A massive explosion occurred in a port in Beirut, Lebanon. The images of the explosion were temporarily spread on social media and, understandably, the videos are horrible. A smoking plant near the water crackles before exploding and spraying a nearby building.
The explosion happened just a few hours ago and everyone is looking for an explanation, which we’ll actually get soon. But that didn’t stop others, some with many supporters, from savagely speculating that it’s a nuclear explosion or a terrorist attack. We are witnessing the birth of a new conspiracy theory that takes place in a genuine time.
The photographs are amazing. There’s a surprise wave and a mushroom cloud, which occurs in nuclear explosions. But the Beirut explosion is not atomic, according to experts who would actually know it.
The explosion in Beirut cannot be a nuclear bomb because, among other reasons, it is too small. “It’s not a nuclear weapon, not even small,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asian Non-Proliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies, told Motherboard in an email. “You can see in the videos that there’s an explosion or a chimney before the big kaboom.”
It’s still too early to say what really happened in Beirut. The Lebanese army told a freelance journalist on the Beirut floor that it was imaginable that the chimneys stored in the domain would stick to the chimney and hit a nearby saltpeter warehouse. Lebanon’s director general of public security told the BBC that the explosion was related to “powerful explosives that were confiscated some time ago.”
Other Lebanese state resources said the explosion was related to fireworks. Massive explosions from fireworks factories are not uncommon. There were two last month, one in China and one in Turkey. The thing is, we won’t know what happened for a while.
We can, however, be damn sure that it wasn’t a nuke. But that’s not stopping some from speculating wildly.
Palmer is a former ESPN journalist with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. He deleted the tweet, but not before several thousand people retwed it. Several marginal Internet sites are already reporting that what happened in Beirut was a nuclear attack. One story claims, without source or confirmation, that Israel bombed a Hezzbolah weapons site in the port. “Our assessment is a guess and we’re waiting for a word from our nuclear expert, Jeff Smith of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” the online page said.
Making such a hypothesis is highly irresponsible. This is how conspiracy theories are born and propagated. In talks this afternoon with Open Source Intelligence and nuclear experts, everyone called for caution. Real experts flock to the data, reminding me that they are unsure and that only percentage of their most productive assumptions based on the available data.
Meanwhile…
A mushroom cloud is only an indicator of an explosion, not a definitive sign that a nuclear blast occurred. “Contrary to a common misconception, the shape of the mushroom cloud does not depend on the nuclear or thermonuclear component…a massive detonation of chemical explosives would produce the same effect,” David Dearborn, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory told Scientific American in 1999.
When an oil refinery exploded in Texas in 2008, it produced a cloud of fungi. The same was the case with the 2013 explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. Last year, an explosion in Philadelphia produced a massive cloud of fungi. “Fungal clouds form in all explosions; they stay much longer for fats,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute, said on Twitter. “You can see by the color of the explosion (dark red/orange) which is not hot enough to be nuclear (starting in white/yellow, even small nuclear weapons).”
Evidence otherwise will probably not convince others who need that what happened in Beirut was a nutransparent explosion or some kind of attack. The timing is much better. The anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing is in two days, Lebanon faces several internal crises and photographs of the Beirut explosion are captivating and horrific. It’s the best recipe for a conspiracy theory. The New York Police Counterterrorism Unit, for no transparent reason, tweeted that it’s “monitoring the incident,” I guess we all are.
“These other people don’t need to be convinced. Those of us who examine nuclear weapons can come back again and again until we’re sad that this isn’t a nuclear explosion,” Lewis said. “People are taking over the ‘mushroom cloud’ that you see of all kinds
explosions There are none of the phenomena we would expect to see and the color is absolutely incorrect. In addition, a nuclear explosion would lead to radiation detections. It’s like other people are shouting “OMG is Lamborghini” and pointing to a sales truck. I don’t know what to say other than “No, that’s not the case.”