
got the idea, but it's been on the list for
(01:24):
a little while and I finally pulled the trigger mechanism
on it.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
No, wow, you're in a roll today.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I guess. So that's one way to put it.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Had you just seen the hurt Locker or something.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I've never seen the hurt Locker. Really, yeah, you check
it out.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
It's great movie.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Oh. I know, I've heard nothing but good things. I
just have not ever gotten around to seeing it. I'm
not crazy about war movies. The last war movie that
I saw that I really liked was probably Uncommon Valor.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Oh wow, see like terrible war movies.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
No, are you crazy, that's one of the best war
movies of all time. Oh okay, you don't like an
Uncommon Valor?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I mean I liked it as a kid in the eighties,
But I mean it was very much that I don't
think it's regarded as one of the great war movies.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
You don't think it'd hold up now, huh?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Well, I mean I think it would hold up as
an eighties war movie.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
I mean he was a guy in it, Gene Hackman.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Randall Tech Cobb, he was Patrick Swayze. Yeah, okay, great movie.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
It was a great movie. So yes, But no, I
haven't seen hert Locker I from what I understand, it's
about as accurate a depiction of how bomb disposal technicians
or EOD technicians explosive ordnance disposal technicians, I should say,
for those who don't know the lingo, it's about as
(02:49):
accurate as is what they do. Is is that correct?
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I mean, I've never done that job, so I don't know,
but judging from reading this, it seemed pretty spot on.
And I know that Catherine Bigelow makes heck of a movie,
so I'm in her corner no matter what.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
What else does she made besides Zero Dark.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Thirty, Well, she did movies. I mean those two were
kind of later in her career as far as like
a big time recognition, but she did. You know, she
did a movie, a vampire movie called Near Dark back
in the day. It was great. Oh yeah, and yeah
you should see that one too.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
That's the trilogy Near Dark, the hurt Locker, and Zero
Dark thirty.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, Vampire's Bombs and Osama bin Laden.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
So okay, so we're talking about people who go near bombs,
unexploded bombs, and try to disable them, try to diffuse
them so that they can either be taken somewhere and
disassembled or they can be safely removed from an area
where say there's a lot of people are real estate
(03:53):
around and blow them up in a much safer manner.
They walk up to bombs that have not yet did
and they have no idea how or if or when
it's going to detonate, and that is their job. That's
who we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, and that can be you know, a military personnel
if it's in wartime or whatever, and that can obviously
be a civilian bomb squad, because bombs are not only
wartime weapons, as we've seen with things like the Boston
marathon bombing. That kind of stuff happens on the on
the streets of the USA and other places too. So
(04:30):
you've got to have cops at work, you got to
have military at work, and they have all kinds of
cool gear that just gets better and better. One thing
Kyle points out is that, you know, it's always and
we're going to talk about the history, but it's always
been sort of a race of devising bombs that aren't
you know, that that blow up when they're supposed to,
(04:52):
and then defeeding bombs from blowing up, and then new
technology and then new anti bomb technology it's just sort
of back and forth.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
What's horrif is that when new bomb technology comes out,
like they don't know until after somebody's died. Essentially, that's
that's often the case, that's how their bomb's gone off, right,
But often it's like if it's if say, like it's
booby trapped, a new kind of booby trap, that probably
(05:19):
means that they found out the hard way that there's
this new style of booby trap. That's the kind of
job that these people have.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, and since I mentioned that, we've got to throw
Kyle some love because he inadvertently came up with his
first band name for the show mm hmm, because in
describing that back and forth of technology and racing against
the bomb technology, he called it the pendulum of development.
And I think it's a pretty good band name.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Sure what kind of music?
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I mean, that's got to be some sort of like emo, right.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I guess I could also see like trance or drone
or something.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, like it too. Youre better at that than me,
I should ask you.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
That's not true. That's not true, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well. I feel like we each have our part. I
generally recognize the band names, and you're always spot on
it nailing the kind of music that it would be.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
All right, well let's move on, we'll both take the
compliment out with that.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
All right, Well, should we cover some of the history,
I guess yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
What was really surprising to me is that that bomb
disposal really started back in England in the nineteenth century,
like yeah, you know the Victorian era. I think the
eighteen seventies really was when it started to take off.
One of the reasons why is that Ireland was trying
(06:39):
to gain independence from Great Britain and one of the
ways they did that was through bombing campaigns. So essentially,
as you'll see, like you said, the pendulum of development
like situations whether it's war or some sort of struggle
or something like that, where bomb's make an appearance, that
(07:00):
leads to bomb development, and that leads in turn to
bomb disposal development. Right, and so that was I mean,
right off the bat, people started adopting this new technology
at the time, dynamite, which is a stable form of
nitroglycerim into bombs. So now it was up to people
who were in charge of disposing of these bombs to
figure out how to do that safely. Like that's the
(07:22):
kind of pendulum of development you were mentioning.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yeah, so dynamite comes along. It's a big sort of
leap forward in bombing technology, right. And the first person
to kind of pioneer this inspection routine was a guy
named Vivian durang Majindi. What was the Finnian Dynamite campaign
(07:46):
was kind of the first big bombing campaign that featured dynamite,
and Vivian came along and pioneered this field. Was the
first bomb disposal specialist because he got to work on
that anti dynamite campaign.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, and so when you think of bomb disposal, we
probably should have said this at the outset. The job
entails much more than just diffusing and disposing of bombs.
There's also like finding bombs, there's identifying the kind of
bomb you're dealing with, and so that's what Magendi was doing.
It was really low hanging fruit because it was such
a new field. He would walk into the room and
(08:24):
be like, yep, that's dynamite and they'd be like, oh,
good show, you know, like and he was like a
celebrated bomb disposal expert, but he was also a very
brave one and he would not delegate dealing with bombs
to anyone else below him, like he took on the
actual handling and attempts to diffuse bombs by himself, and
he was celebrated for that for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah. Absolutely. He was the first head of the explosives
department that they set up over there in eighteen seventy
five that would later become the Forensic Explosives Laboratory, which
basically any kind of explosive activity, like literally explosive activity, right,
not like a Beatles concert or something like that in
(09:07):
Great Britain is run through the Forensics Explosives Laboratory.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Yes, so this is going on in the third or
fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, and as the Irish
were laying bombs, so too were anarchists starting to use
dynamite as well. And that was a problem in Europe too,
but it was also a problem in New York in America.
(09:33):
And so just like in Great Britain and England, where
there were suddenly a lot of people putting bombs all
over the place, there was a huge need for people
to figure out how to make those bombs not go off,
and so America developed its first bomb squad back in
nineteen oh two under the leadership of guy named Giuseppe Petrosino,
(09:55):
and they were dealing with the mafia. Thank you. They
were dealing with the mafia at the time, and apparently
they did their job because the Bomb Squad got disbanded
and then as anarchists started to really step up their game,
the Bomb Squad, actually the Anarchist and Bomb Squad was
created in nineteen fourteen in the NYPD and it was
basically the revived Italian Squad under Petrosino.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I can see Reddit now, my friend, what's up with
Josh doing Italian names? Now after sixteen years?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Right, you can take it?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Oh no, no, no. Which you don't do is go
back and redo an Italian accent.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
So take it. I think you can under the right circumstances.
And the circumstances are these do that Italian accent as
Christopher Walkin doing Sammy Davis Junior doing the Italian accent.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
My brain just broke all right, So we're in nineteen
fourteen with the Anarchists and Bomb Squad. It's kind of
a clunky name. I guess the aabs.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah or ABS, Well, they.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Threw that and in there it's just sort of strange.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Abs are made in the kitchen was their slogan.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
So they uncovered a plot to blow up Saint Patrick's
Saint Patrick's Cheese I'm getting it all backwards Cathedral in
New York City. They basically let this thing go off.
They got all the manuals of the fuse design. It
was a timed fuse, and so they they kind of
(11:30):
let it happen and then arrested these like they wanted
to catch the people, So they let the fuse be lit,
be lit, and then they got these guys, and of
course it extinguished the fuse.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, during mass. Yeah, they they went ahead and let
the bombers light the fuse.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
I mean, I guess that's the only way to know
who the guys were, right.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, I guess. But yeah, that was I mean, that
was gutsy.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
That's the way I took it was that they were
they wanted to, you know, find out who was actually
doing this, and the only way to do that was
to see the views get lit.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
No, absolutely, I think you could also just say anybody
who's who starts to crouch down near the fuse, you
can go ahead and arrest that guy.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Or raise your hand if you're not here to blow
this place up right and then just arrest who doesn't
raise their hand yep.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So also remember we talked about Jay gar Hoover running
the Radical Division. They also had an early bomb unit
within the FBI, and the FBI probably ever since has
had bomb specialists special agent basically bomb technicians, and they
do a lot of training. We saw a really interesting
(12:41):
video on Wired I think, where a FBI bomb technician
describes like, you know, what the whole process is like.
It was pretty fascinating. Yeah, very calmly, but still, I
mean you got anarchists laying bombs, you have Irish Republicans
laying bombs, and then what really steps up the whole
game makes it necessary. Area of the world wars and
(13:01):
the First World War came along and there's a lot
of munitions that were fired on either side all over
the place, all over Europe. And anytime you're firing munitions,
just like we said at the outset with black Cat
fire crackers, some are bound to be duds. And just
because they didn't go off now doesn't mean they're not
going to go off one hundred years from now. So
it's actually, as we'll see, like a huge problem. Still,
(13:23):
we covered it a lot tangentially in our Land Mines
episode about how when bombs are you know, shot off
in war, laid in war, they can you know, kill
people a century later. Essentially that was a problem in
and of itself, and there were volunteer usually Air Force
for some reason, like soldiers, who taught themselves essentially how
(13:49):
to try to diffuse the bombs that were left over
for World War One. But it wasn't until World War
Two that the whole thing started to be formalized, both
in the UK and in the US.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, the training that they had in World War One,
the equipment that they had wasn't enough to snuff, and
I think it just sort of slowly built in everyone's
minds that like, all right, this is something we need
to officially address. Where we're not trained up, we don't
know what we're really doing, and so we got to
correct that because this is a big problem moving forward.
(14:20):
And in nineteen forty Winston Churchill said, we owe it
to these brave men to provide them with the very
best technical equipment. So equipment and training was really the
way forward, especially after Germany's blitz happened over the period
of you know, about a year or two, because there
were a lot of bombs dropped, and like you said,
(14:41):
you know a lot. I mean, I don't know if
we have an exact percentage of I guess it depends
on the war. But even today, like some of the
more recent wars, I've saw numbers like twenty thirty percent
of bombstone even go off. So those things are just
laying around waiting for you know, Unfortunately, sometimes some some
kid or any innocent person to just stumble upon it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah, and I saw something I can't remember, I send
it to you, So maybe you'll remember either hundreds of
thousands of tons or millions of tons of munitions were
dropped in Europe.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Okay, well it was one of those. It was just
a mind boggling amount. So if you think of twenty
or thirty percent of that, like that's they're still there.
They're still in Europe. Like those bombs, if they didn't
go off, they would plant themselves sixty feet underground, waiting
for some guy who like later was going to build
a sports arena on the site to find it and
(15:37):
hope that he didn't accidentally blow it up with his
earth mover. Like that's a I don't know how common
it is, but it's a frequent occurrence in Europe.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Still, Yeah, absolutely, As they got better at disabling these bombs,
of course that that race starts again the pendulum of development.
That great band takes the stage and Germany is like, well,
here's what we'll do. Then we're going to start implementing
things that will kill somebody trying to dismantle it. An
(16:05):
anti handling device. They had all different kinds, but you know,
basically most of them were just you know, if you
mess with the fuse or if you mess with the wiring,
like if you were trying to extract something to keep
it from going boom, that would make it go boom.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Right, And so yeah, I just want to like punctuate
that these anti handling devices were booby traps specifically designed
to blow up the very people whose job we're talking
about today. Yeah, that was the whole thing. That was
the point of it. And for people walking around like
me who just have always thought of fuses as that
long wick that goes to like a shiny black round bomb,
(16:45):
there are basically anything that sets off the detonator or
the thing that blows up the detonator that's a fuse.
It can be everything from something magnetic, it can be barometric,
can be like a gyroscope, so if the bomb is
tipped over, it blows up. Anything that you can use
(17:08):
to to that detects a change in the environment, a timer.
It can also be a radio, something as simple as
a garage shore opener. All those are fuses. It's not
just like there's a wick that'slit. It's anything that can
blow the thing up that triggers the explosion.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, so they started working hard again to try and
counteract this by developing, you know, new methods, new techniques
to not only diffuse bombs, but you know, figure out
what was sometimes literally making them tick, drilling holes in them,
and time bombs. They started listening to them with stethoscopes
(17:47):
so you could hear if it had a clock, and
if it did have a clock, see if there was
some sort of mechanism called a clock stopper, like it's
basically a steel collar, battery power thing, to see if
that thing's firing, to see if they, you know, had
any anti withdrawal devices. Thank you Germans. Boiling water. They
(18:09):
started using water and steam early on to render either
the powder useless or as we'll see now, like just
like flooding a thing with a lot of water very
quickly can sometimes work as well.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah, and that also didn't quite make sense to me
at first until I realized that bombs also are made up.
There's a really like the explosive part that makes the
big boom, but there's also frequently a slightly smaller explosive
that makes the big boom go off. The thing that
booms really hugely, they're usually really kind of hard to detonate,
(18:45):
so you can do things like pour water on the
whole thing, and you're you're not necessarily trying to keep
the big bomb from going off. You're trying to disable
that either explosive charge or the fuse or whatever that's
gonna make that bigger bomb go off. It's kind of
hard to jiggling around a bomb to make like say
the plastic explosives or something like that go off. It's
(19:06):
way easier to make the black powder get triggered. That's
what you're trying to disable most of the time when
you're messing with the bomb. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Absolutely, I mean, we talked about that a lot in
our episodes on nuclear bombs and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
You said we did one on IEDs. Is that right?
I genuinely don't remember that.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Oh yeah, eleven years ago.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Wow, I'm glad you remember. Oh, just we're talking about
previous episodes. I think we should take a second here, Chuck,
to correct ourselves. I don't know if you saw some
of the emails come in, but we released our Genghis
Khan episode as a Saturday select. I think I chose
it ye this past Saturday, And apparently in it we
(19:48):
say that when Genghis Khan was running around, there were
seven billion people on the planet and three billion of
them were Mongols, and that is that could not be
further from the truth. Apparently we didn't hit one billion
until the nineteenth century, and we're at seven billion now.
So we were so off that it doesn't even make
sense what we were saying. And I can't believe we
(20:10):
got it that wrong, but apparently we did. So sorry
to everybody who's like, I can never listen to Josh
and Chuck again. After that, you said, I guess you
wouldn't be listening right now.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
You kept saying we did we both say that in unison.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Hey man, if one of us said it and the
other one didn't correct it. We're both guilty.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Oh okay, all right, well we're guilty of not taking
an ad break. So we'll do that right now and
beg forgiveness when we come back right after this. All right,
(20:59):
So flash forward again. You know, the sort of technology
of defeating bomb seems to rise and fall with lots
of bombings happening, of course, and that happened between nineteen
sixty nine and really up into kind of the mid
two thousands with the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.
(21:20):
During that time, twenty three different specialists were killed in
action from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, and ordnance is
just sort of a fancy name for any kind of artillery.
But you'll hear, you know, like unexploded ordnance and stuff
like that a lot. And that's like a bomb that
didn't go off.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, And so the troubles in Northern Ireland were a
huge impetus for new bomb disposal technology. Simultaneously, bomb disposal
techs who had fought in Vietnam were sorry to come
back to the United States too, So there are two
(21:59):
different things that were pushing bomb disposal technology at about
the same time in both the UK and America. And
what's interesting is this is the second time that it happened.
Third time actually, remember there were there was the Irish
Republicans in the nineteenth century, followed closely by the anarchists
in New York. There was the Vets returning from Vietnam,
(22:19):
and in the UK dealing with the troubles of Northern Ireland.
And then in World War Two there was the there
was Churchill's push to train veterans or servicemen in World
War Two, and at the same time, the US Navy
was learning to defuse SA minds at the same time.
So it's just strange to me that the US and
the UK have run in paralleled so many different times.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, totally so. Prior to seventy two, it was basically
using your hands like a human being dismantling a bomb
with their fingies. After that, because of you know, the
new threats coming from all the bombs from the troubles,
they started saying like, hey, maybe, and the idea very
(23:04):
much now is to try and do everything as far
away from the bomb as possible, including the actual technician
obviously getting the people out of there. But they did
this by developing a bunch of new tools, one of
which is called the pig stick. I was a minute
in nineteen seventy one, and this is one of those
that sends a water jet, a really powerful water jet,
(23:27):
to try and just interrupt the circuitry and disable it.
And they're still used to this day.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, I saw one of these go off. It also
took me a minute to figure out why they call
it a pigstick, and then I remembered Anton Sugar in
No Country for Old Men. It's essentially they're kind of
saying it's the same thing as that. It's a charge
that shoots water so forcefully that I saw it slowed
down to twenty percent and it still happened too fast
to see. Yeah, Like it's so quick that it will
(23:57):
disrupt the bomb before the bomb knows what hit it, right,
So any fuse or firing mechanism or anything like that,
it's just going to get separated before it can trigger
the bomb. And the fact that it's water means that
it's not going to let the it's not going to
accidentally light any say like incendiary trigger inside. So it's
(24:18):
pretty ingenious. And the fact that they were using this
all the way back in the early mid seventies is
pretty impressive, and because it was just so effective, like
you said, like, it's still pretty much standard around the
world today.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah, for sure, they're not very effective for car bombs obviously,
so more and more car bombs started to be used.
Like again, once something is sort of figured out and
you figure out a better way to defeat it, the
enemy morphs, and so car bombs became sort of and
are still just a big problem worldwide because car bombs
(24:52):
are mobile obviously, and they're huge, Like you can have
a two hundred to three hundred pound bomb hidden in
a that's not very big without even seeing it. So
of course they had to develop even newer technology and
we all knew it was going to go this way.
But eventually robots would come onto the scene.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
I'm impressed you didn't say robots. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
That's Hodgman Steele.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
So yeah, one of the technologies that came out of
that is the early prototypes or proto robots used today
were called wheelbarrows. I think the first one was made
out of a lawnmower motor and essentially you could put
say something like a pigstick and then maybe a video
camera on there and go approach a car, and some
(25:40):
of the ones that came later you could use this
robot to hook toe ropes up to move the car
out of the area to someplace safer to blow it up.
And I think something like four hundred wheelbarrows were destroyed
just between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy eight, now,
which gives you an idea. That's six years. That's just
(26:00):
the ones that were destroyed. That's how many bombs were
laid around Northern Ireland, but also in Europe and England
to somewhat lesser extent during that period, during the Troubles
which ran all the way to ninety eight, I think
there was a lot of bombs going off around there
at the time. So the more bombs there were, the
(26:20):
more quickly they had to develop these techniques to counter
bomb measures too. That's what was going on. It was
just a huge laboratory and pressure cooker at the same time.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, to be fair, I think the purpose mostly for
the wheelbarrow was to blow it up, So I don't
think there were a ton of wheelbarrows that made it
out alive, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Oh, okay, all right, Still four hundred there is a
lot of bombs in six years.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Oh totally. There was a well, I guess we should
just sort of give the general breakdown of how this
might work back then, and it's not too dissimilar from
how it works now. But you would initially, you know,
get the call that there's a suspected device to this,
this team or the specialists, they would the first thing
they do is clear the area. They try to get people,
(27:05):
you know, they figure out what they think might be
the blast zone, get as many people as far away
from that area as possible, and then you get that
robot out. If the robot can't do the job, then
you have to get a person in a bomb suit
in there. We'll talk about bomb suits a little bit
more later. And then they go in and they explode
(27:27):
this thing if it's real.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Right, Yeah, that's another thing. Kyle found this BBC documentary
on the bomb squads working in Northern Ireland at the
time from nineteen seventy four and everything has a real
clockwork orange look to it still, but they find a hoax.
But at the end of it they're working on like
(27:50):
a real live bomb and they just have the audio
of the guy who you know, is now inside this
building trying to figure out what kind of bomb they're
dealing with, and you just hear his breath and it
just gets like more and more quickened and like like
it sounds not quite like he's going to hyperventilate, but
he's breathing way harder than the normal average person does.
(28:12):
And it's really just kind of stirring at the end there,
Especially for a fifty year old hour long BBC documentary.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
You should see the hurt Locker then. Okay, that that
turns you on.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
I don't know if it turned me on, it is
the right way to put it, but yees I definitely
noticed it.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah, it's an anxiety inducing film for sure. It's very
very tense as you would imagine.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Okay, I'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Sure you don't have to, man.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I mean, are you one of the financiers of the.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Movie or you know, just suggesting very related to this topic,
you know?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (28:44):
So IEDs again, we did a full episode on these
about eleven years ago, so we don't need to really
go through what all those are. But they are improvised
explosive devices. And the scary thing about IEDs, like this
is what you had in the boss of marathon bombing
is is like it could be almost anything, like a
pressure cooker, a pipe bomb, could be you know, something
(29:07):
just sitting in a backpack on the corner. So those
are that's you know, incredibly frightening to face that kind
of reality.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yes, so yeah, so that's something that say, like a
public safety bomb disposal tech would be more likely to
deal with, rather than say like a military grade bomb
being left somewhere. That would probably be more like a
military person that was dealing with that. But I also
saw one other thing that people in public safety have
(29:35):
to deal with are illegal fireworks. I didn't even know
there was such a thing as illegal fireworks.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Did you You mean, like the firework itself is illegal
in a legal state.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
I think the impression is that they're homemade, okay, or
they're so powerful that they're not legal.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, yeah, I've heard that. I think as a kid,
we all heard rumors of like in one hundreds and
in one twenties, it probably didn't even.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Exist, right, A black cat. The size of your forearm.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Also on those IEDs, especially in the case of Boston
that video we saw. You know, one thing you don't
think about is when you find out that there is
like a bomb, you know, or a tip that there's
a bomb somewhere, and you clear out an area, like
a lot of things can look like a bomb at
that point, because he was like, you know, people drop
(30:28):
their backpack, they get out of there there, you know,
all of a sudden, there's a lot of things laying around,
or it could be like the mailbox, you know, so
they have to check out like everything.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, I noted that too. That was pretty interesting. Another
thing that they'll do is they'll pre sweep areas, say
like there's a political rally or something like that, you
can pretty much bet that there's a bomb squad that
moved through the area already and swept it for bombs. Also,
one of the other big jobs that they have, Chuck,
is they will identify like evidence of bombs. They'll help
(31:02):
people gather evidence. They'll be like, that's a part of
a bomb, that's part of bomb. And the more that
they can collect, the more information they can take back
to the lab and figure out about the bomb, the
bomb maker, the country that it came from. And the
more they can do that, the more they can learn
to counter them as well.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yeah, for sure, you know I mentioned that in the seventies,
kind of the protocol of how you would go about
this on the scene basically being the same today. Like
some of the only differences today is like they have
X rays now, so yeah, you know, just like in
the doctor's office, they'll go and put a plate behind
the bomb and take an X ray of it. And
(31:41):
that has been a real game changer in being able
to look inside this thing safely and see what's going on.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And the other thing too that the guy in the
video really wanted to drive home is they want to
spend as less as little time around that bomb as possible.
So like if you're going in, you don't want to
go in with a couple of things and be like, oh,
let me go back and get this now and try this.
Like they want to go in there one time and
have everything at their disposal on hand to assess and
(32:10):
evaluate and decide how they're going to disrupt this thing.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah, but as it stands, because you almost exclusively across
the board, every bomb disposal unit's going to take an
X ray first, you have to put a person in
danger at least at some point. Ideally after they take
the X ray, they get the heck out of there,
and then they never go back again. It's the robot
(32:34):
that's sent in, the wheelbearer or whatever to handle the
whole thing with, say like some sort of disruptor, like
a pigstick or something. Right, But if, like you said,
the robot can't get to it, it's up the stairs,
it's over some weird debris, it's just in a place
where the robot can't get to it, that person's going
to have to go back in and deal with this directly.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, and like this is frightening when you think about,
like you have to go in to get that X ray.
And two out of the three methods for a bomb
potentially going off are threats to you at that moment.
If it's a time bomb and you have some bad
luck with your timing, you could be exploded. If it's
(33:17):
a remote controlled bomb, you could very easily be exploded.
The only one that you're I guess, relatively safe from
if you're doing your job really, really carefully, is victim
initiated or like a booby trap or something. So you
know you're not gonna want to disturb it. Basically, you're
gonna want to be really really careful when you're laying
(33:38):
when you're doing that X ray.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah for sure. All right, Chuck, I say we come
back and we talk about some of the technology that
these very brave people are using when they do this crazy,
crazy stuff. Let's do it, all right, man. So, as
(34:10):
we promised, we're going to talk about some of the
technology that bomb disposal technicians use. We already talked about
the robot and we mentioned the bomb suit a little bit,
but I think you can go into it a little
more because they're fairly complex.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, absolutely, and uncomfortable. There are variations. You know, they'll
gauge what kind of level of suit you need, like
lighter versus heavier. But if you've got on the full
heaviest kevlar plated collar, protected, helmet visor wearing suit, it
(34:46):
is clunky. You do have use of your Fingi's so like,
you know, I think if you're a one of these
kind of specialists, one thing you're going to have to
really consider is that you may at some point be
living your life without or hands right at the very least.
But they are fairly effective. I mean they're pretty clunky,
(35:09):
but like the heat is the biggest problem, especially you know,
you know, when you're disrupting a bomb, let's say in
the Middle East in the middle of summer or something
like that, they don't last long in those So the
very latest technology has actual cooling units. They all used
to have fans, but now they have actually coolant that
says they can withstand like any amount of heat for
(35:32):
an hour.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
And I don't think they want to be in there
for more than an hour anyway, So hopefully that's helped
a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah. One thing that I saw that a lot of
them don't have, though, is like communication equipment, because you
usually use radio and you can accidentally set off a
bomb that's radio controlled, so they often don't have any
sort of calm equipment in there. I also saw, and
I don't know this is not from a legitimate source
(35:59):
or vetted source. How about that it's either on Core
or Reddit. No offense to either of those sites, but
where somebody who presented themselves as a bomb technician essentially
said if you're yes, if you're dealing with a pipe bomb,
maybe illegal fireworks something like that, you're probably gonna wear
a bomb suit if you have to diffuse it yourself.
(36:21):
Not a robot, but at bomb bomb, you probably aren't
going to go to the trouble of wearing a suit
because that bomb will kill you if it goes off,
whether you're wearing a suit or not. And those suits
are definitely made to protect your against shrapnel. Projectiles. A
lot of them are literally bulletproof because they're they're so
(36:42):
tough and made of such thick kevlar and ceramic plates
and all that. But the overblast, the shockwave that's produced
is what can It can give you crushing injuries just
from hitting you that hard if you're very close to
a blast radius. So putting all that together, I couldn't help.
But wonder if they were if they were correct, or
(37:05):
if they were just talking jive.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Well, there is something called blast long. It's very common injury,
and it's basically, you know, like you said, getting just
smashed in the chest with an invisible, you know, wrecking ball.
So it's an internal injury. But that's one of the
most common and those suits, you know, they obviously stop
projectiles and stuff, but they also decreased that blast wave impact.
(37:30):
It's you know, they're made to do that. So I
would be surprised if the just sort of the rules
around it were like, yeah, he's just not gonna wear
it today.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
That was my take too, It's like, are you are
you really allowed to just say that yourself. But also
I wonder if they're in such short supply that it's
like do whatever you want. Man, Like, just hats off
to you for even trying this. They're expensive, Yeah, they're
like thirty five grand, but I stopped and thought about it.
That's because probably it's local and federal governments buying them,
(38:05):
so I'm sure they're marked.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Up, you know, yeah, you probably make one of those
for a couple hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
I bet sure. I also saw some of them have
spinal protection, so that if you're blown back by the
blast wind, the actual wind that's pushed out from the blast,
and you land on your spine, you're not automatically going
to get a spinal injury.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Oh that's that's cool, because that guy in the video
kind of indicated that the back was the least protected.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
I saw that. But this is on a site for
a manufacture of actual blast suits bombs.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Did you ever think they're just trying to sell you suit? Josh,
Come on, come on, naive.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Yeah, it was a little kind of hokey. It looked
like it was like a drawing of a tuxedo on
the front of it.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah. So the other, you know, piece of technology we
talked a little bit about is the it was called
the disruptor. Those pigsticks or disruptors. There are all kinds
of disruptors, from things that use you know, sound to water,
that that bottler thing. You know, I tried to understand
what he was talking about in that video, but I
was a little little confused.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
So essentially, which one the bottler? Yeah, so it's the
same thing as the others, except the pig stick and
the other one that shoots everything in like a v wedge.
It's it's not it's not like a hyper located on
a certain area. Okay, it blows out in a circle.
It's multidirectional. Again, the same key is it's spreading water
(39:35):
and it blows up so fast that it can disable
the trigger before it can fire. All. It's that's what
disruptors do essentially.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Okay. Uh, there's also you know, they're they're bomb carriers
that just sit on the back of a pickup truck.
You know, they're bolted to a pickup truck or pumby
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Or a cyber truck.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, oh god, I saw one in the wild the
other day for the first time.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Oh yeah, what'd you think. I was just like, it's
just the.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Dumbest looking thing to drive around in that I've ever
seen in my life. That's what I thought.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah, I mean I get that a lot of people do.
There's a subreddit called cyber stuck, and the whole thing
is just totally dedicated to making fun of people who
drive cyber trucks and all of the woes that they
have from driving a cyber truck.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
It's pretty finny if you've got one.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
I'm not trying to yuck or you. Everyone has different tastes,
but let's just say it's not my taste.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Yeah, I think that was well aesthetically. So these bomb carriers,
like I said, you know, it's kind of just a big, like,
you know, heavy chamber to put a bomb in to
carry it somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yes, And like I think they can. I've seen that
some of them can hold up to ten kilograms of
TNT the equivalent of that, right, Yeah, so like you
could blow up you could put twenty something pounds of
dynamite in this thing and blow it up, and the
thing will be like that's all you got. It'll like
get belched or something like that. It's just amazing that
we can make something that can can that kind of
(41:01):
violent force. Yeah, for sure, I'm just impressed by those things.
One other thing that I saw that it really stuck
out to me is like you would think that that
bomb disposal experts are paid like basketball stars and they
are not. Like the average bomb tech makes about fifty
thousand dollars a year in the UK or the US.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Oh yeah, that's wrong.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, okay, I just wanted to go on record as
saying that I support bomb techts being paid through the roof.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Oh yeah, I mean it's just another example of job
you do. Does it necessarily equate to money you make?
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
You know, as far as the fairness scale goes, yeap,
So unexploded ordinances. I keep saying ordinances, ordinance without any right.
It's hard to say that right for me. But like
we said, those are bombs from past wars that have
not gone off. I think you already mentioned that World
War Two has a lot of these still scattered across Europe.
(42:03):
And these are really dangerous because you know, these things
degrade over time in every way you can imagine, from
the fuses to the primers to you know, parts resting
out and stuff like that. So it's you know, it's
literally sometimes a bomb just waiting to go off, and
you never know when that might be.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Right, and this happens, I mean sometimes it goes off
and kills people, as recently is two thy ten, twenty
twenty three. I think in that twenty ten incident it
was in Germany. Three three bomb techs were killed in
that explosion. Yeah, and again this is World War two ordinance.
Like imagine being a pilot who drops a bomb, it
(42:44):
doesn't go off, You go home, you return from the war,
you buy a house in the suburbs, you have a
pick of fence, a family, you grow old, you die,
and then thirty years after that, after you're buried, somebody
comes along and that bomb you drop blows up and
kills them completely outside the context of war. That happens
in Europe.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Yeah, that happens all over the world.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Yes, for sure, that's well put.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Because you know, more recently in the nineteen seventies with
the wars in Indo China, I think Kyle found the
stat two million tons of munitions were dropped between sixty
four and seventy three, and of the two hundred and
seventy million cluster bombs dropped, thirty percent may have failed
to detonate. That's over eighty million cluster bombs potentially still
(43:32):
scattered about that area.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, and that's not including all the land mines that
were purposely laid and not cleared too, man, unbelievable. Yeah,
and kids get killed by that, the kids in I Rack.
I saw between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two, five
hundred and nineteen kids were either killed or injured in
a rock from unexploded ordinance. And then the United States
(43:54):
has its own stockpole problems too. I saw that we
dumped millions of pounds of bombs when when the stockpiles
got too big they were, and the stuff was getting old,
they just dumped it off the coast in the east
and the west.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
That's just how can that be allowed?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
It was, well, it was stopped being allowed in nineteen seventy.
But it's not like they went back and got every
fished everything out, which is funny because it does get
fished out once in a while in a fishing net
and apparently Lake Erie had Camp Perry, which was a
proving ground from munitions, and just like in war when
you're shooting off a bunch of munitions to test them,
some of them aren't going to aren't going to blow up,
(44:36):
right then, So apparently Lake Erie is littered with unexploded
ordnance as well.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
That we talked about. When wasn't it a nuclear bomb
off the coast of Savannah, right?
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah? From I think the early fifties, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Did they find that thing recently? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (44:53):
I think they did, and they were like, it's too
it's too dangerous to move. We're just gonna cross our
fingers if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, I couldn't remember because I feel like we got
email because we talked about that a long time ago.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, they made the they made the call that it's
really just Tybee Island that's in danger in there, like
Tybee Island.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
That's so mean.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Okay, since I just made fun of Tybee Allen, I'm
just kidding Tybee. Uh, it's time for listener mail. I say, you.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Know who loves Tybee jas Jerry does.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
She's a Tybee person and she's.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Not here today, so she'll hear this when she uh,
or maybe she won't, who.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Knows, No, she'll be doing something else.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
All right, So you said listener mail, right, Yeah I did.
I'm gonna call this. I have to do it. Friend.
I'm sorry, but I have to do this Minecraft correction.
Oh yeah, because the emails. And this is one where
I just tried and tried and tried to tell you
that that wasn't right, and you stuck to your guns.
Hey sure, Hey, guys, been listening for her almost as
(45:57):
long as I played Minecraft a little over a decade.
Josh repeated the point that there is one seed per
game copy, but Minecraft has more to offer than you think.
You can make as many worlds as you want concurrently,
and even pick your seed. It's gotten so popular that
entire websites are dedicated to seed sharing. That sounds gross.
If someone finds an interesting seed with something like an
(46:18):
island inside a volcano close to your spawn point, they
will often share the random string of characters that produce
that seed so others can generate that same world. There
was also a sarcastic comment made about kids learning that
the ancient ones built underwater cities. I don't think it
was sarcastic. I think it was clever quip.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Probably sarcastic. It's sardonic. It was sardonic.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Okay, but this is actually true, guys. Tons of ancient
settlements in real life are currently under the water because
the coastline changes over time, we tend to build near
bodies of water.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Absolutely true on both counts. Thank you and for day
that is Nathan, Nathan, that was great. That's pretty awesome.
You've been listening to us about as long as you've
been playing mine. That is high praise as we take it.
And thank you for so gently correcting me even though
I got it so wrong long.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
That's okay.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
If you want to be like Nathan and gently correct us,
we're always up for that. You can send it via
email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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