How Bomb Disposal Works
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kaboom Clark, and there's Chuck Bryant. And Jerry's not here. She's a dud. And this is Stuff You Should Know about bomb disposal.

That's right. And specifically a dud, meaning a thing that doesn't go off, right? Yeah. A dud. Yeah. Like when you're a kid playing with fireworks and you light one, throw it at your friend, nothing happens, and you start crying because it's a dud. You're like, I don't have two cents to waste, black cat. Give me my two cents back. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, when you're a kid, two cents mattered back in the 80s. That's true. You could put that together with three other cents and buy yourself a stick of butter. Throw it at your friend. So we should shout out, speaking of friends, our newish writer, Kyle Hoekstra, who's writing for us from the UK, makes us an international podcast of mystery.

And he helped 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 a little while. And I finally pulled the trigger mechanism on it. Oh, wow. You're on a roll today. I guess so. That's one way to put it. Had you just seen The Hurt Locker or something? I've never seen The Hurt Locker.

Really? Yeah. You should check it out. It's a great movie. 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.

Oh, wow. He liked terrible war movies. No, are you crazy? That's one of the best war movies of all time. Oh, okay. You don't like Uncommon Valor? I mean, I liked it as a kid in the 80s, but I mean, it was very much that. I don't think it's regarded as one of the great war movies. You don't think it'd hold up now, huh?

Well, I mean, I think it would hold up as an 80s war movie. I mean, who was the guy in it? Gene Hackman. Randall Tex Cobb. He was. Patrick Swayze. Yeah. Okay. Great movie. It was a great movie. So, yes. But no, I haven't seen Hurt Locker. 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 accurate as what they do is. Is that correct? 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 a heck of a movie. So I'm in her corner no matter what. What else has she made besides Zero Dark Thirty?

Well, she did movies. I mean, those two were kind of later in her career as far as like big time recognition. But 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. That's the trilogy. Near Dark, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty. Yeah. Vampires, Bombs, and Osama Bin Laden.

So, okay. So we're talking about people who go near bombs, unexploded bombs, and try to disable them.

try to defuse 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 or real estate around and blow them up in a much safer manner. They walk up to bombs that have not yet detonated 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.

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 Boston.

the USA and other places too. So you 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 blow up when they're supposed to and then defeating bombs from blowing up and then new technology and then new anti-bomb technology. It's just sort of back and forth. What's horrific is that when new bomb technology comes out, like they don't know until after somebody's died, essentially. That's often the case. At least the bomb's gone off. Right. But often it's like if it's, say, like it's booby-trapped, a new kind of booby-trap,

That probably 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. Yeah. And since I mentioned that, we got to throw Kyle some love because he inadvertently came up with his first band name for the show. 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. Sure. What kind of music?

I mean, that's got to be some sort of like emo, right? I guess. I could also see like trance or drone or something. Yeah, I could too. You're better at that than me. I should ask you. That's not true. That's not true, Chuck. Well, I feel like we each have our part. I generally recognize the band names and you're always spot on at nailing the kind of music that it would be. All right. Well, let's move on. We'll both take the compliment. How about that? All right. Well, should we cover some of the history, I guess?

Yeah. What was really surprising to me is that bomb disposal really started back in England in the 19th century. Yeah. You know, the Victorian era, I think the 1870s really was when it started to take off. One of the reasons why is that Ireland was trying to gain independence from Great Britain. And one of the ways they did that was through bombing campaigns, right?

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 bombs make an appearance, that 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 nitroglycerin.

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 kind of pendulum of development you were mentioning. Yeah. So dynamite comes along. It's a big sort of leap forward in bombing technology. Right. Yeah. And the first person to kind of pioneer this inspection routine was a guy named Vivian Durang Majindi.

Uh, who there was, uh, what was the, uh, the, the Finney and dynamite campaign was kind of the first, um, 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, that, you know, anti dynamite campaign.

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 Majendi was doing.

It was really low-hanging fruit because it was such a new field. He would walk into the room and be like, yep, that's dynamite. 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 anything.

dealing with bombs to anyone else below him. Like he took on the actual handling and attempts to defuse bombs by himself. And he was celebrated for that for sure. Yeah, absolutely. He was the first head of the explosives department

that they set up over there in 1875. That would later become the Forensic Explosives Laboratory, which basically any kind of explosive activity, like literally explosive activity, not like a Beatles concert or something like that, in Great Britain is run through the Forensics Explosives Laboratory. Right.

Yes. So this is going on in the, you know, third or fourth quarter of the 19th 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.

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 1902 under the leadership of a guy named Giuseppe Petrosino.

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 1914 in the NYPD. And it was basically the revived Italian squad under Petrosino. I can see Reddit now, my friend.

What's up with Josh doing Italian names now after 16 years? You can take it. Oh, no, no, no. What you don't do is go back and redo an Italian accent. So take it. I think you can under the right circumstances. And the circumstances are these. Do that Italian accent as...

Christopher Walken doing Sammy Davis Jr. doing the Italian accent. My brain just broke. All right. So we're in 1914 with the Anarchist and Bomb Squad. It's kind of a clunky name. I guess the A-A-B-S. Yeah, or A-B-S. Well, they threw that and in there. It's just sort of strange. Abs are made in the kitchen was their slogan.

So they uncovered a plot to blow up St. Patrick's 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 kind of 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 extinguished the fuse. Yeah. During mass. Yeah. They went ahead and let the bombers light the fuse. I mean, I guess that's the only way to know who the guys were, right?

Yeah, I guess. But yeah, that was, I mean, that was gutsy. 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 fuse get lit. No, absolutely. I think you could also just say anybody who starts to crouch down near the fuse, you can go ahead and arrest that guy. 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. Yeah.

So also, remember, we talked about J. Edgar 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 involved.

And they do a lot of training. We saw a really interesting video on Wired, I think, where a FBI bomb technician describes 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 are the world wars. And 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 firecrackers, 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 100 years from now. So it's actually, as we'll see, like a huge problem still. We covered it a lot

tangentially in our landmines episode about how when bombs are, you know, shot off in war, late 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 were

taught themselves essentially how to try to defuse the bombs that were left over from World War I. But it wasn't until World War II that the whole thing started to be formalized, both in the UK and in the US. Yeah, the training that they had in World War I, the equipment that they had wasn't up 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.

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. And in 1940, 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 World War II.

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, 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 20, 30 percent of bombs don't even go off. So I saw things are just laying around waiting for, you know, unfortunately, sometimes some some kid or any innocent person to just stumble upon it. Yeah. And I saw something. I can't remember. I sent it to you. So maybe you'll remember either hundreds of thousands of tons or millions of tons of munitions were dropped in Europe. I don't remember.

Okay, well, it was one of those. It was a mind-boggling amount. So if you think of 20% or 30% 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 60 feet underground waiting for some guy who like later was going to build a sports arena on the site to find it and 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 still. Yeah, absolutely. As they got better at disabling these bombs,

Of course, that race starts again, the pendulum of development. A 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 anti-handling device. They had all different kinds, but basically most of them were just 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.

Right. And so, yeah, I just want to 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.

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. It can be like a gyroscope. So if the bomb is tipped over, it blows up. Anything that you can use that detects a change in the environment, a

a timer, it can also be a radio, something as simple as a garage door opener. All those are fuses. It's not just like there's a wick that's lit. It's anything that can blow the thing up that triggers the explosion.

Yeah, so they started working hard again to try and counteract this by developing new methods, new techniques to not only diffuse bombs, but figure out what was sometimes literally making them tick, drilling holes in them in time bombs. They started listening to them with stethoscopes 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, a battery powered 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 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.

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. So you can do things like pour water on the whole thing, and 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 going to make that bigger bomb go off. It's kind of hard just jiggling around detonating.

a bomb to make like, say the plastic explosives or something like that go off. It's 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, absolutely. I mean, we talked about that a lot in our, our,

episodes on nuclear bombs and stuff like that. You said we did one on IEDs. Is that right? I genuinely don't remember that. Oh, yeah. 11 years ago. Wow. Full episode. I'm glad you remembered. 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 this past Saturday. And apparently in it, we say that when Genghis Khan was running around, there were 7 billion people on the planet and 3 billion of them were Mongols.

And that could not be farther from the truth. Apparently, we didn't hit one billion until the 19th 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 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 we a lot. I guess you wouldn't be listening right now. You kept saying we. Did we both say that in unison? Yeah.

Hey, man, if one of us said it and the other one didn't correct it, we're both guilty. 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. Thank you.

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Visit your local branch or check out the Chase mobile app today. J.P. Morgan Wealth Management offers investment products and services through J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, member FINRA SIPC. All right. So flash forward again. You know, the the sort of technology of defeating bombs seems to rise and fall with lots of bombings happening, of course.

And that happened between 1969 and really up into kind of the mid-2000s with the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. During that time, 23 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.

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 starting to come back to the United States too. So there were two 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 was the Irish Republicans in the 19th century followed closely by the anarchists in New York.

There was the vets returning from Vietnam and the UK dealing with the troubles of Northern Ireland. And then in World War II, there was Churchill's push to train veterans or servicemen in World War II. And at the same time, the U.S. Navy was learning to defuse sea mines at the same time. So it's just fascinating.

strange to me that the U.S. and the U.K. have run in parallel so many different times. Yeah, totally. So prior to 72, it was basically using your hands, like a human being dismantling a bomb with their fingies. After that, because of the new threats coming from all the bomb's

from the troubles, they started saying like, hey, maybe, and the idea very 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,

It was invented in 1971. And this is one of those that sends a water jet, a really powerful water jet, to try and just interrupt the circuitry and disable it. And they're still used to this day.

Yeah, I saw one of these go off. It also took me a minute to figure out why they call it a pig stick. 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 20% and it still happened too fast to see. Like it's so quick.

that it will 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 pretty ingenious. And the fact that they were using this all the way back in the early mid-70s is pretty impressive. And because it was just so effective, like you said, like it's still pretty much standard around the world today. 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...

and are still just a big problem worldwide because car bombs are mobile, obviously, and they're huge. Like you can have a 200 to 300-pound bomb hidden in a car 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. I'm impressed you didn't say robots.

Thank you. That's Hodgman's deal. 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 pig stick and then maybe a video camera on there and go approach a car. And some of the ones that came later, you could use this robot to hook tow ropes up to move the car out of the area to someplace safer to blow it up. And I think something like 400 wheelbarrows were destroyed just between 1972 and 1978, which gives you an idea that's six years.

That's just 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 98, I think. There was a lot of bombs going off around there at the time. So the more bombs there were, the 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. 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? Oh, okay. All right. Still, 400 is a lot of bombs in six years. 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 team or these specialists. They would, the first thing they do is clear the area. They try to get people, you know, they figure out what they think might be the blast zone, get as many people as far away from, you know, 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 this thing, if it's real. Right. Yeah, that's another thing. Kyle found this BBC article.

documentary on the bomb squads working in Northern Ireland at the time from 1974. 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 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. Yeah.

And it just gets like more and more quickened. And like, like it sounds not quite like he's going to hyperventilate, but he is breathing way harder than the normal average person does. And it's really just kind of stirring at the end there, especially for a 50 year old person.

hour-long BBC documentary. You should see The Hurt Locker then. Okay. If that turned you on. I don't know if turned me on is the right way to put it, but yes, I definitely noticed it. Yeah, it's an anxiety-inducing film for sure. It's very, very tense, as you would imagine. Okay. I'll check it out, sure. You don't have to, man. I mean, are you one of the financiers of the movie? You know, just suggesting. It's very related to this topic, you know. Sure.

So IEDs, again, we did a full episode on these about 11 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 Boston Marathon bombing, is like it could be almost anything, like a pressure cooker, a pipe bomb. It could be, you know, something just sitting in a backpack on the corner. So those are – that's, you know, incredibly frightening to face that kind of reality. Yeah.

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 to deal with are illegal fireworks. I didn't even know there was such a thing as illegal fireworks. Did you?

Uh, you mean like the firework itself is illegal in a legal state? I think the impression is that they're homemade. Oh, okay. Or they're so powerful that they're not legal. Yeah, yeah, I've heard that. I think as a kid we all heard rumors of like M100s and M120s that probably didn't even exist. Right, a black cat the size of your forearm. Yeah.

Also on those IEDs, especially in the case of Boston, that video we saw, one thing you don't think about is when you find out that there is 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 their backpack, they get out of there. They're, 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.

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 is 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 people.

like evidence of bombs. They'll help people gather evidence. They'll be like, that's a part of a bomb. That's part of a 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, um,

And the more they can do that, the more they can learn to counter them as well. Yeah, for sure. You know, I mentioned that in the 70s, 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, 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 that has been a real game changer in being able to look inside this thing safely and see what's going on. And the other thing, too, that the guy in the video really wanted to drive home is they want to spend 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 evaluate and decide how they're going to disrupt this thing. Yeah. But as it stands, because you almost exclusively across the board, every bomb disposal unit is going to take an X-ray first. Right.

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 that's sent in, the wheelbarrow or whatever, to handle the whole thing with, say, like some sort of disruptor, like a pig stick 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. Right.

Yeah, and like this is frightening when you think about like you have to go in to get that X-ray and

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 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. Right. So, you know, you're not going to want to disturb it, basically. You're going to want to be really, really careful when you're doing that X-ray. 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. Let's do it.

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All right, man. So as we promised, we are 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 we can go into it a little more because they're fairly complex.

Yeah, absolutely. And uncomfortable. There are variations, you know, they'll, 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 suit,

collar-protected helmet visor-wearing suit. It is clunky. You do have use of your fingies. So, like, you know, I think if you're 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 fingers or hands. Right. At the very least. Right. But they are fairly effective. I mean...

They're pretty clunky, but the heat is the biggest problem, especially 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 fans.

that says they can withstand like any amount of heat for an hour. Wow. And I don't think they want to be in there for more than an hour anyway, so hopefully that's helped a lot. 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 comm equipment in there. Yeah.

I also saw, and I don't know, this is not from a legitimate source or a vetted source. How about that? It was either on Quora or Reddit. No offense to either of those sites, but where somebody who presented himself 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 going to wear a bomb suit if you have to diffuse it yourself, not a robot. But at BombBomb.com,

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 you against shrapnel projectiles. A lot of them are

literally bulletproof because they're so 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 correct or if they were just talking jive.

Well, there is something called blast lung. It's a 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 decrease that blast wave impact. 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 going to wear it today. That was my take, too. It's like, 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.

Yeah, they're like $35,000, but I stopped and thought about it. That's because probably it's local and federal governments buying them. So I'm sure they're 200 or 300% marked up, you know? Yeah, you can probably make one of those for a couple hundred bucks, I bet. Sure. Yeah.

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. Oh, that's cool because that guy in the video kind of indicated that the back was the least protected. I saw that. But this is on a site for a manufacturer of actual blast suits, bomb suits. Yeah.

Did you ever think they were just trying to sell you a suit, Josh? Come on. Don't be naive. Yeah. It was a little kind of hokey. It looked like it was like a drawing of a tuxedo on the front of it. Yeah. So the other piece of technology we talked a little bit about is the – it was called a disruptor. Those pig sticks are disruptors. There are all kinds of disruptors from things that use sound to water, electricity.

That bottler thing, you know, I tried to understand what he was talking about in that video, but I was a little confused. 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 not...

It's not like a hyper located on a certain area. Oh, okay. It blows out in a circle. It's multidirectional. Again, the same key is it's spreading water and it blows up so fast that it can disable the trigger before it can fire. That's what disruptors do essentially. Okay. There's also, you know, there are bomb carriers that just sit on the back of a pickup truck. You know, they're bolted to a pickup truck or a Humvee or whatever. Or a cyber truck.

Yeah. Oh, God. I saw one in the wild the other day for the first time. Oh, yeah? What did you think? I was just like, that's just the dumbest looking thing to drive around in that I've ever seen in my life. That's what I thought.

Yeah. I mean, I get that. A lot of people do. There's a subreddit called Cyberstuck, and the whole thing is just totally dedicated to making fun of people who drive Cybertrucks and all of the woes that they have from driving a Cybertruck. It's pretty funny. Hey, if you've got one, you know, I'm not trying to yuck your yum. Everyone has different tastes, but let's just say it's not my taste. Okay. Yeah, I think that was well put, Chuck. Aesthetically. 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.

Yes. And like, I think they can, I've seen that some of them can hold up to 10 kilograms of TNT, the equivalent of that. Right. Yeah. So like you could blow up, you could put 20 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 it belched or something like that. It's just amazing that we can make something that can contain that kind of violent force. Yeah, for sure. I'm just impressed by those things. Wonderful.

One other thing that I saw that really stuck out to me is, like, you would think that bomb disposal experts are paid like basketball stars, and they are not. Like, the average bomb tech makes about $50,000 a year in the U.K. or the U.S. Oh, yeah. That's wrong. Yeah. Okay. Just wanted to go on record as saying that I support bomb techs being paid through the roof.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just another example of job you do doesn't necessarily equate to money you make. Right. You know, as far as the fairness scale goes. Yeah. So unexploded ordinances. I keep saying ordinance is ordinance without an I. 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 II has a lot of these still scattered across Europe. 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 rusting 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.

Right. And this happens. I mean, sometimes it goes off and kills people. As recently as 2010, 2023, I think, in that 2010 incident 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 doesn't go off. You go home. You return from the war. You buy a house in the suburbs. You have a picket fence, a family. You grow old. You die. And then 30 years after that, after you're buried, somebody comes along and that bomb you drop blows up and kills them completely outside of the context of war. That happens in Europe. Yeah, that happens all over the world. Yes, for sure. That's well put.

Because, you know, more recently in the 1970s with the wars in Indochina, I think Kyle found the stat, 2 million tons of munitions were dropped between 64 and 73. And of the 270 million cluster bombs dropped, 30% may have failed to detonate. That's over 80 million cluster bombs petitioned.

potentially still scattered about that area. Yeah. And that's not including all the landmines that were purposely laid and not cleared too. Man, unbelievable. Yeah. And kids get killed by that. Kids in Iraq, I saw between 2017 and 2022, 519 kids were either killed or injured in Iraq from unexploded ordnance. And then the United States has its own stockpile problems too. Yeah.

I saw that we dumped millions of pounds of bombs when the stockpiles got too big and the stuff was getting old. They just dumped it off the coast in the east and the west. That's just, how can that be allowed? Well, it was stopped being allowed in 1970, 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 is a proving ground for 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 blow up right then. So apparently Lake Erie is littered with unexploded ordnance as well. We talked about the one, wasn't it a nuclear bomb off the coast of Savannah? Right. Yeah. From I think the early 50s. Didn't they, did they find that thing recently? Yeah.

Yeah, I think they did. And they were like, it's too dangerous to move. We're just going to cross our fingers if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I couldn't remember because I feel like we got email because we talked about that a long time ago. Yeah, they made the call that it's really just Tybee Island that's in danger. And they're like, it's Tybee Island. That's so mean. Okay, since I just made fun of Tybee Island, I'm just kidding, Tybee. It's time for listener mail, I say. You know who loves Tybee? Tybee.

Jer's. Jerry does? She's a Tybee person. And she's not here today, so she'll hear this when she, or maybe she won't, who knows? No. She'll be doing something else. All right. So you said listener mail, right? Yeah, I did. I'm going to 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. Sure.

Hey guys, been listening for almost as 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 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 a clever quip, probably. Sarcastic is not the word. It's sardonic. It was sardonic.

Oh, 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. Absolutely true on both counts. Thank you for that. 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 Minecraft. That is high praise as we take it. And thank you for so gently correcting me, even though I got it so wrong, wrong, wrong. That's okay.

If you want to be like Nathan and gently correct us, we're always up for that. You can send it via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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