Just how dense are high explosives like RDX? For example, if I were to fill one semi-trailer (say, 40 feet by 8 feet by 10 feet) full of RDX, would that weigh five tons? Ten? Thirty?
The density of RDX is 1.82 g/cm[sup]3[/sup].
350 tons of the stuff would make a cube about 18.3 feet on a side.
If you shipped that cube to Osama, he could carve himself a nice little studio apartment out of it. It’d be a step up from his cave.
Most trailers have a weight limit. Let’s say a standard box trailer can hold 30,000 lbs. (That might not be right but it’s in the ball park) That’s roughly 14 metric tonnes. So 380 tons would be about 27 tractor trailers full. That convoy would be hard to miss, I’d say.
Wow, that’s dense. I just checked a website for Schneider and they say that a 53’ trailer can legally handle 46,100 lbs with a maximum axle load of 34,000 lbs. So my estimate on the number of trailers is a bit high, assuming 53’ trailers but probably about right given 40’ trailers. Of course there are special trailers that can likely haul a higher payload. Not sure we can assume whoever took these had special trailers, though. I’m not even sure what a “normal” trailer size would be in Iraq. Point is still that even though the stuff is very dense it would still need to be split up in multiple loads.
OK, say you’ve got that 18.3’ cube of RDX and I blow it up. How much damage am I going to do?
I assume the damage of blowing it up in one place will be less, socially and medically, than blowing it up in smaller amounts in more places. But I’m not a terrorist, so don’t take this as professional advice. 
My question: if this stuff was around in such large amounts, does that mean it’s easy to make? Would it be hard to police the production of this kind of weapon?
A B-52 can carry 51 MK-82 500 pound bombs, for a total munition weight of 9792 pounds of high explosive. Round that to five tons of explosives just to make the calculation easier, and you can arm approximately 76 full-up B-52s with Mk-82 bombs, or a grand total of approximately 3,875 bombs altogether.
Anybody ever seen what a single B-52 can do? Imagine the explosive power of 76 of them, full up.
Another way to look at it: the Hiroshima bomb was equivalent to 15 kilotons of high explosive. This would be approximately 1/40th the explosive power of that.
Needless to say it would wipe out a small town, it might even get a small city in its entirety, and it would undoubtedly wipe out a substantial portion of any city I can think of. It’s much, much more explosive power than the ships had that blew Texas City off the map in 1946.
Not that much, due to something called over-explosion.
Basically, you can only blow something apart one time, even if you over-use the amount of explosives. So a bomb that big would basically just waste most of the explosive power. After the first ton exploded, there wouldn’t be anything left for the remaining 379 tons to blow up.
It would do a lot more damage by being split into 800,000 car bombs of about a pound of explosive each. (And I greatly fear that is what will happen with this.)
In the preparation for the Trinity test of the atomic bomb, they calibrated their instruments with a test shot of 100 tons of TNT. They just stacked boxes of TNT in a big pile. It made a big bang and left a small crater.
FWIW, this is from the comments on this blog: http://www.michaeltotten.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=574
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Think of it like this: how big is 760,000 pounds of the stuff What has a similar weight, Clay? Box of baking soda?