Tom said he was interested in how my mind works as if to say he doesn't but knows his own. Foof!
I was in Germany, in the RAF. They wanted me to do a mini instructor's course. I was quite shy at the time of standing up in front of people and telling them what the IRA wanted to do to them, with what and how and how to avoid it. Similarly the Russians. On a grander techier scale. The second the reason we were there
Newly arrived on a station the newbs assemble in a room to hear from the firemen, the medics, from a pilot who had a map - You are here, and They are there. The old Soviet Warsaw Pact loomed over us like an angry Bear with loose bowels, out of loo roll, over a shivering squirrel with a suddenly attractive tail.
And me, EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal; Bomb Disposal. I still have the sleeve badge.
Back at the Education Centre. Prepare a ten-minute talk on anything you want outside of your trade. There was a spinning globe in the corner with the Pacific facing out. That view of the World 90% blue with white bits top and bottom. A swimming pool of a planet.
I can't remember why but I came up with the idea that humanity clings precariously to the other half, why doesn't it wobble being so out of balance?
Further investigation, no Google then, revealed 71% of the globe is salty water, 10-15% ice variable, 10% mainly uninhabitable mountains, plus deserts - huge, jungles and swamps. Look it up. We get the rest on which to cling.
Further, we generally live below 1000 feet above sea level, near water, close by the coast. Yeah yeah, Inuit, Tibet, Mrs Picky.
Cover a grapefruit in a single layer of clingfilm. If the grapefruit is Earth (12,742 km in diameter) the clingfilm is the Earth's habitable atmosphere. 500 million years old. For Mr Picky we can't live comfortably above 3000 metres. Passenger jets fly at 10km. 3Km divided by 12,472 - a 0.000235th. A thin slice? Still feel significant? Important? Sorry. Bummer.
The Senior Education Officer still wonders how my mind works. Annoyed, he thought he was important.
Armed with such perspective how does a bomb work?
Imagine big pointy bullet things made of steel. Fill them with explosive with a heavy shortbread biscuit consistency. Safe as houses. The RAF Vulcan dropped its load safe on Stanley (we wanted the runway later but it proved a point) Introduce a booster and a detonator. The tail unit stabilises the flight and an airflow driven vane spins unlocking the striker. On impact the striker hits the detonator. Boom.
Like lighting a fire, paper, sticks, coal.
Here's a badge for you.
That's it really.
What? Oh yes, they don't always work. Murphy's Law makes sure of that. Or sometimes delayed for embuggerance.
Air dropped weapons are set off by fuses with a 'z'. The early German bombs, the lads used to unscrew them, winch the bomb onto a lorry and drive them out of town. Somebody told the Germans, probably the BBC, Bob Danvers Walker of Pathé News as well.
Cunning Fritz decided to booby trap them. Decided to put clockwork timers and anti-disturbance switches in. Oh dear. How inconvenient. You can hand that badge back now, thank you.
Improvised explosive devices. IEDs. Victim operated, you can't hide down in the Underground, in a shelter in the garden. They can come through the letterbox, left in a rubbish bin with a timer running. In a car with 8 gallons of petrol, fired with a fishing line wrapping itself around a drive shaft pulling the firing switch.
Think burglar alarm. Move something, a door, a window, an alarm triggers a buzzer. Replace with a detonator embedded in Semtex, plastic explosive, inert, like plasticene until the det triggers it. Or mix fertiliser with diesel.
The vibrator on your mobile phone, rewired. Trip wires.
We all did the course, but the Army Royal Logistic Corps and the Met Police Bomb Squad did the nasty stuff.
Of course it's far more complicated but I'm not writing a book.
Some highlights.
In training we learnt to recognise the huge range of ordnance types. Rockets, missiles, area denial mines, markings, chemical agents, flares, pyrotechnics.
Nerve gas. We move our muscles by electrochemically triggering our nerves with acetylcholine; decay the trigger with cholinesterase I'm told or something like that.
Nerve gas stops the latter and we twitch, sweat and jerk; stop breathing. The antidote, atropine. Found in Deadly nightshade, our Plant Kingdom friends again.
Injected in the early days by a toothpaste like tube with a needle, straight into the thigh. Later with an autoject needle. Most servicemen would sooner die than plunge such into their leg. Hence the buddy system, he who might enjoy saving your life.
Snakes deploy neurotoxins - or some, haemotoxins to rot you from the inside. Nice.
Those anti removal fuzes. At the end of the course, exams. We had to disable one, a dummy, by hand drilling into the fuze, evacuating the air and pumping in a solution, sometimes salty water, sometimes a special liquid that gave people cancer. Mask and gloves. If you got the connections wrong you immunised the pump. A fail, and you still had to clean it.
Digging down to a bomb, shafting and shoring 20 feet down. The names from the mining industry. I'd have to look them all up but walings and puncheons, folding and sliding wedges, then block and tackles, a range of knots to be learnt, how to roll a 1000 pound bomb up a 45 degree ramp onto a lorry with three men.
Sandbags and shovels, ropes, wellies and duffel coats, bleach to neutralise mustard gas, Fullers Earth to soak up anything and decontam NBC suits. The ubiquitous 2 inch black tape, bodge tape to the RAF, masking tape to the Army. Land Rover wings painted red. More on the tanks another time. Spitfire? Dunno, PR?
The safety fuze, practical demolition on the beach, you know, the burning fuze from Mission Impossible. Minimum 6 feet, to get away, burns at 40 seconds a foot, plus or minus 10%. *
The civvy assistants who drove the ancient Bedford, its ancient engine ticking over and shuddering. The fuzes, more than one, 6" difference to bet beer on.
Light the fuzes! All aboard! Fzzzz!
Engine stalls. Wuh-wuh- wuh groan, fizzzz! wuh-wuh groan, fizzzz!
Their highlight of every course. Those days are gone, some time now. There are still 500 bombs below Docklands. Rust in Peace.
41 years ago. Still here. It's not dangerous on the conventional side. More so falling down the stairs. DIY's the dodgy one.
? Oh, OK. * 4 minutes burn time and...
https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/blog/a-short-history-of-raf-bomb-disposal/