I’ve recently heard a theory that the USS Cole was damaged by an accidental explosion while refueling, and not by a terrorist attack. The intitial story was that the boat with the bomb in it was pretending to help moor the ship when they set off the bomb. But it has been established that the ship was already moored and taking on fuel for at least a half-hour before the explosion, so there couldn’t have been boats helping it moor. Also, I have seen pictures supposedly of the USS Cole that show a hole with the metal bent outward. This would indeed seem to indicate an internal explosion, not an external one.
Could the US Navy be covering up an embarassing accident by calling it a terrorist attack? We know the military has done it before. Remember when the #2 turret on the USS Iowa exploded? The navy concocted an outlandish theory about a gay sailor committing suicide, rather than admit that their equipment was not perfect. Heck, we can go all the way back to the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 or thereabouts. The Maine was destroyed by a coal dust explosion (some braindead shipbuilder had located the coal bunkers right next the the ammo magazines) but the explosion was immediately labeled an “obvious Spanish attack” and the Spanish-American war began. Alot of people are saying that this is what the Russians are doing with the Kursk (ie, blaming their accident on a US sub so they won’t look bad). Does anyone have any more info about the attack, or this theory?
The FBI is analyzing the chemical signature of the C4 explosive residue found all over the ship. Somehow, I consider it unlikely that a warship keeps C4 lying about.
I believe that this photograph should clarify the issue somewhat.
I’m no photo analyst, but it looks to me as if the ship’s hull around the hole is bent inward. On the face of it, I’d say that the hole was caused by an explosion outside of the ship. That, plus the alledged presence of C-4, would indicate this is not a refueling accident.
Any links to these pictures? I have a pretty good collection of Cole photos, including ones from less than 12 hours after the event, that all show not only metal blown inward, but a massive inward buckling of the hull. It looks like a classic explosion of something on the surface of the water near the ship. If you look at the photos of the ship being hauled away by the heavy lifting vessel, you can even see the difference between the above and below water-line damage.
And, IIRC, the fuel used by the gas turbines on the Cole (I think they are LM2500’s, I have a book all about the ships like the Cole and their construction at the Bath Iron Works in Maine at home, so I’ll check later) is not really explosive.
But they also did not cover up anything about the USS Stark, which was quite a bit more embarassing.
I still think this has never been proven, but it is a likely scenario nonetheless. BTW - IMO the damage from a coal dust explosion in a bunker on a ship would not really be affected by the location of the ammo magazines. A coal dust explosion by itself is still enough to crack a ship like the Maine in half.
How much worse could it have been? I read that had the explosion happened slightly astern, it would have ignited the magazines. How much explosive power do modern, inactive weapons have? Could this terrorist attack laid waste to the entire city of Aden? What I mean is, are weapons in storage (as opposed to loaded into firing position) dangerous? Will the warheads explode if exposed to outside violence (such as a C4 terrorist attack)?
I’ve seen photos of the explosion at CNN.com, and I’m confused. (Go to CNN.com and search the news archives for “Cole”. I can’t post a link because the article appeared in a pop-up window.) Wide view photos show the expected inward buckling, but in the close-up photos of the hole, the edges are indeed buckled outward. Is this normal? Also, the Cole had finished docking two hours before the explosion, and refueling had begin 30-45 minutes before the blast. So the captain of the Cole still has to explain why he let the boat get so close to his ship.
If it was a fuel explosion or something similar, probably not much more damage could have occured. If they really botched the damage control it’s conceivable that the ship might have caught on fire, but most of the crew would have gotten off safely. If it was a terrorist attack, however, then it could have been much, much, MUCH worse. Some explosives are more stable than others; I think some can even be burned without detonating, but any explosive will detonate if exposed to a sufficient amount of energy. If the explosion had penetrated one of the magazines, it would have set off something easily detonated. This would have served as a trigger for the more stable explosives and set them off. The end result would be the USS Cole blasted all over Aden harbor. I don’t think it would have destroyed the entire city (did the Cole have nuclear weapons on board? I hope to God that they don’t give one to every rinky-dink little frigate on the water.) But it would have probably destroyed a large part of the harbor and killed thousands of people.
This is irrelevant. The fact that the navy didn’t cover up one incident doesn’t mean that they have never attempted it.
Well, yeah, the pictures make it look like the explosion was from outside the ship… but you gotta remember, negatives REVERSE the image. So the explosion was probably really from inside the ship, blowing out.
Also, there are NO STARS visible in the pictures.
And the footprints of the sailors in the water are deeper than the footprints of the … um… eh? What? [/sarcasm]
Holy cow, I dunno, what’s with this “conspiracy”
and “cover up”??? It isn’t tragic enough that we got lunatic terrorists blowing up innocent people, we gotta deal with lunatic paranoids who think it ain’t happening???
I am reminded of Alfred Hitchcock movies, which usually include some sappy character who thinks it ain’t happening. “No, those birds can’t be attacking, the children must have provoked them.” Or, “Those Nazis shooting at us, they’re really just friendly guys, if I go out there with a white flag to surrender, they’ll treat me … AAAARGH”.
The U.S.S. Maine did not need a cover-up, just a rush to judgment and more primitive analytical resources. There was an article on the Maine in Smithsonian magazine a few years ago. A substantial section of the hull plating had curled inward and the conclusion drawn was that the explosion had occurred outside the ship.
The conspiracy theories are based on the fact that the Navy classified the photos taken during the analysis for years, and they took the Maine’s hulk out and sank it in the Atlantic the moment the initial investigation was complete.
Given the knowledge of metallurgy and explosions that was available to the investigators, the conclusion of an outside explosion was not necessarily predetermined and did not necessarily indicate incompetence on the part of the investigators.
The design problem regarding the Maine’s coal bunkers was not simply that the bunkers were next to the magazine. The other issues were that a part of the bunker was up against the boiler room (where it would collect heat) and because it was not sufficiently ventilated. Coal being withdrawn from the bunkers to feed the boilers tossed up a lot of dust. The heated dust was susceptible to exploding. (I think one of the Maine’s sister-ships had suffered a smaller explosion earlier and the Navy had been notified that the design was a bad one.)
In the midst of an explosion, the initial exploding gas ball pushes things waway from it, but the immediately contracting fireball will also drag things back toward the point of origin. Thus, in the case of the Maine, huge sections of plate were blown into the bottom of the harbor (in small pieces) while the plate at the fringes of the explosion were sucked back into the hole in the hull. Something similar could easily have happened to the Cole: the primary result of the explosion was to push that section of the hull that was not vaporised into the ship, but several sections of plate on the fringes of the hole would be sucked back outward as the gasball contracted. The result would be a place where most of the damage was shoved into the ship, but smaller sections along the fringe of the hole might protude outward from the hole. Looking at the entire damage, it clearly is inward, but small points on the hull can be found buckled outward.
Not that I can see how the Maine would be relevant to what happened recently to the Cole but since it was brought up… National Geographic had an article about the sinking of the Maine just a few years back. IIRC the conclusion ws that everything indicated to an accidental explosion used later by the Americans who were spoiling for a fight anyway (maybe if the had foreseen the bearded one they would have done it differently).
It said fires and explosions in coal bunkers were not so uncommon and mentioned several others. It also said Spain had nothing to gain by this act and it would have been unlikely that they would do such a thing to a visiting ship. And finally that many in America were sppoiling for a fight. Everything put together seems to indicate the explosion was accidental and then used to support what they wanted to do anyway.
Regarding the Cole, while I am not saying they would not lie to us, until the evidence shows otherwise I believe things happened the way they said.
Tomndebb: That’s what I wanted to hear about. The outward bending on the edges was what struck me as odd, but the retracting gas cloud makes sense. And it doesn’t help when our moderator Mr. Consistency starts calling people conspiracy kooks.
As for the relevency of the USS Maine, I mentioned it because it’s the perfect example of when the government lied to the public to achieve it’s ends. [Rant warning] The media (William Hearst, et al) was fully complacent in the USS Maine scandal as well. They started declaring the explosion an unprovoked act of war before anyone had any idea what had happened, and when even the captain of the Maine thought it was just an accident. BTW, they also started printing horrendous stories about the Spanish doing monsterous things to the Cubans to incite war fever. The stories were almost all completely false. There are clear parallels between this and US involvement in Iraq and Kosovo. The Iraqis did not take Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leave them to die, or cut off women’s breasts, or most of the other things they were accused of. And there were no concentration camps in Kosovo or Serbia during the Balkan wars. That photo of the Kosovars behind a barbed wire fence was fake. It was a normal refugee camp where people could come and go as they pleased. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding it. The barbed wire was surrounding a tool shed or some similar structure that was on private property next to the refugee camp. The photographer was a pro-NATO propagandist who fully intended to take a misleading photo. Also, everyone heard about the atrocities committed by the Serbs, but what about the atrocities comitted by the Kosovars, or the Bosnians, or the Croatians? The news made it seem like the big bad Serbians were beating up a bunch of helpless people, when in fact everyone involved had alot of blood on their hands. And that includes the NATO forces. Sorry about the ranting, but our government does lie to us sometimes, and the media is not always willing to expose the truth.
[/rant warning]
** Diceman.** Perhaps if you’d asked your question in that way instead? “I have some confusion. Some of the pictures from the Cole show bending outward. If the blast came from outside the ship, what is the explanation?” vs. leaping to the assumption that immediately after this explosion our government stepped in with accusations of terrorism.
Questions are always a good way of learning.
>> Could the US Navy be covering up an embarassing
>> accident by calling it a terrorist attack?
>> Does anyone have any more info about the attack, or this theory?
I have already said I don’t think this is the case but I cannot see how the question is wrong in any way.
I can’t believe that main engine fuel would have exploded in that way as it is very similar to diesel.It would have to be sprayed into the air at high pressure forming a very fine mist.
In some ship designs magazines are surrounded by fuel tanks which are meant to flood the magazine with diesel should an explosion put a hole all the way into it.
The only fuel on ships that could explode in such a manner would be AVCAT which is used for the helicopters and the tanks for that are usually at the other end of the ship, beneath the hanger area.
Torpedo fuel(OTTO fuel) might do it but it is only kept within the torpedo itself, there are no shipborne tanks as there is no need to fill up any equipment.
The explosive agent in shells and missiles (amatol torpex) is very stable and takes some setting off, the detonators will not usually arm until they have undergone a period of extreme accelaration such as being fired from a gun.
The chances of spontaneous explosion are pretty remote.
Fire in the magazine is unlikely as there is a very comprehensive system of high pressure sprinklers and flood valves.
The only things likely to go off in an unpredictable way are generally certain types of aircraft mounted missiles which have been known to be set off by radio emissions but you can imagine that this is a very rare occurance.
To elaborate on what casdave said, fuel does not explode. Burst into flames maybe, but explode, no. The reason is that fuel doesn’t have everything that it needs for the chemical reaction to take place:
2C8H18 + 25O2 => 16CO2 + 18H2O
You have octane (which is not exactly diesel, but close enough) on the left, plus lots and lots of oxygen, to form carbon dioxide and water. So for fuel to burn, it has to get lots of oxygen from the air. It can’t explode because there’s not enough oxygen available in the immediate vicinity, so it burns at a pace slow enough to let the heat rising draw in fresh oxygen from the side.
Explosives, on the other hand, have everything they need right inside. All it takes is a little energy to start a chain reaction.
Yeah, the Aden harbor is teeming with little boats filled with explosives which cling to visiting American ships.
If there are any military, I’d like to know: are any military objects, like land bases, ships, silos, barraks,etc. should be guarded at all times or anyone is allowed to approach them at will and do whatever they are pleased? It may be difficult to guard a big military base in the woods, but a few cleverly placed guards can observe the perimeter of any ship and keep anyone at a specified distance. I thought that military security rules are written in some kind of regulations and that any stationary object, like a moored sheep, is guarded 24/7, even on high seas?
