Apparently, Ukrainian drones pushed through and started a chain reaction.
Explosions reportedly continued for hours, and authorities evacuated nearby settlements. Initial reports indicate that the site, previously protected by one of Russia’s densest air defense networks, suffered catastrophic damage.
I’m pretty sure competent militaries store their munitions in networks of dozens if not hundreds of earthen bunkers per site, specifically so shit like this can’t happen.
264 kilotons is a fuckload of bombs.
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A bullet train, you say?
!fuckcars@lemmy.world breaks down the door
That’s a very nice way to say “embezzle”.
In their infinite wisdom they apparently stored a bunch of ammunitions out in the open.
Russia has a long history of open storage at these sites. They also lost a ton of bunkers a few months ago at other sites. So they likely did not have much of an option, and they chose open store it at their “best defended” base.
I personally would bet that site was overstocked as it was likely the primary ammo dump by default. All of the newly manufactured missiles and shells going there directly from the factories.
It could hold that much, but according to Ukraine it was 105000 tons that exploded. Huge success though.
I’m making a note here.
Assuming I’m looking at the right thing on google maps, it does seem to be a lot of earthen bunkers with berms separating them. There are also quite a few free standing buildings scattered around.
I looked at Hawthorne Army Depot (US) to compare, and that one is a lot less dense, but it’s absolutely gigantic.
They may not have enough manpower to guard a more distributed site, especially if they’re afraid of internal groups seizing some of it.
That’s like ten small nukes.
But you can save money by putting all of them in one place
I guess we don’t have an accurate source on what percentage of munitions his was.
I would confidently assume 100% of it was munitions
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I think they meant 100% of the explosions were munitions, not 100% of the munitions exploded. 'Twas a joke.
Competent being the key word in that sentence, and not an accurate one based on the last few years of intel.
I assume that bunkers protect you from a chain reaction, but that at some point the explosion is big enough that a chain reaction is exactly what you get.
This definitely seems like it would have been big enough to cause a chain reaction (and/or big enough to show that a chain reaction happened). If so, I wonder what fraction of bunkers exploded. I’m glad we live in an age of civilian satellites, so it’s probably just a matter of time before we get to see the damage for ourselves.