corrente

There's a basic human tendency to regard any number much higher than ten (five in the case of some people, since you need one hand to count the fingers on the other) as a sort of blurry "lots and lots."

Three hundred and eighty? That's a lot.

380 tons? Oy.

So let's break it down a little. Okay, it looks rough in the beginning but it gets easier. Not nicer, mind you, but... here we go. This was mostly swiped from Atrios' comment threads from people who sound like they know what they're talking about. I would just as soon not leave my ISP's fingerprints on sites that would confirm this data by googling, so we're going to take their word for it:

EXPLOSIVE FORCE:

TNT: 2.76 Mpsi @ 7197 m/sec velocity
RDX: 5.03 Mpsi @ 8754 m/sec velocity
HMX: 5.70 Mpsi @ 9159 m/sec velocity

"Mpsi" is million pounds per square inch or how hard it blows up. "m/sec" is meters per second, or how fast it blows up. Or as the poster put it:

9159 m/sec is about 20,500 miles per hour.

The vast majority of this stuff is not manufactured for use in weapons or other military purposes, but for mining. Demolition (like those cool implosions of old smokestacks and sports arenas and such) uses most of the rest. Now why does this stuff about "speed of explosion" make a difference? Possibly The Flash could duck out of the way of TNT, the slowest of the lot, but I guarantee that neither you nor I could do so if it was anywhere nearby.

So who cares? Turns out it matters....

The difference is in the speed of the explosion. The reason [another "slow" explosive called ANFO] used in mining is because it has a slower reaction rate, producing gas and shockwaves that shove rather than shatter.

In most mines, high explosive sticks or gel packs are fired which shatters the rock and detonates the ANFO. The ANFO than pushes the shattered rock outward.

The shattering effect is what makes RDX and such so deadly. A barrel containing a small amount of ANFO and detonated will tend to rupture and separate into large chunks. If the pressure wave doesn't get you, you have pretty good odds of getting away unscathed because there are only a few large pieces flying around.

A barrel with RDX or another high explosive turns into a grenade, forming many more smaller fragments with much higher velocities.

Now you are at least a little bit of an explosives geek, able to discuss this Latest Bush Fuckup with the proper lingo and an informed air. Stomp anybody around the water cooler who tries to downplay just what a disaster this is, and is going to continue to be for years.

If that's not good enough, here's the even simpler version, from our own esteemed reader Amazed in CA down in comments to Tresy's original post on this horror:

Seven hundred and sixty thousand pounds of high explosive. One pound took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

Seven hundred and sixty thousand pounds. Seven hundred and sixty. thousand. pounds.

Enough to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 all over again, every hour, on the hour, for the next eighty-seven years.

UPDATE: Thanks to heading out and Keith in comments for correcting "miles per second" to "meters." Let's call it a typo rather than an admission of my own innumeracy.