Explosive Remnants of War

When we consider possible targets in the context of system design we may group them into three broad classes, all of which may be considered as unexploded ordnance, UXO. Classes 1 and 2, and sometimes all three, are termed explosive remnants of war, ERW by the United Nations, UN. 

The original need that led to development of trace chemical sensors for explosives was the need to restore land that had been abandoned to public or private use. This land was abandoned because of the presence of, or perception of the presence of, mines or unexploded ordnance, often called UXO. These potentially lethal items could be the result of some earlier armed conflict. In that case it is now common to refer to them as explosive remnants of war, or ERW. In some cases the war that left its remnants was concluded many years ago. Dangerous ERW are still found on World War I battlefields, and occasionally on... 

The United Nations has adopted the term explosive remnants of war to describe a variety of items that includes mines and unexploded ordnance. 

Explosive-related chemical Explosive remnants of war Electrostatic discharge Explosives trace detection Explosive vapor detection (U.S.) Federal Aviation Administration Field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometry Fertilizer-Grade AN (ammonium nitrate)... 

Searle, W.R, Moody, D.H., 1985. Explosive remnants of war at sea technical aspects of disposal. In Westing, A.H. (Ed.), Explosive Remnants of War, Mitigating the Environmental Effect. Sipri, Taylor Francis, London, pp. 61-69. 

When World War I ended in 1918, over 16 million acres of France were cordoned off due to the danger of unexploded ordnance. Today, more than 80 years after the conflict, many chemical bombs and shells still remain scattered in the former No Mans Land in France, requiring special engineers— demineurs—to dig up and destroy countless munitions posing hazards to local inhabitants and farmers. Most of this ordnance contains high explosive, but some may also have remnants of CW agents such as mustard. 

In the early thirties of the last century Baade and Zwicky conjectured in their studies of supernova explosions that supemovae represent a transition from ordinary stars to compact objects, whose size is an order of magnitude smaller than the size of a white dwarf. At that time it was already known that the atomic nucleus consists of neutrons and it was clear that the density of the remnant objects must be of the same order as the nuclear density. Baade and Zwicky predicted that a supernova explosions will result in objects composed of closely packed neutrons (neutron stars). Prior to the beginning of the second World War (1939) a number of theoretical works by Landau, Oppenheimer, Volkoff and Snider showed, that indeed objects could exist with sizes about 10 km and masses about a solar mass. The density in these objects is about the nuclear saturation density and they basically consist of neutrons with a small amount of protons and electrons. The studies of neutron stars were subsequently stopped most likely due to the engagement of the nuclear scientists in the development of the nuclear bomb both in the West and the East. 

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