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How Bomb Disposal Works · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kaboom Clark, and
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: there's Chuck Wow Bryant, and Jerry's not here. She's a
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: dud and this stuff you should know about bomb disposals.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: That's right, and specifically a dud meaning a thing that
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: doesn't go off right.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a dud.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think you're a kid playing with fireworks and
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: you light one through it at your friend. Nothing happens,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: and you start crying because it's a dud.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: You're like, I don't have two cents to waste, black cat,
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: give me my two cents back.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're a kid, two cents matter back in
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: the eighties.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: That's true.
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: You can put that together with three other cents and
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: buy yourself a stick a butter.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Throw it at your friend.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: So we should shout out. Speaking of friends, are Newish
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: writer Kyle Houkstra, who's writing for us from the UK
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: makes us an international podcast of mystery, and he helps
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: us out with this one. It's a pretty interesting topic
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: if you ask me, and I don't remember where I
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: got the idea, but it's been on the list for
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: a little while and I finally pulled the trigger mechanism
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: on it.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: No, wow, you're in a roll today.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: I guess. So that's one way to put it.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Had you just seen the hurt Locker or something.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: I've never seen the hurt Locker. Really, yeah, you check
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: it out.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: It's great movie.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Oh. I know, I've heard nothing but good things. I
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: just have not ever gotten around to seeing it. I'm
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: not crazy about war movies. The last war movie that
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: I saw that I really liked was probably Uncommon Valor.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, see like terrible war movies.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: No, are you crazy, that's one of the best war
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: movies of all time. Oh okay, you don't like an
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: Uncommon Valor?
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: I mean I liked it as a kid in the eighties,
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: But I mean it was very much that I don't
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: think it's regarded as one of the great war movies.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: You don't think it'd hold up now, huh?
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean I think it would hold up as
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: an eighties war movie.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: I mean he was a guy in it, Gene Hackman.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Randall Tech Cobb, he was Patrick Swayze. Yeah, okay, great movie.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: It was a great movie. So yes, But no, I
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: haven't seen hert Locker I from what I understand, it's
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: about as accurate a depiction of how bomb disposal technicians
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: or EOD technicians explosive ordnance disposal technicians, I should say,
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: for those who don't know the lingo, it's about as
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: accurate as is what they do. Is is that correct?
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've never done that job, so I don't know,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: but judging from reading this, it seemed pretty spot on.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: And I know that Catherine Bigelow makes heck of a movie,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: so I'm in her corner no matter what.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: What else does she made besides Zero Dark.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Thirty, Well, she did movies. I mean those two were
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: kind of later in her career as far as like
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: a big time recognition, but she did. You know, she
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: did a movie, a vampire movie called Near Dark back
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: in the day. It was great. Oh yeah, and yeah
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: you should see that one too.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: That's the trilogy Near Dark, the hurt Locker, and Zero
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: Dark thirty.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Vampire's Bombs and Osama bin Laden.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: So okay, so we're talking about people who go near bombs,
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: unexploded bombs, and try to disable them, try to diffuse
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: them so that they can either be taken somewhere and
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: disassembled or they can be safely removed from an area
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: where say there's a lot of people are real estate
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: around and blow them up in a much safer manner.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: They walk up to bombs that have not yet did
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: and they have no idea how or if or when
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: it's going to detonate, and that is their job. That's
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: who we're talking about today.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that can be you know, a military personnel
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: if it's in wartime or whatever, and that can obviously
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: be a civilian bomb squad, because bombs are not only
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: wartime weapons, as we've seen with things like the Boston
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: marathon bombing. That kind of stuff happens on the on
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: the streets of the USA and other places too. So
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: you've got to have cops at work, you got to
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: have military at work, and they have all kinds of
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: cool gear that just gets better and better. One thing
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Kyle points out is that, you know, it's always and
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the history, but it's always
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: been sort of a race of devising bombs that aren't
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: you know, that that blow up when they're supposed to,
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: and then defeeding bombs from blowing up, and then new
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: technology and then new anti bomb technology it's just sort
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: of back and forth.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: What's horrif is that when new bomb technology comes out,
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: like they don't know until after somebody's died. Essentially, that's
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: that's often the case, that's how their bomb's gone off, right,
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: But often it's like if it's if say, like it's
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: booby trapped, a new kind of booby trap, that probably
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: means that they found out the hard way that there's
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: this new style of booby trap. That's the kind of
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: job that these people have.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and since I mentioned that, we've got to throw
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Kyle some love because he inadvertently came up with his
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: first band name for the show mm hmm, because in
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: describing that back and forth of technology and racing against
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: the bomb technology, he called it the pendulum of development.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: And I think it's a pretty good band name.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: Sure what kind of music?
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's got to be some sort of like emo, right.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: I guess I could also see like trance or drone
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: or something.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like it too. Youre better at that than me,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: I should ask you.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: That's not true. That's not true, Chuck.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Well. I feel like we each have our part. I
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: generally recognize the band names, and you're always spot on
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: it nailing the kind of music that it would be.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: All right, well let's move on, we'll both take the
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: compliment out with that.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, should we cover some of the history,
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: I guess yeah.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: What was really surprising to me is that that bomb
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: disposal really started back in England in the nineteenth century,
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: like yeah, you know the Victorian era. I think the
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: eighteen seventies really was when it started to take off.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: One of the reasons why is that Ireland was trying
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: to gain independence from Great Britain and one of the
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: ways they did that was through bombing campaigns. So essentially,
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: as you'll see, like you said, the pendulum of development
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: like situations whether it's war or some sort of struggle
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: or something like that, where bomb's make an appearance, that
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: leads to bomb development, and that leads in turn to
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: bomb disposal development. Right, and so that was I mean,
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: right off the bat, people started adopting this new technology
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: at the time, dynamite, which is a stable form of
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: nitroglycerim into bombs. So now it was up to people
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: who were in charge of disposing of these bombs to
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: figure out how to do that safely. Like that's the
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: kind of pendulum of development you were mentioning.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so dynamite comes along. It's a big sort of
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: leap forward in bombing technology, right. And the first person
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: to kind of pioneer this inspection routine was a guy
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: named Vivian durang Majindi. What was the Finnian Dynamite campaign
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: was kind of the first big bombing campaign that featured dynamite,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: and Vivian came along and pioneered this field. Was the
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: first bomb disposal specialist because he got to work on
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: that anti dynamite campaign.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and so when you think of bomb disposal, we
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: probably should have said this at the outset. The job
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: entails much more than just diffusing and disposing of bombs.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: There's also like finding bombs, there's identifying the kind of
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: bomb you're dealing with, and so that's what Magendi was doing.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: It was really low hanging fruit because it was such
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: a new field. He would walk into the room and
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: be like, yep, that's dynamite and they'd be like, oh,
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: good show, you know, like and he was like a
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: celebrated bomb disposal expert, but he was also a very
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: brave one and he would not delegate dealing with bombs
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: to anyone else below him, like he took on the
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: actual handling and attempts to diffuse bombs by himself, and
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: he was celebrated for that for sure.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely. He was the first head of the explosives
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: department that they set up over there in eighteen seventy
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: five that would later become the Forensic Explosives Laboratory, which
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: basically any kind of explosive activity, like literally explosive activity, right,
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: not like a Beatles concert or something like that in
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Great Britain is run through the Forensics Explosives Laboratory.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: Yes, so this is going on in the third or
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, and as the Irish
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: were laying bombs, so too were anarchists starting to use
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: dynamite as well. And that was a problem in Europe too,
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: but it was also a problem in New York in America.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: And so just like in Great Britain and England, where
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: there were suddenly a lot of people putting bombs all
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: over the place, there was a huge need for people
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: to figure out how to make those bombs not go off,
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: and so America developed its first bomb squad back in
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: nineteen oh two under the leadership of guy named Giuseppe Petrosino,
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: and they were dealing with the mafia. Thank you. They
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: were dealing with the mafia at the time, and apparently
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: they did their job because the Bomb Squad got disbanded
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: and then as anarchists started to really step up their game,
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: the Bomb Squad, actually the Anarchist and Bomb Squad was
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: created in nineteen fourteen in the NYPD and it was
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: basically the revived Italian Squad under Petrosino.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: I can see Reddit now, my friend, what's up with
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Josh doing Italian names? Now after sixteen years?
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: Right, you can take it?
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no. Which you don't do is go
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: back and redo an Italian accent.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: So take it. I think you can under the right circumstances.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: And the circumstances are these do that Italian accent as
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: Christopher Walkin doing Sammy Davis Junior doing the Italian accent.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: My brain just broke all right, So we're in nineteen
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: fourteen with the Anarchists and Bomb Squad. It's kind of
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: a clunky name. I guess the aabs.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah or ABS, Well, they.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Threw that and in there it's just sort of strange.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: Abs are made in the kitchen was their slogan.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: So they uncovered a plot to blow up Saint Patrick's
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Saint Patrick's Cheese I'm getting it all backwards Cathedral in
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: New York City. They basically let this thing go off.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: They got all the manuals of the fuse design. It
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: was a timed fuse, and so they they kind of
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: let it happen and then arrested these like they wanted
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: to catch the people, So they let the fuse be lit,
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: be lit, and then they got these guys, and of
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: course it extinguished the fuse.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, during mass. Yeah, they they went ahead and let
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: the bombers light the fuse.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, I guess that's the only way to know
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: who the guys were, right.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess. But yeah, that was I mean, that
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: was gutsy.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: That's the way I took it was that they were
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: they wanted to, you know, find out who was actually
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: doing this, and the only way to do that was
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: to see the views get lit.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: No, absolutely, I think you could also just say anybody
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: who's who starts to crouch down near the fuse, you
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: can go ahead and arrest that guy.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Or raise your hand if you're not here to blow
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: this place up right and then just arrest who doesn't
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: raise their hand yep.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: So also remember we talked about Jay gar Hoover running
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: the Radical Division. They also had an early bomb unit
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: within the FBI, and the FBI probably ever since has
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: had bomb specialists special agent basically bomb technicians, and they
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: do a lot of training. We saw a really interesting
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: video on Wired I think, where a FBI bomb technician
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: describes like, you know, what the whole process is like.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: It was pretty fascinating. Yeah, very calmly, but still, I
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: mean you got anarchists laying bombs, you have Irish Republicans
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: laying bombs, and then what really steps up the whole
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: game makes it necessary. Area of the world wars and
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: the First World War came along and there's a lot
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: of munitions that were fired on either side all over
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: the place, all over Europe. And anytime you're firing munitions,
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: just like we said at the outset with black Cat
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: fire crackers, some are bound to be duds. And just
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: because they didn't go off now doesn't mean they're not
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: going to go off one hundred years from now. So
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: it's actually, as we'll see, like a huge problem. Still,
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: we covered it a lot tangentially in our Land Mines
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: episode about how when bombs are you know, shot off
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: in war, laid in war, they can you know, kill
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: people a century later. Essentially that was a problem in
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: and of itself, and there were volunteer usually Air Force
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: for some reason, like soldiers, who taught themselves essentially how
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: to try to diffuse the bombs that were left over
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: for World War One. But it wasn't until World War
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: Two that the whole thing started to be formalized, both
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: in the UK and in the US.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the training that they had in World War One,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: the equipment that they had wasn't enough to snuff, and
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: I think it just sort of slowly built in everyone's
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: minds that like, all right, this is something we need
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: to officially address. Where we're not trained up, we don't
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: know what we're really doing, and so we got to
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: correct that because this is a big problem moving forward.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: And in nineteen forty Winston Churchill said, we owe it
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: to these brave men to provide them with the very
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: best technical equipment. So equipment and training was really the
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: way forward, especially after Germany's blitz happened over the period
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: of you know, about a year or two, because there
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: were a lot of bombs dropped, and like you said,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: you know a lot. I mean, I don't know if
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: we have an exact percentage of I guess it depends
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: on the war. But even today, like some of the
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: more recent wars, I've saw numbers like twenty thirty percent
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: of bombstone even go off. So those things are just
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: laying around waiting for you know, Unfortunately, sometimes some some
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: kid or any innocent person to just stumble upon it.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I saw something I can't remember, I send
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: it to you, So maybe you'll remember either hundreds of
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: thousands of tons or millions of tons of munitions were
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: dropped in Europe.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: I don't remember.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Okay, well it was one of those. It was just
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: a mind boggling amount. So if you think of twenty
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: or thirty percent of that, like that's they're still there.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: They're still in Europe. Like those bombs, if they didn't
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: go off, they would plant themselves sixty feet underground, waiting
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: for some guy who like later was going to build
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: a sports arena on the site to find it and
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: hope that he didn't accidentally blow it up with his
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: earth mover. Like that's a I don't know how common
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: it is, but it's a frequent occurrence in Europe.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Still, Yeah, absolutely, As they got better at disabling these bombs,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: of course that that race starts again the pendulum of development.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: That great band takes the stage and Germany is like, well,
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: here's what we'll do. Then we're going to start implementing
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: things that will kill somebody trying to dismantle it. An
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: anti handling device. They had all different kinds, but you know,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: basically most of them were just you know, if you
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: mess with the fuse or if you mess with the wiring,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: like if you were trying to extract something to keep
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: it from going boom, that would make it go boom.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Right, And so yeah, I just want to like punctuate
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: that these anti handling devices were booby traps specifically designed
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: to blow up the very people whose job we're talking
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: about today. Yeah, that was the whole thing. That was
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: the point of it. And for people walking around like
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: me who just have always thought of fuses as that
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: long wick that goes to like a shiny black round bomb,
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: there are basically anything that sets off the detonator or
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: the thing that blows up the detonator that's a fuse.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: It can be everything from something magnetic, it can be barometric,
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: can be like a gyroscope, so if the bomb is
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: tipped over, it blows up. Anything that you can use
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: to to that detects a change in the environment, a timer.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: It can also be a radio, something as simple as
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: a garage shore opener. All those are fuses. It's not
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: just like there's a wick that'slit. It's anything that can
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: blow the thing up that triggers the explosion.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so they started working hard again to try and
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: counteract this by developing, you know, new methods, new techniques
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: to not only diffuse bombs, but you know, figure out
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: what was sometimes literally making them tick, drilling holes in them,
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: and time bombs. They started listening to them with stethoscopes
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: so you could hear if it had a clock, and
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: if it did have a clock, see if there was
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: some sort of mechanism called a clock stopper, like it's
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: basically a steel collar, battery power thing, to see if
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: that thing's firing, to see if they, you know, had
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: any anti withdrawal devices. Thank you Germans. Boiling water. They
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: started using water and steam early on to render either
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: the powder useless or as we'll see now, like just
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: like flooding a thing with a lot of water very
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: quickly can sometimes work as well.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that also didn't quite make sense to me
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: at first until I realized that bombs also are made up.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: There's a really like the explosive part that makes the
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: big boom, but there's also frequently a slightly smaller explosive
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: that makes the big boom go off. The thing that
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: booms really hugely, they're usually really kind of hard to detonate,
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: so you can do things like pour water on the
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: whole thing, and you're you're not necessarily trying to keep
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: the big bomb from going off. You're trying to disable
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: that either explosive charge or the fuse or whatever that's
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: gonna make that bigger bomb go off. It's kind of
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: hard to jiggling around a bomb to make like say
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: the plastic explosives or something like that go off. It's
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: way easier to make the black powder get triggered. That's
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: what you're trying to disable most of the time when
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: you're messing with the bomb. Yeah.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, I mean, we talked about that a lot in
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: our episodes on nuclear bombs and stuff like that.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: You said we did one on IEDs. Is that right?
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: I genuinely don't remember that.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, eleven years ago.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: Wow, I'm glad you remember. Oh, just we're talking about
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: previous episodes. I think we should take a second here, Chuck,
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: to correct ourselves. I don't know if you saw some
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: of the emails come in, but we released our Genghis
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Khan episode as a Saturday select. I think I chose
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: it ye this past Saturday, And apparently in it we
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: say that when Genghis Khan was running around, there were
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: seven billion people on the planet and three billion of
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: them were Mongols, and that is that could not be
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: further from the truth. Apparently we didn't hit one billion
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: until the nineteenth century, and we're at seven billion now.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: So we were so off that it doesn't even make
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: sense what we were saying. And I can't believe we
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: got it that wrong, but apparently we did. So sorry
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: to everybody who's like, I can never listen to Josh
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: and Chuck again. After that, you said, I guess you
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: wouldn't be listening right now.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: You kept saying we did we both say that in unison.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Hey man, if one of us said it and the
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: other one didn't correct it. We're both guilty.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Oh okay, all right, well we're guilty of not taking
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: an ad break. So we'll do that right now and
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: beg forgiveness when we come back right after this. All right,
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: So flash forward again. You know, the sort of technology
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: of defeating bomb seems to rise and fall with lots
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: of bombings happening, of course, and that happened between nineteen
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: sixty nine and really up into kind of the mid
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: two thousands with the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: During that time, twenty three different specialists were killed in
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: action from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, and ordnance is
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: just sort of a fancy name for any kind of artillery.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: But you'll hear, you know, like unexploded ordnance and stuff
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: like that a lot. And that's like a bomb that
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: didn't go off.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And so the troubles in Northern Ireland were a
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: huge impetus for new bomb disposal technology. Simultaneously, bomb disposal
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: techs who had fought in Vietnam were sorry to come
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: back to the United States too, So there are two
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: different things that were pushing bomb disposal technology at about
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: the same time in both the UK and America. And
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: what's interesting is this is the second time that it happened.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: Third time actually, remember there were there was the Irish
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: Republicans in the nineteenth century, followed closely by the anarchists
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: in New York. There was the Vets returning from Vietnam,
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: and in the UK dealing with the troubles of Northern Ireland.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: And then in World War Two there was the there
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: was Churchill's push to train veterans or servicemen in World
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: War Two, and at the same time, the US Navy
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: was learning to defuse SA minds at the same time.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: So it's just strange to me that the US and
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: the UK have run in paralleled so many different times.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, totally so. Prior to seventy two, it was basically
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: using your hands like a human being dismantling a bomb
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: with their fingies. After that, because of you know, the
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: new threats coming from all the bombs from the troubles,
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: they started saying like, hey, maybe, and the idea very
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: much now is to try and do everything as far
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: away from the bomb as possible, including the actual technician
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: obviously getting the people out of there. But they did
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: this by developing a bunch of new tools, one of
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: which is called the pig stick. I was a minute
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, and this is one of those
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: that sends a water jet, a really powerful water jet,
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: to try and just interrupt the circuitry and disable it.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: And they're still used to this day.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw one of these go off. It also
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: took me a minute to figure out why they call
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: it a pigstick, and then I remembered Anton Sugar in
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: No Country for Old Men. It's essentially they're kind of
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: saying it's the same thing as that. It's a charge
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: that shoots water so forcefully that I saw it slowed
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: down to twenty percent and it still happened too fast
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: to see. Yeah, Like it's so quick that it will
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: disrupt the bomb before the bomb knows what hit it, right,
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: So any fuse or firing mechanism or anything like that,
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: it's just going to get separated before it can trigger
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: the bomb. And the fact that it's water means that
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: it's not going to let the it's not going to
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: accidentally light any say like incendiary trigger inside. So it's
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: pretty ingenious. And the fact that they were using this
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: all the way back in the early mid seventies is
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: pretty impressive, and because it was just so effective, like
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: you said, like, it's still pretty much standard around the
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: world today.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, they're not very effective for car bombs obviously,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: so more and more car bombs started to be used.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Like again, once something is sort of figured out and
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: you figure out a better way to defeat it, the
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: enemy morphs, and so car bombs became sort of and
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: are still just a big problem worldwide because car bombs
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: are mobile obviously, and they're huge, Like you can have
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: a two hundred to three hundred pound bomb hidden in
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: a that's not very big without even seeing it. So
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: of course they had to develop even newer technology and
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: we all knew it was going to go this way.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: But eventually robots would come onto the scene.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: I'm impressed you didn't say robots. Thanks.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: That's Hodgman Steele.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: So yeah, one of the technologies that came out of
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: that is the early prototypes or proto robots used today
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: were called wheelbarrows. I think the first one was made
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: out of a lawnmower motor and essentially you could put
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: say something like a pigstick and then maybe a video
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: camera on there and go approach a car, and some
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: of the ones that came later you could use this
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: robot to hook toe ropes up to move the car
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: out of the area to someplace safer to blow it up.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: And I think something like four hundred wheelbarrows were destroyed
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: just between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy eight, now,
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: which gives you an idea. That's six years. That's just
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: the ones that were destroyed. That's how many bombs were
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: laid around Northern Ireland, but also in Europe and England
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: to somewhat lesser extent during that period, during the Troubles
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: which ran all the way to ninety eight, I think
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: there was a lot of bombs going off around there
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: at the time. So the more bombs there were, the
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: more quickly they had to develop these techniques to counter
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: bomb measures too. That's what was going on. It was
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: just a huge laboratory and pressure cooker at the same time.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, to be fair, I think the purpose mostly for
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: the wheelbarrow was to blow it up, So I don't
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: think there were a ton of wheelbarrows that made it
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: out alive, you know.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay, all right, Still four hundred there is a
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: lot of bombs in six years.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Oh totally. There was a well, I guess we should
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: just sort of give the general breakdown of how this
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: might work back then, and it's not too dissimilar from
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: how it works now. But you would initially, you know,
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: get the call that there's a suspected device to this,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: this team or the specialists, they would the first thing
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: they do is clear the area. They try to get people,
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: you know, they figure out what they think might be
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: the blast zone, get as many people as far away
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: from that area as possible, and then you get that
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: robot out. If the robot can't do the job, then
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: you have to get a person in a bomb suit
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: in there. We'll talk about bomb suits a little bit
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: more later. And then they go in and they explode
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: this thing if it's real.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's another thing. Kyle found this BBC documentary
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: on the bomb squads working in Northern Ireland at the
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: time from nineteen seventy four and everything has a real
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: clockwork orange look to it still, but they find a hoax.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: But at the end of it they're working on like
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: a real live bomb and they just have the audio
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: of the guy who you know, is now inside this
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: building trying to figure out what kind of bomb they're
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: dealing with, and you just hear his breath and it
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: just gets like more and more quickened and like like
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: it sounds not quite like he's going to hyperventilate, but
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: he's breathing way harder than the normal average person does.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: And it's really just kind of stirring at the end there,
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: Especially for a fifty year old hour long BBC documentary.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: You should see the hurt Locker then. Okay, that that
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: turns you on.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: I don't know if it turned me on, it is
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: the right way to put it, but yees I definitely
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: noticed it.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an anxiety inducing film for sure. It's very
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: very tense as you would imagine.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'll check it out.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: Sure you don't have to, man.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, are you one of the financiers of the.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Movie or you know, just suggesting very related to this topic,
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: you know?
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: Sure?
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: So IEDs again, we did a full episode on these
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: about eleven years ago, so we don't need to really
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: go through what all those are. But they are improvised
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: explosive devices. And the scary thing about IEDs, like this
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: is what you had in the boss of marathon bombing
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: is is like it could be almost anything, like a
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: pressure cooker, a pipe bomb, could be you know, something
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: just sitting in a backpack on the corner. So those
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: are that's you know, incredibly frightening to face that kind
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: of reality.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, so yeah, so that's something that say, like a
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: public safety bomb disposal tech would be more likely to
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: deal with, rather than say like a military grade bomb
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: being left somewhere. That would probably be more like a
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: military person that was dealing with that. But I also
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: saw one other thing that people in public safety have
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: to deal with are illegal fireworks. I didn't even know
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: there was such a thing as illegal fireworks.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Did you You mean, like the firework itself is illegal
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: in a legal state.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: I think the impression is that they're homemade, okay, or
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: they're so powerful that they're not legal.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I've heard that. I think as a kid,
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: we all heard rumors of like in one hundreds and
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: in one twenties, it probably didn't even.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: Exist, right, A black cat. The size of your forearm.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: Also on those IEDs, especially in the case of Boston
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: that video we saw. You know, one thing you don't
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: think about is when you find out that there is
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: like a bomb, you know, or a tip that there's
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: a bomb somewhere, and you clear out an area, like
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: a lot of things can look like a bomb at
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: that point, because he was like, you know, people drop
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: their backpack, they get out of there there, you know,
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden, there's a lot of things laying around,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: or it could be like the mailbox, you know, so
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: they have to check out like everything.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I noted that too. That was pretty interesting. Another
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: thing that they'll do is they'll pre sweep areas, say
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: like there's a political rally or something like that, you
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: can pretty much bet that there's a bomb squad that
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: moved through the area already and swept it for bombs. Also,
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: one of the other big jobs that they have, Chuck,
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: is they will identify like evidence of bombs. They'll help
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: people gather evidence. They'll be like, that's a part of
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: a bomb, that's part of bomb. And the more that
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: they can collect, the more information they can take back
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: to the lab and figure out about the bomb, the
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: bomb maker, the country that it came from. And the
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: more they can do that, the more they can learn
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: to counter them as well.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, you know I mentioned that in the seventies,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: kind of the protocol of how you would go about
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: this on the scene basically being the same today. Like
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: some of the only differences today is like they have
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: X rays now, so yeah, you know, just like in
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: the doctor's office, they'll go and put a plate behind
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: the bomb and take an X ray of it. And
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: that has been a real game changer in being able
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: to look inside this thing safely and see what's going on.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: And the other thing too that the guy in the
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: video really wanted to drive home is they want to
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: spend as less as little time around that bomb as possible.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: So like if you're going in, you don't want to
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: go in with a couple of things and be like, oh,
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: let me go back and get this now and try this.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Like they want to go in there one time and
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: have everything at their disposal on hand to assess and
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: evaluate and decide how they're going to disrupt this thing.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but as it stands, because you almost exclusively across
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: the board, every bomb disposal unit's going to take an
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: X ray first, you have to put a person in
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: danger at least at some point. Ideally after they take
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: the X ray, they get the heck out of there,
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: and then they never go back again. It's the robot
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: that's sent in, the wheelbearer or whatever to handle the
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: whole thing with, say like some sort of disruptor, like
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: a pigstick or something. Right, But if, like you said,
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: the robot can't get to it, it's up the stairs,
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: it's over some weird debris, it's just in a place
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: where the robot can't get to it, that person's going
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: to have to go back in and deal with this directly.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and like this is frightening when you think about,
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: like you have to go in to get that X ray.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: And two out of the three methods for a bomb
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: potentially going off are threats to you at that moment.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: If it's a time bomb and you have some bad
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: luck with your timing, you could be exploded. If it's
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: a remote controlled bomb, you could very easily be exploded.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: The only one that you're I guess, relatively safe from
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: if you're doing your job really, really carefully, is victim
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: initiated or like a booby trap or something. So you
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: know you're not gonna want to disturb it. Basically, you're
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: gonna want to be really really careful when you're laying
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: when you're doing that X ray.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah for sure. All right, Chuck, I say we come
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: back and we talk about some of the technology that
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: these very brave people are using when they do this crazy,
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: crazy stuff. Let's do it, all right, man. So, as
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: we promised, we're going to talk about some of the
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: technology that bomb disposal technicians use. We already talked about
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: the robot and we mentioned the bomb suit a little bit,
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: but I think you can go into it a little
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: more because they're fairly complex.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and uncomfortable. There are variations. You know, they'll
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: gauge what kind of level of suit you need, like
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: lighter versus heavier. But if you've got on the full
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: heaviest kevlar plated collar, protected, helmet visor wearing suit, it
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: is clunky. You do have use of your Fingi's so like,
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: you know, I think if you're a one of these
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: kind of specialists, one thing you're going to have to
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: really consider is that you may at some point be
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: living your life without or hands right at the very least.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: But they are fairly effective. I mean they're pretty clunky,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: but like the heat is the biggest problem, especially you know,
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: you know, when you're disrupting a bomb, let's say in
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: the Middle East in the middle of summer or something
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: like that, they don't last long in those So the
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: very latest technology has actual cooling units. They all used
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: to have fans, but now they have actually coolant that
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: says they can withstand like any amount of heat for
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: an hour.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: And I don't think they want to be in there
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: for more than an hour anyway, So hopefully that's helped
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: a lot.
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing that I saw that a lot of
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: them don't have, though, is like communication equipment, because you
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: usually use radio and you can accidentally set off a
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: bomb that's radio controlled, so they often don't have any
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: sort of calm equipment in there. I also saw, and
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: I don't know this is not from a legitimate source
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: or vetted source. How about that it's either on Core
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: or Reddit. No offense to either of those sites, but
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: where somebody who presented themselves as a bomb technician essentially
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: said if you're yes, if you're dealing with a pipe bomb,
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: maybe illegal fireworks something like that, you're probably gonna wear
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: a bomb suit if you have to diffuse it yourself.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: Not a robot, but at bomb bomb, you probably aren't
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: going to go to the trouble of wearing a suit
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: because that bomb will kill you if it goes off,
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: whether you're wearing a suit or not. And those suits
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: are definitely made to protect your against shrapnel. Projectiles. A
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: lot of them are literally bulletproof because they're they're so
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: tough and made of such thick kevlar and ceramic plates
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: and all that. But the overblast, the shockwave that's produced
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: is what can It can give you crushing injuries just
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: from hitting you that hard if you're very close to
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: a blast radius. So putting all that together, I couldn't help.
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: But wonder if they were if they were correct, or
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: if they were just talking jive.
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: Well, there is something called blast long. It's very common injury,
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: and it's basically, you know, like you said, getting just
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: smashed in the chest with an invisible, you know, wrecking ball.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: So it's an internal injury. But that's one of the
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: most common and those suits, you know, they obviously stop
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: projectiles and stuff, but they also decreased that blast wave impact.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: It's you know, they're made to do that. So I
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: would be surprised if the just sort of the rules
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: around it were like, yeah, he's just not gonna wear
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: it today.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: That was my take too, It's like, are you are
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: you really allowed to just say that yourself. But also
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: I wonder if they're in such short supply that it's
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: like do whatever you want. Man, Like, just hats off
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: to you for even trying this. They're expensive, Yeah, they're
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: like thirty five grand, but I stopped and thought about it.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: That's because probably it's local and federal governments buying them,
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: so I'm sure they're marked.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Up, you know, yeah, you probably make one of those
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: for a couple hundred bucks.
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: I bet sure. I also saw some of them have
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: spinal protection, so that if you're blown back by the
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: blast wind, the actual wind that's pushed out from the blast,
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: and you land on your spine, you're not automatically going
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: to get a spinal injury.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: Oh that's that's cool, because that guy in the video
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: kind of indicated that the back was the least protected.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: I saw that. But this is on a site for
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: a manufacture of actual blast suits bombs.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: Did you ever think they're just trying to sell you suit? Josh,
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Come on, come on, naive.
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a little kind of hokey. It looked
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: like it was like a drawing of a tuxedo on
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: the front of it.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So the other, you know, piece of technology we
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: talked a little bit about is the it was called
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: the disruptor. Those pigsticks or disruptors. There are all kinds
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: of disruptors, from things that use you know, sound to water,
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: that that bottler thing. You know, I tried to understand
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: what he was talking about in that video, but I
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: was a little little confused.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: So essentially, which one the bottler? Yeah, so it's the
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: same thing as the others, except the pig stick and
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: the other one that shoots everything in like a v wedge.
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: It's it's not it's not like a hyper located on
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: a certain area. Okay, it blows out in a circle.
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: It's multidirectional. Again, the same key is it's spreading water
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: and it blows up so fast that it can disable
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: the trigger before it can fire. All. It's that's what
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: disruptors do essentially.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: Okay. Uh, there's also you know, they're they're bomb carriers
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: that just sit on the back of a pickup truck.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: You know, they're bolted to a pickup truck or pumby
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: or whatever.
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: Or a cyber truck.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, oh god, I saw one in the wild the
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: other day for the first time.
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, what'd you think. I was just like, it's
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: just the.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: Dumbest looking thing to drive around in that I've ever
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: seen in my life. That's what I thought.
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I get that a lot of people do.
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: There's a subreddit called cyber stuck, and the whole thing
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: is just totally dedicated to making fun of people who
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: drive cyber trucks and all of the woes that they
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: have from driving a cyber truck.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: It's pretty finny if you've got one.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: I'm not trying to yuck or you. Everyone has different tastes,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: but let's just say it's not my taste.
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that was well aesthetically. So these bomb carriers,
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: like I said, you know, it's kind of just a big, like,
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: you know, heavy chamber to put a bomb in to
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: carry it somewhere else.
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: Yes, And like I think they can. I've seen that
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: some of them can hold up to ten kilograms of
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: TNT the equivalent of that, right, Yeah, so like you
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: could blow up you could put twenty something pounds of
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: dynamite in this thing and blow it up, and the
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: thing will be like that's all you got. It'll like
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: get belched or something like that. It's just amazing that
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: we can make something that can can that kind of
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: violent force. Yeah, for sure, I'm just impressed by those things.
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: One other thing that I saw that it really stuck
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: out to me is like you would think that that
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: bomb disposal experts are paid like basketball stars and they
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: are not. Like the average bomb tech makes about fifty
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: thousand dollars a year in the UK or the US.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's wrong.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I just wanted to go on record as
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: saying that I support bomb techts being paid through the roof.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean it's just another example of job
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: you do. Does it necessarily equate to money you make?
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: You know, as far as the fairness scale goes, yeap,
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: So unexploded ordinances. I keep saying ordinances, ordinance without any right.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: It's hard to say that right for me. But like
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: we said, those are bombs from past wars that have
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: not gone off. I think you already mentioned that World
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: War Two has a lot of these still scattered across Europe.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: And these are really dangerous because you know, these things
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: degrade over time in every way you can imagine, from
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: the fuses to the primers to you know, parts resting
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: out and stuff like that. So it's you know, it's
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: literally sometimes a bomb just waiting to go off, and
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: you never know when that might be.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: Right, and this happens, I mean sometimes it goes off
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: and kills people, as recently is two thy ten, twenty
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: twenty three. I think in that twenty ten incident it
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: was in Germany. Three three bomb techs were killed in
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: that explosion. Yeah, and again this is World War two ordinance.
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: Like imagine being a pilot who drops a bomb, it
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: doesn't go off, You go home, you return from the war,
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: you buy a house in the suburbs, you have a
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: pick of fence, a family, you grow old, you die,
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: and then thirty years after that, after you're buried, somebody
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: comes along and that bomb you drop blows up and
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: kills them completely outside the context of war. That happens
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: in Europe.
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that happens all over the world.
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: Yes, for sure, that's well put.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Because you know, more recently in the nineteen seventies with
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: the wars in Indo China, I think Kyle found the
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: stat two million tons of munitions were dropped between sixty
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: four and seventy three, and of the two hundred and
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: seventy million cluster bombs dropped, thirty percent may have failed
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: to detonate. That's over eighty million cluster bombs potentially still
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: scattered about that area.
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's not including all the land mines that
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: were purposely laid and not cleared too, man, unbelievable. Yeah,
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: and kids get killed by that, the kids in I Rack.
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: I saw between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two, five
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: hundred and nineteen kids were either killed or injured in
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: a rock from unexploded ordinance. And then the United States
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: has its own stockpole problems too. I saw that we
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: dumped millions of pounds of bombs when when the stockpiles
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: got too big they were, and the stuff was getting old,
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: they just dumped it off the coast in the east
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: and the west.
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: That's just how can that be allowed?
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: It was, well, it was stopped being allowed in nineteen seventy.
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: But it's not like they went back and got every
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: fished everything out, which is funny because it does get
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: fished out once in a while in a fishing net
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: and apparently Lake Erie had Camp Perry, which was a
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: proving ground from munitions, and just like in war when
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: you're shooting off a bunch of munitions to test them,
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: some of them aren't going to aren't going to blow up,
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: right then, So apparently Lake Erie is littered with unexploded
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: ordnance as well.
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: That we talked about. When wasn't it a nuclear bomb
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: off the coast of Savannah, right?
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah? From I think the early fifties, didn't it.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: Did they find that thing recently? Yeah?
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: I think they did, and they were like, it's too
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: it's too dangerous to move. We're just gonna cross our
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: fingers if I'm not mistaken.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn't remember because I feel like we got
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: email because we talked about that a long time ago.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they made the they made the call that it's
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: really just Tybee Island that's in danger in there, like
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: Tybee Island.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: That's so mean.
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: Okay, since I just made fun of Tybee Allen, I'm
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: just kidding Tybee. Uh, it's time for listener mail. I say, you.
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: Know who loves Tybee jas Jerry does.
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: She's a Tybee person and she's.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: Not here today, so she'll hear this when she uh,
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: or maybe she won't, who.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: Knows, No, she'll be doing something else.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: All right, So you said listener mail, right, Yeah I did.
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this. I have to do it. Friend.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but I have to do this Minecraft correction.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because the emails. And this is one where
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: I just tried and tried and tried to tell you
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: that that wasn't right, and you stuck to your guns.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: Hey sure, Hey, guys, been listening for her almost as
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: long as I played Minecraft a little over a decade.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: Josh repeated the point that there is one seed per
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: game copy, but Minecraft has more to offer than you think.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: You can make as many worlds as you want concurrently,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: and even pick your seed. It's gotten so popular that
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: entire websites are dedicated to seed sharing. That sounds gross.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: If someone finds an interesting seed with something like an
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: island inside a volcano close to your spawn point, they
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: will often share the random string of characters that produce
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: that seed so others can generate that same world. There
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: was also a sarcastic comment made about kids learning that
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: the ancient ones built underwater cities. I don't think it
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: was sarcastic. I think it was clever quip.
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: Probably sarcastic. It's sardonic. It was sardonic.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: Okay, but this is actually true, guys. Tons of ancient
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: settlements in real life are currently under the water because
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: the coastline changes over time, we tend to build near
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: bodies of water.
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: Absolutely true on both counts. Thank you and for day
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: that is Nathan, Nathan, that was great. That's pretty awesome.
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: You've been listening to us about as long as you've
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: been playing mine. That is high praise as we take it.
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: And thank you for so gently correcting me even though
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: I got it so wrong long.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: That's okay.
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: If you want to be like Nathan and gently correct us,
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: we're always up for that. You can send it via
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.