Arms experts estimate, the Beirut bombing on August 4 was more powerful than the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal.

In his report published by the American "Business Insider" website, the writer Ryan Becquerel said that the explosive power of the Beirut Port accident is at least twice as large as the GBU-43 / B bomb mother, It is the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal, with an explosive yield of about 11 tons.

The massive explosion that occurred in the port of Beirut led to a large destruction in the capital, and caused severe damage to the buildings, killing more than 100 people and injuring thousands. The author emphasized that the videos that circulated on the Internet show successive explosions and a red cloud rising in the air, compared by some to the mushroom cloud caused by the nuclear bomb.

The Lebanese authorities announced that the explosion occurred inside a warehouse that contained 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate, which was stored improperly.

Massive explosive force

It was estimated that the force of the explosion was equal to an earthquake of 3.3 degrees on the Richter scale, and its aftershocks reached great distances. The writer quoted experts as saying that the "explosive return" of the Beirut accident had probably reached several hundreds of tons of "TNT".

According to Geoffrey Lewis, a nuclear and conventional weapons expert 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 rapidity of shock waves, seismic energy, and the size of The hole that made it.

The writer confirmed that the Beirut Port bombing force was at least two times greater than the "Umm Al-Qanabul" bombing force that the US military used for the first time in April 2017 against ISIS in Afghanistan.

Beirut accident and the nuclear bomb

The writer pointed out that the explosion that took place last Tuesday in the Lebanese capital was so strong that some residents believed that the city was subjected to a nuclear attack, and this belief reinforced the towering cloud of mushrooms that rose throughout.

But he clarified that experts estimate that the "explosive yield" of the Beirut accident is between one and two kilotons, which is much less than the yield of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, which was estimated at 15 kilotons.

According to disarmament expert Kingston Rive, the "explosive return" of the Beirut accident cannot be compared to what could be caused by the US "B-61" nuclear bomb, despite the enormity of the damage witnessed in the Lebanese capital.

He explained that "the nuclear explosion would have been much worse, because it would have had significant thermal and radiative effects."