According to estimates by weapons experts, the explosion in Beirut on August 4 was many times more powerful than the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal.
In his report published by the American Business Insider website, writer Ryan Pickrell said that the explosive power of the Beirut Port incident is at least twice as strong as the GBU-43 / B bomb, which is called the mother of bombs. It is the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the arsenal of the United States of America, with an explosive yield of about 11 tons.
The massive explosion at the Beirut port resulted in great damage to the capital and severely damaged buildings, killing more than a hundred people and injuring thousands. The writer emphasized that the videos that spread on the Internet show successive explosions and a red cloud high in the air, which some compared to the mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear bomb.
The Lebanese authorities announced that the explosion took place inside a warehouse containing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, which was stored improperly.
It was estimated that the force of the explosion was equivalent to an earthquake of 3.3 magnitude on the Richter scale, with aftershocks reaching great distances. The writer quoted experts as saying that the "explosive return" of the Beirut accident was probably several hundreds of tons of "TNT".
According to estimates by Geoffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear and conventional weapons at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the "explosive yield" of the Beirut Port accident ranges between 200 and 500 tons, by calculating the force of the explosion, the velocity of shock waves, the seismic energy and the volume The hole he made.
The writer emphasized that the power of the Beirut port explosion was at least twice that of the "mother of bombs" explosive power that the US military used for the first time in April 2017 against ISIS in Afghanistan.
The writer pointed out that the explosion in the Lebanese capital last Tuesday was so powerful that some residents believed that the city had been subjected to a nuclear attack, and this belief was reinforced by the towering mushroom cloud that rose around.
However, he clarified that experts' estimates indicate that the "explosive yield" of the Beirut accident is between one and two kilotons, much less than the yield of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, which was estimated at 15 kilotons.
According to the expert on disarmament, Kingston Rife, the "explosive return" of the Beirut accident cannot be compared to what the US nuclear bomb "B-61" could cause, despite the enormity of the damage that the Lebanese capital suffered.
He explained that "the nuclear explosion would have become much worse, because it would have caused great thermal and radiological effects."
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