B1 · Intermediate
13 min
armed conflictscience and technologypost-war reconstructionhumanitarian issues
The Bomb That Waits
La Bomba que Espera
Fourteen members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard are killed when unexploded ordnance detonates in Zanjan province. Fletcher and Octavio dig into the science of what wars leave behind, and why the bombs that never went off are often deadlier than the ones that did.
Catorce miembros de la Guardia Revolucionaria iraní mueren cuando un artefacto explosivo sin detonar explota en la provincia de Zanyán. Fletcher y Octavio exploran la ciencia detrás de los explosivos que los conflictos dejan atrás, y el precio humano que pagan las generaciones siguientes.
6 essential B1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| estallar | to explode, to go off | La bomba estalló cuando los soldados se acercaron al edificio. |
| detonador | detonator | Algunos artefactos no explotan porque el detonador tiene un fallo mecánico. |
| peligroso | dangerous | La zona sigue siendo muy peligrosa después del conflicto. |
| enterrado | buried | Encontraron un artefacto enterrado a dos metros de profundidad. |
| limpieza | clearance, cleaning | Los trabajos de limpieza de minas pueden durar décadas. |
| residuo | remnant, residue | Los residuos de la guerra todavía están en el suelo cincuenta años después. |
Fourteen soldiers.
Not killed in combat.
Killed by what the combat left behind.
Sí.
Yes.
Esta semana, catorce miembros de la Guardia Revolucionaria de Irán murieron en la provincia de Zanyán cuando un artefacto explosivo sin detonar estalló.
This week, fourteen members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard died in Zanjan province when unexploded ordnance detonated.
Dos personas más resultaron heridas.
Two more people were injured.
The war was declared over, more or less.
Trump notified Congress it was "terminated." The Ford carrier group went home.
And then, quietly, fourteen men died from a bomb that decided it wasn't done yet.
Es que esto es algo que la gente no entiende bien.
The thing is, this is something people don't really understand.
Cuando una guerra termina, las bombas no desaparecen.
When a war ends, the bombs don't disappear.
Muchas bombas no explotan cuando caen.
Many bombs don't explode when they fall.
Y después, meses o años más tarde, alguien las toca, y entonces sí explotan.
And then, months or years later, someone touches them, and that's when they go off.
Right, and there's actually a name for this category of weapon.
Unexploded ordnance, or UXO.
It's a huge field of military science, and it covers everything from artillery shells to aircraft bombs to cluster munitions that scattered across a field and just...
sat there.
Los explosivos tienen lo que los ingenieros llaman una "tasa de fallo".
Explosives have what engineers call a "failure rate." Not every bomb explodes when it's supposed to.
No todas las bombas explotan cuando deben.
Some have a mechanical failure in the detonator.
Algunas tienen un fallo mecánico en el detonador.
Others land in soft ground and don't receive enough impact to activate.
Otras caen en tierra blanda y no reciben suficiente impacto para activarse.
And the failure rate is not trivial.
Depending on the munition type, you're looking at anywhere from two to fifteen percent of devices that simply don't go off.
Drop a thousand bombs, and you might have a hundred of them just waiting in the dirt.
Y con el tiempo, esas bombas se vuelven más peligrosas, no menos.
And over time, those bombs become more dangerous, not less.
Los materiales explosivos cambian con los años.
Explosive materials change over the years.
La humedad, el calor, el frío, todo afecta a la estabilidad química del explosivo.
Humidity, heat, cold, all of it affects the chemical stability of the explosive.
Una bomba vieja puede ser mucho más sensible que una nueva.
An old bomb can be far more sensitive than a new one.
Which is a genuinely disturbing thought.
The bomb is degrading, essentially, and that degradation makes it more volatile.
You're not waiting for the danger to fade.
You're waiting for it to get worse.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Los científicos que estudian esto hablan de compuestos como el TNT o el RDX.
Scientists who study this talk about compounds like TNT or RDX.
Con el tiempo, estos materiales pueden cristalizar o descomponerse de formas que hacen la detonación más imprevisible.
Over time, these materials can crystallize or break down in ways that make detonation more unpredictable.
Y en Irán, las bombas son muy recientes, claro, pero el principio es el mismo.
And in Iran, the bombs are very recent, of course, but the principle is the same.
Let me give some context here for listeners who might not have been following the Iran war closely.
Operations were concentrated in certain areas, and Zanjan province, in northwestern Iran, sits in a region where supply lines and infrastructure were targeted.
So it makes complete sense that UXO would be there.
Y lo que ocurrió esta semana no es sorprendente para los expertos.
And what happened this week is not surprising to experts.
Después de cualquier guerra, los primeros meses son los más peligrosos para los equipos de limpieza.
After any war, the first months are the most dangerous for clearance teams.
Todos tienen prisa por reconstruir, por abrir carreteras, por volver a la normalidad, y esa prisa puede ser fatal.
Everyone is in a hurry to rebuild, to open roads, to return to normality, and that hurry can be fatal.
I covered post-conflict zones for years and that pressure to move fast is real and it comes from every direction at once.
The government wants to show normalcy.
Families want their homes back.
Businesses need roads.
And the demining teams are the ones caught between all of it.
Mira, el caso más extremo en la historia es Laos.
Look, the most extreme case in history is Laos.
Entre 1964 y 1973, Estados Unidos lanzó más bombas sobre Laos que sobre toda Europa durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than on all of Europe during the Second World War.
Laos es el país más bombardeado de la historia en relación con su tamaño.
Laos is the most bombed country in history relative to its size.
More than two million tons of ordnance over nine years, a significant portion of it cluster munitions, and the estimates suggest that around thirty percent of those submunitions never detonated.
Fifty years later, Laotians are still being killed by them.
Children, mostly, because the bomblets are small and bright and sometimes look like toys.
Es horrible.
It's horrific.
En Camboya también.
In Cambodia too.
Y en Vietnam.
And in Vietnam.
Y en Irak.
And in Iraq.
Los países que sufren una guerra moderna no terminan de sufrir cuando los soldados se van.
Countries that suffer a modern war don't stop suffering when the soldiers leave.
La tierra guarda la violencia durante décadas.
The land holds onto the violence for decades.
There's a phrase I heard from a deminer in Bosnia in the late nineties that has stayed with me: "The war ended.
The minefields didn't get the memo." He said it like a dark joke but his face wasn't joking.
Eso es exactamente la realidad.
That is exactly the reality.
En Bosnia todavía hay zonas contaminadas.
In Bosnia there are still contaminated areas.
En Croacia también.
In Croatia too.
Europa tiene este problema y mucha gente no lo sabe.
Europe has this problem and many people don't know it.
No es solo un problema de países lejanos.
It's not just a problem of distant countries.
So let's get into the science of how you actually find and deal with these things.
Because the detection technology is fascinating and, honestly, not nearly as advanced as you'd hope.
El método más antiguo, y todavía el más común, es el detector de metales.
The oldest method, and still the most common, is the metal detector.
Funciona bien para bombas grandes de metal.
It works well for large metal bombs.
Pero hay explosivos que tienen muy poco metal, o que están enterrados muy profundo, o que están en zonas con mucho hierro natural en el suelo.
But there are explosives with very little metal, or buried very deep, or in areas with a lot of natural iron in the ground.
Entonces el detector falla.
So the detector fails.
And beyond metal detectors, what are the more modern approaches?
Because I know there's been a lot of research investment here.
Hay varias tecnologías nuevas.
There are several new technologies.
Una es el georradar, que envía ondas de radio al suelo y analiza cómo rebotan.
One is ground-penetrating radar, which sends radio waves into the ground and analyzes how they bounce back.
Otra usa infrarrojos para detectar diferencias de temperatura en el suelo, porque una bomba enterrada cambia cómo la tierra absorbe el calor del sol.
Another uses infrared to detect temperature differences in the soil, because a buried bomb changes how the earth absorbs heat from the sun.
The infrared one is really clever.
You're essentially reading the thermal signature of disturbed soil, which persists long after whatever was buried there was put in the ground.
I remember reading about this being used in some agricultural contexts too, not just demining.
Sí, y también están los drones.
Yes, and there are also drones.
Hoy en día, los equipos de desminado usan drones con cámaras especiales para hacer mapas de zonas peligrosas antes de mandar a personas al terreno.
Nowadays, demining teams use drones with special cameras to map dangerous areas before sending people into the field.
Es mucho más seguro.
It's much safer.
Pero la tecnología no es perfecta y al final siempre hay un ser humano que tiene que acercarse.
But the technology isn't perfect and in the end there is always a human being who has to get close.
There's also been some genuinely remarkable research into using animals.
Rats, specifically.
African giant pouched rats trained to detect the scent of explosives, and they're light enough not to trigger a pressure mine.
There's an organization called APOPO that's been doing this work in Mozambique and Cambodia for decades.
Las ratas.
The rats.
Sí, yo leí sobre esto.
Yes, I read about this.
Es que una rata puede limpiar un campo de minas del tamaño de una cancha de tenis en treinta minutos.
A rat can clear a minefield the size of a tennis court in thirty minutes.
Un humano con un detector de metales necesita cuatro días para hacer lo mismo.
A human with a metal detector needs four days to do the same.
La naturaleza a veces es más inteligente que la tecnología.
Nature is sometimes smarter than technology.
They've trained bees too.
Bees can be conditioned to associate the smell of TNT with food, and they'll swarm toward buried explosives.
It sounds absurd until you realize the math: bees can cover several square kilometers in a single flight, and you just watch where they cluster.
Esto me parece increíble.
I find this incredible.
Pero hay un problema más grande que la tecnología de detección, y es el dinero.
But there's a bigger problem than detection technology, and that's money.
Limpiar un país después de una guerra cuesta miles de millones de dólares y puede durar muchas décadas.
Clearing a country after a war costs billions of dollars and can take many decades.
¿Quién paga eso?
Who pays for that?
Normalmente, no el país que lanzó las bombas.
Usually, not the country that dropped the bombs.
That's a pointed observation.
The United States has contributed to Laos demining programs, but the total contribution over decades doesn't come close to the scale of what was dropped.
There's a real accountability gap there, and it's a political conversation as much as a scientific one.
Y ahora, en el caso de Irán, la pregunta es la misma.
And now, in the case of Iran, the question is the same.
El conflicto fue muy corto, pero las bombas que no explotaron van a estar ahí durante años.
The conflict was very short, but the bombs that didn't explode will be there for years.
El gobierno iraní tiene que decidir cómo organizar y financiar esa limpieza, y al mismo tiempo está manejando una economía muy dañada por la guerra.
The Iranian government has to decide how to organize and finance that clearance, while at the same time managing an economy badly damaged by the war.
And there's an international legal dimension that's worth naming.
The Ottawa Treaty, signed in 1997, bans anti-personnel landmines.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions, signed in 2008, bans cluster bombs.
But neither the United States nor Iran has signed the cluster munitions treaty.
So the weapons that created this problem were, technically, legal to use.
Esto es algo que me parece difícil de entender.
This is something I find hard to understand.
Sabemos que estas armas matan civiles durante décadas.
We know these weapons kill civilians for decades.
Tenemos la evidencia de Laos, de Camboya, de Bosnia.
We have the evidence from Laos, from Cambodia, from Bosnia.
Y aun así, los países más poderosos del mundo no firman los tratados.
And yet, the most powerful countries in the world don't sign the treaties.
Es una contradicción muy grande.
It's a very large contradiction.
The argument from the non-signatories is always that these weapons have legitimate military utility and that signing would constrain their defensive capabilities.
I understand the strategic logic and I still find it hard to look at the Laos casualty figures and feel convinced by it.
Volviendo a Zanyán, lo que me parece importante es que estas catorce personas murieron después de que el presidente Trump anunció que la guerra estaba terminada.
Coming back to Zanjan, what I think is important is that these fourteen people died after President Trump announced the war was over.
Para sus familias, la guerra no terminó ese día.
For their families, the war didn't end that day.
Terminó cuando los mataron.
It ended when they were killed.
That's the gap between political declarations and physical reality.
A president can sign a paper.
A bomb doesn't read it.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y el trabajo de limpieza en Irán va a ser muy difícil porque la geografía de Zanyán es complicada.
And the clearance work in Iran is going to be very difficult because the geography of Zanjan is complicated.
Es una zona de montañas y valles.
It's an area of mountains and valleys.
El terreno irregular hace más difícil usar la mayoría de las tecnologías modernas.
The irregular terrain makes it harder to use most modern technologies.
Muchas áreas solo se pueden explorar a pie.
Many areas can only be explored on foot.
Which brings us back to the human cost of this work.
Demining is one of the most dangerous professions that exists.
The people who do it are not celebrated the way soldiers are.
Most of them are local, underpaid, often undertrained, and they carry the risk of the war long after the cameras have moved on.
Hay una frase de un desminador afgano que leí una vez.
There's a phrase from an Afghan deminer that I read once.
Dijo: "Mi trabajo es que otros puedan caminar sin miedo." Me pareció muy hermoso y muy triste al mismo tiempo.
He said: "My job is so that others can walk without fear." I found it very beautiful and very sad at the same time.
That'll stay with me.
Octavio, something you said earlier, and I want to circle back to it because it was a nice construction, you said "para que otros puedan caminar", and I know I've seen "para que" before but I always freeze when I try to use it.
What's happening there exactly?
Ah, bueno, en este nivel, la cosa más simple es esto: "para" sola significa "for" o "in order to", y la usas cuando el sujeto de las dos acciones es el mismo.
Ah, well, at this level, the simplest thing is this: "para" alone means "for" or "in order to", and you use it when the subject of both actions is the same.
"Trabajo para ganar dinero", yo trabajo, yo gano.
"I work to earn money": I work, I earn.
Pero cuando el sujeto cambia, necesitas "para que".
But when the subject changes, you need "para que": "I work so that my family is well": I work, but the family is different.
"Trabajo para que mi familia esté bien": yo trabajo, pero la familia es diferente.
So "para" when it's the same person doing both things, and "para que" when you're talking about the effect on someone else.
That's actually a cleaner distinction than English makes.
We just throw "so that" at everything and hope for the best.
Exacto, es exactamente eso.
Exactly, that's precisely it.
"Para limpiar el campo": yo lo hago y yo soy el agente.
"Para limpiar el campo": I do it and I'm the agent.
"Para que la gente camine segura": yo hago el trabajo, pero la gente es otra.
"Para que la gente camine segura": I do the work, but the people are someone else.
Dos sujetos diferentes, "para que".
Two different subjects, "para que".
Cuando lo piensas así, es bastante lógico.
When you think about it that way, it's quite logical.
Logical.
Right.
I'll try to remember that the next time I'm attempting Spanish at a family dinner in Madrid and I need to explain why I'm eating slowly.
"Como despacio para que Octavio no se avergüence de mí."
La gramática es perfecta.
The grammar is perfect.
La frase es un poco dramática, pero la gramática es perfecta.
The sentence is a little dramatic, but the grammar is perfect.
Hay esperanza para ti, Fletcher.
There is hope for you, Fletcher.