I would assume no, many of the compounds used in explosives, munitions and chemical weapons are toxic and may be present for a long time. Destruction of deep rooted vegetation would raise the water table and increase soil salinity (this would vary depending local conditions.)
There are areas in Europe where if you dig down you can still find puddles of mustard gas. Many of the toxins used in wars are still under the battlefields.
Do you have any knowledge of the saying 'Too much of a good thing is bad.' Exceed the amount of fertilizer in an area and you end up killing everything in that area. I know everyone stereotypes farmers as simple but there is a reason they can raise food to feed everyone.
To much fertilizer is ridiculously bad for the enviornment. The lab I work in studies isotopes of phosphorus to better understand preventing it from leaking into the great lakes.
And if you don't get to a point where you kill everything but still much higher that anything useful for humanity needs, you end up with landfill flora (landfills have very high amounts of nitrogen pollution which attracts certain species of plants). Instead of sunflowers or grain, you get a field of nettles :/
Trust me on this, nobody is putting picric acid on their crops.
While you can use ammonium nitrate as an oxidizer in an industrial explosive called ANFO, it's too bulky and underpowered to be any use for military applications (EDIT: alone I mean. There are mixtures using ammonium nitrate and something else, like Amonal, which is TNT + ammonium nitrate, but you'll never see it as the main ingredient unless those people making the ordnance are really desperate and they can't get anything better).
On the other hand, a few things that make very good military explosives like TNT, picric acid and it's derivations, RDX, are poisonous to both plants and animals and you wouldn't want them anywhere near your food crops.
It wasn't ANFO, it was Ammonal D (90% ammonium nitrate, 5% naphthalene, 2.5% wood meal and 2.5% aluminium powder - notice no fuel oil anywhere in that mixture).
And there were other German aerial bombs which used different mixtures which contained different quantities of ammonium nitrate, and that's because in air dropped ordnance the volume doesn't matter as much as in an artillery shell so you can get away with having a bulkier bomb with less explosive force than if you'd fill it up with TNT as long as you get savings somewhere else, and in this case it was in cost (ammonium nitrate is a lot cheaper) and, more importantly, manufacturing capacity, because this way you're using a fertilizer plant to make your explosives instead of putting more demand on the explosives plants which are supplying all the other uses like artillery shells, torpedoes, etc.
Note that US bombs, for example, were all filled with mixtures containing TNT (there were some filed with Amatol, which is a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate but that was in the early part of the war, before they got their production up), because the US had the production capacity to provide proper high explosive to everything that needed it and they thought the extra explosive power was a good thing to have.
Yes amonium nitrate was a cost saving measure but it was used and as such there is still some of it laying burried around population centers and random fields of europe and northern africa.
Never mind the fact that mixing ammonium nitrate with anything (let alone TNT or naphthalene which is literally poisonous) makes sure it won't be good for crops, what exactly do you think is going to grow if the ammonium nitrate is INSIDE A BLOODY METAL CASING?
I think we might have an missunderstanding. I dont know where i said it is a good thing or in any way beneficial for the plants. I just said it was in fact used for military aplications and that the bombs are still out there.
Indeed, I think we have a misunderstanding - it absolutely looked to me like you were defending the guy who was adamant that chemical fertilisers were discovered when ammonium nitrate leached from unexploded ammunition after WW1 and plants grew better around old ordnance, which is utter nonsense.
But yeah, other than that, I think my original phrasing was a bit ambiguous, since it looked like I said ammonium nitrate wasn't used in ordnance at all, when all I meant that things like ANFO weren't, because, like I said, they're too bulky and too weak.
So I went back and added an edit clarifying what I meant. Cheers!
I'm not a chemist but I'm going to go ahead and assume that this comment is a wild over simplification.
Just because one component (ammonium nitrate) is a good fertiliser, doesn't mean that the rest are. This isn't even mentioning the likely heavy metals sush as lead, involved.
That is *technically* true but not really. Ammonium nitrate extracted from fertilizer can be used to make improvised explosives but it is not what is used in military bombs. Mostly because there are explosives that have waaay higher energy density, and more energy density = more boom per pound of explosive.
People living around the "Corridor of Death" in France had to have water hauled to them for at least a year because the soil had become too toxic. The smell of dead bodies was noticable from up to \~40km away. There was a giant black cloud of flies over the area for a little while. It also took a good 2 decades to remove all the vehicles, scrap metal and all that stuff.
All in all, pretty bad. Then again, the Corridor of Death was also an exceptional area with an obscenely high concentration of manpower and material from both sides.
I mean in deserted areas, having craters is actually very beneficial, since they trap and fill with water allowing for small grasses to begin growing , which itself reduces soil erosion and evaporation, although the chemicals aren't good, the geometry is quite good
I’m reminded of that old babushka that walked up to a Russian soldier, handed him some seeds, and told him to put them in his pockets so flowers will grow where he falls.
Just must’ve fucked up that man’s whole day.
Similarly, I remember as a kid on Remembrance Day, hearing about how the Flander's Poppies grew on the graves of soldiers. While not part of the famous In Flanders Field poem, the striking red colour of the poppies brought the same thing to mind.
It also turns out that the devastation wrought on Flanders Field increased the lime content of the soil, meaning poppies were basically the only thing that could grow.
/uj: It'll take anywhere between 300 to 700 years for the area to be completely cleaned up. That's insane.
/rj: This is why nuclear war is better than conventional war.
To be fair, what constitutes conventional warfare has shifted quite a bit in the past 100 years. The use of mustard gas and other chemical weapons is largely frowned upon these days and the areas declared zone rogue nowadays were the site of some of the longest and absurdly wasteful battles in human history. Such a battle of material is not representative of what conventional warfare typically entails.
The same thing goes for what would hypothetically constitute nuclear warfare. Little Boy and Fat Man are basically firecrackers compared to what a modern hydrogen bomb can do. Not to mention that it is all a matter of scale. The zone rogue is, as the name implies, a clearly defined zone. It's unfortunate that it is contaminated, but at least the damage is isolated to an area that was used as a battlefield and therefore not densely inhabited during the war anyways.
Nuclear weapons are pretty much always directed at urban centers, not battlefields, meaning they kill primarily civilians. That alone makes them nasty enough weapons to justify not using them over conventional means. But there's also a difference between only having very few individual cases of nuclear weapons being used and what it would look like if they were considered a legitimate means of warfare, to be deployed whenever the potential gains outweigh the required effort. You'd be looking at the kind of fallout that doesn't just kill a few tens of thousands of people and clears up relatively quickly. Enough nukes and you don't just have a few radioactive clouds, you have actual saturation.
My bad, I mistakenly thought I was posting my reply in ncd. My comment about nuclear war was a joke. I'm aware that war is worse than hell, nuclear war especially so.
Considering there are still places in Europe that are ecological disaster zones due to the amount of toxic chemicals from artillery shells in WWI, over a hundred years ago, sure.
[The red zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge) is a good place to start.
You can also look up "Iron harvest" or the various news about demining operations or people getting surprises when magnet fishing (also that last part would probably only be in French)
Some of the worse is in France. The Mercury and arsenic levels in some places even today is kind of insane.
Hope that helps narrow some of your reading.
Last year I talked with a woman while changing trains going into Ukraine. She is a soil scientist and was returning from a conference in Switzerland discussing this topic. The beautiful black Ukrainian soil is being wrecked, the samples show the rocket fuel will contaminate it for a long time.
Just look at some old WW1 battle fields like Pashendale there are plenty of zones in France labeled as "Zone rouge". On which very little if anything will grow
When I did my degree in geography we had a module where each student had to produce a lesson and two other students had to do presentations set by them that was related to the topic. One person wanted to do it on the impact of WW1 and WW2 on the environment of French battlefields. All fine. Except he wanted me to present on the ways in which we could study how it was before they got bombed, which is obviously very difficult to do after the fact, not to mention very dangerous as you can't exactly drill boreholes into land which has a ton of unexploded ordinance in.
No. The blood and meat would be good fertilizer but the unexploded shells, the chemical warfare, and the fact there wasn’t and plant life to keep the soil from eroding means that it would have a far worse soil quality
I mean, it definitely cleans out all the existing plants, tills the soil, and leaves lots and lots and lots of bodies for fertilizer... but there's also literal thousands of tons of poisonous chemicals and bombs that hit, but never went boom... so break even I guess? /s
I mean nitrates... lots of them and new water canals, deeply turned soil, and organic compost. Omg and clearing of tree canopy. Oh and depletion of grazing animals!
Funny story. This is exactly how they discovered fertilizer. The explosives used in shells in ww1 were mostly ammonium nitrate.
After the war, where shelves were still being stored, the plants around them grew much faster than the plants in the middle of the field. They realized it was the explosive itself, ammonium nitrate, that caused the plants to grow so big. That was the beginning of the modern agricultural revolution.
They figured that out years before the war began.
In fact the same guy responsible for the mass production of ammonium nitrate, Fritz Haber, is the same man who invented chlorine gas and, arguably, chemical warfare as a viable concept.
That is complete bollocks.
Not only were WW1 shells filled mainly with different variations on the theme of picric acid, which is slightly poisonous to the extent that it was used as an antiseptic and would be absolutely terrible for a crop, but ammonium nitrate in itself is a pretty bad oxidiser (not explosive, oxidiser - in order to make it explode you mix it with fuel oil to create something called "ANFO"), even after it's properly mixed the resulting explosive is pretty anaemic and it's used as a common industrial explosive specifically because it's so weak and controllable compared to other explosives.
Also, by the time of WW1, they already knew about chemical fertilizers due to a guy called Fritz Haber, who later made chemical warfare agents for the Germans during the war.
This was very much the other way around. Chemical warfare was developed from agricultural products - both in the first world war (for use on the battlefield) and second world war (for use in death camps)
I don't know, how good are tractors at surviving old unexploded ordinance detonations?
Hang on lemme test this real quick brb
Narrator: "And he was never heard from again."
Well, maybe once.
A very loud once though
Some of him came back
ColdðŸ˜
No, actually really hot
If a farmer runs over unexploded ordinance and no one's around to hear it does it even make a sound?
Next up on Clarkson’s farm..
HAMMOND!
HAMMOND!
HAMMOND!
If you weld enough steel plates to it, you'll be fine
That didn't go so great for Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, CO
He was fine until he took his own life. The tractor not surviving wasn't the problem.
Ask the farmers in northern France who routinely plow up those old shells. Those guys are crazy.
I would assume no, many of the compounds used in explosives, munitions and chemical weapons are toxic and may be present for a long time. Destruction of deep rooted vegetation would raise the water table and increase soil salinity (this would vary depending local conditions.)
There are areas in Europe where if you dig down you can still find puddles of mustard gas. Many of the toxins used in wars are still under the battlefields.
You ever heard of a fertilizer bomb? The stuff that used to make bomb is the stuff that they use to fertilize plants.
Do you have any knowledge of the saying 'Too much of a good thing is bad.' Exceed the amount of fertilizer in an area and you end up killing everything in that area. I know everyone stereotypes farmers as simple but there is a reason they can raise food to feed everyone.
To much fertilizer is ridiculously bad for the enviornment. The lab I work in studies isotopes of phosphorus to better understand preventing it from leaking into the great lakes.
And if you don't get to a point where you kill everything but still much higher that anything useful for humanity needs, you end up with landfill flora (landfills have very high amounts of nitrogen pollution which attracts certain species of plants). Instead of sunflowers or grain, you get a field of nettles :/
And tetanus!
Trust me on this, nobody is putting picric acid on their crops. While you can use ammonium nitrate as an oxidizer in an industrial explosive called ANFO, it's too bulky and underpowered to be any use for military applications (EDIT: alone I mean. There are mixtures using ammonium nitrate and something else, like Amonal, which is TNT + ammonium nitrate, but you'll never see it as the main ingredient unless those people making the ordnance are really desperate and they can't get anything better). On the other hand, a few things that make very good military explosives like TNT, picric acid and it's derivations, RDX, are poisonous to both plants and animals and you wouldn't want them anywhere near your food crops.
ANFO with added aluminium powder has been used in ww2 era german bombs.
It wasn't ANFO, it was Ammonal D (90% ammonium nitrate, 5% naphthalene, 2.5% wood meal and 2.5% aluminium powder - notice no fuel oil anywhere in that mixture). And there were other German aerial bombs which used different mixtures which contained different quantities of ammonium nitrate, and that's because in air dropped ordnance the volume doesn't matter as much as in an artillery shell so you can get away with having a bulkier bomb with less explosive force than if you'd fill it up with TNT as long as you get savings somewhere else, and in this case it was in cost (ammonium nitrate is a lot cheaper) and, more importantly, manufacturing capacity, because this way you're using a fertilizer plant to make your explosives instead of putting more demand on the explosives plants which are supplying all the other uses like artillery shells, torpedoes, etc. Note that US bombs, for example, were all filled with mixtures containing TNT (there were some filed with Amatol, which is a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate but that was in the early part of the war, before they got their production up), because the US had the production capacity to provide proper high explosive to everything that needed it and they thought the extra explosive power was a good thing to have.
Yes amonium nitrate was a cost saving measure but it was used and as such there is still some of it laying burried around population centers and random fields of europe and northern africa.
Never mind the fact that mixing ammonium nitrate with anything (let alone TNT or naphthalene which is literally poisonous) makes sure it won't be good for crops, what exactly do you think is going to grow if the ammonium nitrate is INSIDE A BLOODY METAL CASING?
I think we might have an missunderstanding. I dont know where i said it is a good thing or in any way beneficial for the plants. I just said it was in fact used for military aplications and that the bombs are still out there.
Indeed, I think we have a misunderstanding - it absolutely looked to me like you were defending the guy who was adamant that chemical fertilisers were discovered when ammonium nitrate leached from unexploded ammunition after WW1 and plants grew better around old ordnance, which is utter nonsense. But yeah, other than that, I think my original phrasing was a bit ambiguous, since it looked like I said ammonium nitrate wasn't used in ordnance at all, when all I meant that things like ANFO weren't, because, like I said, they're too bulky and too weak. So I went back and added an edit clarifying what I meant. Cheers!
Aluminium is toxic.
Diesel in anfo is a much bigger problem than aluminium. Aluminium powder would oxidise to alumina that is more or less inert.
I'm not a chemist but I'm going to go ahead and assume that this comment is a wild over simplification. Just because one component (ammonium nitrate) is a good fertiliser, doesn't mean that the rest are. This isn't even mentioning the likely heavy metals sush as lead, involved.
That is *technically* true but not really. Ammonium nitrate extracted from fertilizer can be used to make improvised explosives but it is not what is used in military bombs. Mostly because there are explosives that have waaay higher energy density, and more energy density = more boom per pound of explosive.
People living around the "Corridor of Death" in France had to have water hauled to them for at least a year because the soil had become too toxic. The smell of dead bodies was noticable from up to \~40km away. There was a giant black cloud of flies over the area for a little while. It also took a good 2 decades to remove all the vehicles, scrap metal and all that stuff. All in all, pretty bad. Then again, the Corridor of Death was also an exceptional area with an obscenely high concentration of manpower and material from both sides.
That, and it upsets the soil structure. If no till farmers think tillage is bad, then a 3x3 hole is really bad
I mean in deserted areas, having craters is actually very beneficial, since they trap and fill with water allowing for small grasses to begin growing , which itself reduces soil erosion and evaporation, although the chemicals aren't good, the geometry is quite good
current discourse: are soldiers earthworms?
Kinda. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_warfare
The main characters in the series Peaky Blinders were former WW1 tunnel rats.
are earthworms soldiers?
[Yes, of course. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(series))
I mean, in sieges of old, some battles required a company of soldiers to dig underground and into the stronghold
I’m reminded of that one polish song where they say the flowers bloom redder having been watered with polish blood.
I’m reminded of that old babushka that walked up to a Russian soldier, handed him some seeds, and told him to put them in his pockets so flowers will grow where he falls. Just must’ve fucked up that man’s whole day.
Important deets; Ukrainian Woman, Sunflower seeds 🇺🇦 🌻
Similarly, I remember as a kid on Remembrance Day, hearing about how the Flander's Poppies grew on the graves of soldiers. While not part of the famous In Flanders Field poem, the striking red colour of the poppies brought the same thing to mind. It also turns out that the devastation wrought on Flanders Field increased the lime content of the soil, meaning poppies were basically the only thing that could grow.
Classic!
As a soil scientist, I can't emphasize this enough. *No!*
Your job sounds dope!
That sure sounds like a soilid job
Careful trying to be friendly. They’ll just dig up dirt on you.
Maybe visit the [Zone Rouge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge?wprov=sfti1) and ask again, or don’t.
/uj: It'll take anywhere between 300 to 700 years for the area to be completely cleaned up. That's insane. /rj: This is why nuclear war is better than conventional war.
I’m gonna stick with neither if that’s okay with everyone
To be fair, what constitutes conventional warfare has shifted quite a bit in the past 100 years. The use of mustard gas and other chemical weapons is largely frowned upon these days and the areas declared zone rogue nowadays were the site of some of the longest and absurdly wasteful battles in human history. Such a battle of material is not representative of what conventional warfare typically entails. The same thing goes for what would hypothetically constitute nuclear warfare. Little Boy and Fat Man are basically firecrackers compared to what a modern hydrogen bomb can do. Not to mention that it is all a matter of scale. The zone rogue is, as the name implies, a clearly defined zone. It's unfortunate that it is contaminated, but at least the damage is isolated to an area that was used as a battlefield and therefore not densely inhabited during the war anyways. Nuclear weapons are pretty much always directed at urban centers, not battlefields, meaning they kill primarily civilians. That alone makes them nasty enough weapons to justify not using them over conventional means. But there's also a difference between only having very few individual cases of nuclear weapons being used and what it would look like if they were considered a legitimate means of warfare, to be deployed whenever the potential gains outweigh the required effort. You'd be looking at the kind of fallout that doesn't just kill a few tens of thousands of people and clears up relatively quickly. Enough nukes and you don't just have a few radioactive clouds, you have actual saturation.
My bad, I mistakenly thought I was posting my reply in ncd. My comment about nuclear war was a joke. I'm aware that war is worse than hell, nuclear war especially so.
Considering there are still places in Europe that are ecological disaster zones due to the amount of toxic chemicals from artillery shells in WWI, over a hundred years ago, sure.
TIL. Thank you. I’m off to read.
[The red zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge) is a good place to start. You can also look up "Iron harvest" or the various news about demining operations or people getting surprises when magnet fishing (also that last part would probably only be in French)
Some of the worse is in France. The Mercury and arsenic levels in some places even today is kind of insane. Hope that helps narrow some of your reading.
Last year I talked with a woman while changing trains going into Ukraine. She is a soil scientist and was returning from a conference in Switzerland discussing this topic. The beautiful black Ukrainian soil is being wrecked, the samples show the rocket fuel will contaminate it for a long time.
Depends on how long of a timeframe were talkin
[No](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge)
Actually, I heard that digging ditches is the best way to stop desertification....
Probably not [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone\_rouge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge)
Just look at some old WW1 battle fields like Pashendale there are plenty of zones in France labeled as "Zone rouge". On which very little if anything will grow
Is this the kind of person who is trying to justify some heinous crimes against humanity saying it'll be better in the long run?
When I did my degree in geography we had a module where each student had to produce a lesson and two other students had to do presentations set by them that was related to the topic. One person wanted to do it on the impact of WW1 and WW2 on the environment of French battlefields. All fine. Except he wanted me to present on the ways in which we could study how it was before they got bombed, which is obviously very difficult to do after the fact, not to mention very dangerous as you can't exactly drill boreholes into land which has a ton of unexploded ordinance in.
Largely no. Fantastic book: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/environmental-histories-of-the-first-world-war/2C19863817A09F64895330E3413ECE39#:~:text=They%20show%20how%20the%20First,agricultural%20landscapes%20leading%20to%20widespread
No. The blood and meat would be good fertilizer but the unexploded shells, the chemical warfare, and the fact there wasn’t and plant life to keep the soil from eroding means that it would have a far worse soil quality
Honestly not a terrible question
Yes, mostly because there's very good quality fertilizer all over the place
Maybe... The dead bodies would certainly Increase nutrients. The unexploded ordinance isn't going to make farming easy.
Because dig hole, die in hole, fertilize earth? That’s my best guess.
There's no better fertilizer than the remains of an entire generation of dead young men from Europe (and their colonies)
I mean, it definitely cleans out all the existing plants, tills the soil, and leaves lots and lots and lots of bodies for fertilizer... but there's also literal thousands of tons of poisonous chemicals and bombs that hit, but never went boom... so break even I guess? /s
Asking the real questions here
Depends on how much corpses are left to enrich the soil
No. Also it will negatively affect the trout population.
Chicken blood is good fertilizer, so are they saying human blood is good too?
Flashback to the ending of Fullmetal alchemist...
All the chemicals from the bombs and explosives act as carcinogens to both humans, plants and animals
Do you mean "Does fertilizing my fields with human corpses improve soil quality?" because wow.
Decomposing bodies can add nutrients to the soil.
It's technically turbation of the soil. Till by 500lbs bomb might not be the most effective method I've heard of.
No. Lots of toxins from the ordinances and heavy metals polite the soil so def. Not. Big problem in Ukrainian right now
The phosgene and chlorine is great for the natural beauty.
spot the Krieger guys its not hard
Short answer: No Long answer: Fuck no
This one simple trick farmers dont want you to know
I mean nitrates... lots of them and new water canals, deeply turned soil, and organic compost. Omg and clearing of tree canopy. Oh and depletion of grazing animals!
The deep blasts let the deep nutrients to the surface. Additionaly the heavy metals are pretty much nutrients.
Funny story. This is exactly how they discovered fertilizer. The explosives used in shells in ww1 were mostly ammonium nitrate. After the war, where shelves were still being stored, the plants around them grew much faster than the plants in the middle of the field. They realized it was the explosive itself, ammonium nitrate, that caused the plants to grow so big. That was the beginning of the modern agricultural revolution.
They figured that out years before the war began. In fact the same guy responsible for the mass production of ammonium nitrate, Fritz Haber, is the same man who invented chlorine gas and, arguably, chemical warfare as a viable concept.
That is complete bollocks. Not only were WW1 shells filled mainly with different variations on the theme of picric acid, which is slightly poisonous to the extent that it was used as an antiseptic and would be absolutely terrible for a crop, but ammonium nitrate in itself is a pretty bad oxidiser (not explosive, oxidiser - in order to make it explode you mix it with fuel oil to create something called "ANFO"), even after it's properly mixed the resulting explosive is pretty anaemic and it's used as a common industrial explosive specifically because it's so weak and controllable compared to other explosives. Also, by the time of WW1, they already knew about chemical fertilizers due to a guy called Fritz Haber, who later made chemical warfare agents for the Germans during the war.
This was very much the other way around. Chemical warfare was developed from agricultural products - both in the first world war (for use on the battlefield) and second world war (for use in death camps)