A2 · Elementary
10 min
historyscience and technologyconflict and securityenvironment
The Sleeping Bomb: War, Time, and Science
La Bomba Dormida: Guerra, Tiempo y Ciencia
This week, more than a thousand homes were evacuated in Plymouth, England, after a German WWII bomb was found on a building site. Fletcher and Octavio explore why these bombs remain deadly eight decades later, and what that tells us about the long shadow of war.
Esta semana, más de mil casas fueron evacuadas en Plymouth, Inglaterra, después de encontrar una bomba alemana de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en una obra. Fletcher y Octavio exploran por qué estas bombas siguen siendo peligrosas ochenta años después, y qué nos dice esto sobre la larga sombra de la guerra.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| espoleta | fuse (of a bomb) | La espoleta de la bomba no funciona bien. |
| peligrosa | dangerous | La bomba vieja es muy peligrosa. |
| forma | way, manner, form, shape | Vuelve de formas distintas. |
| expertos | experts | Los expertos trabajan muy despacio con la bomba. |
| tierra | earth, ground, soil | La bomba está en la tierra desde 1940. |
| construyen | they build | Construyen casas nuevas en la ciudad. |
Here's something I keep coming back to this week: a construction crew in Plymouth, England, hits something metal in the ground, and the next thing you know, more than a thousand families are packing bags and leaving their homes.
Not because of a gas leak, not because of a fire.
Because of a bomb dropped by Nazi Germany in 1940.
Sí.
Yes.
La bomba es de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
The bomb is from World War II.
Todavía es peligrosa.
It is still dangerous.
Still dangerous.
Eighty-some years in the ground, and this thing could still kill people.
That's the part that gets me.
En Europa hay muchas bombas así.
In Europe there are many bombs like this.
En el suelo.
In the ground.
Many, many more.
And before we get into the science of why these things stay lethal for decades, I want to set the scene a little.
Plymouth is not a random choice here.
That city took a beating in the Second World War that most people outside Britain don't fully appreciate.
Plymouth es una ciudad importante del mar.
Plymouth is an important port city.
Los alemanes la atacan mucho.
The Germans attacked it a lot.
A major naval base.
The Luftwaffe hit it in what they called the Plymouth Blitz, 1941, and parts of the city center were simply erased.
Something like 1,200 civilians killed.
And the bombs that missed their targets, or malfunctioned, or simply buried themselves in soft ground without detonating, those stayed exactly where they landed.
Sí.
Yes.
Muchas bombas no explotan.
Many bombs do not explode.
Quedan en la tierra.
They stay in the earth.
And this is where the science starts to get interesting.
Octavio, tell me: what do you know about why a bomb just...
doesn't go off?
La bomba tiene una parte especial.
The bomb has a special part.
Se llama espoleta.
It is called a fuse.
A veces no funciona.
Sometimes it does not work.
The fuse.
That's the critical piece.
And this specific bomb they found in Plymouth, an SC250, was a standard German general-purpose bomb, 250 kilograms.
The SC stood for Sprengbombe Cylindrisch, basically a cylindrical blast bomb.
It was designed to detonate on impact.
When it didn't, something in the fuzing mechanism failed.
La espoleta tiene un pequeño mecanismo.
The fuse has a small mechanism.
Es muy delicada.
It is very delicate.
Delicate is the right word.
And here's the counterintuitive part that took me a while to get my head around.
You'd think a bomb that's been in the ground for eighty years would have degraded, become inert, essentially harmless.
But that's often exactly backwards.
Con el tiempo, la bomba puede ser más peligrosa.
Over time, the bomb can become more dangerous.
El metal cambia.
The metal changes.
More dangerous, not less.
The metal corrodes, the casing weakens, and some of the chemical explosives inside can actually become more sensitive over time.
Trinitrotoluene, TNT, is relatively stable, but picric acid, which the Germans used in some munitions, crystallizes as it ages.
Those crystals are highly shock-sensitive.
Move the bomb the wrong way and it goes.
Por eso los expertos trabajan muy despacio.
That is why the experts work very slowly.
Es muy importante.
It is very important.
Very slowly and very carefully.
Explosive ordnance disposal, EOD, is one of the most technically demanding jobs on the planet.
I covered conflicts long enough to have enormous respect for the people who do this work.
In war zones and in peacetime both.
En España también hay bombas viejas.
In Spain there are also old bombs.
De la Guerra Civil.
From the Civil War.
That's a point I was hoping you'd make.
It's not just World War Two.
Spain's civil war, the Korean War, conflicts from the middle of the last century all left ordnance in the ground.
This is a global problem, not a British one.
En el norte de España hay mucha historia de la guerra.
In the north of Spain there is a lot of war history.
La gente sabe esto.
People know this.
And across Germany, Poland, Belgium, France, the numbers are staggering.
German authorities alone handle something like 2,000 tons of unexploded ordnance every single year.
Belgium's Flanders region, where the trenches of World War One ran, still yields what they call the Iron Harvest: shells, grenades, gas canisters plowed up by farmers every spring.
La guerra no termina con la paz.
War does not end with peace.
Queda en la tierra.
It stays in the earth.
That is a very precise way to put it.
And what brings this into sharp contemporary focus is construction.
Cities grow, old industrial land gets redeveloped, and suddenly you're breaking ground on what used to be a bombed-out area.
Construyen casas nuevas.
They build new houses.
Y encuentran la bomba vieja.
And they find the old bomb.
Exactly that sequence.
And the question of what you do in the next two hours matters enormously.
Do you evacuate?
How wide a radius?
Can you move the bomb?
Do you detonate it in place?
These are not simple calls, and they depend heavily on real-time scientific assessment of the specific munition, its condition, and what's around it.
Los expertos usan robots y tecnología moderna.
The experts use robots and modern technology.
Es fascinante.
It is fascinating.
The technology has changed enormously.
Robotics, fiber-optic cameras, portable X-ray systems that can image a bomb casing from outside without touching it.
When I was covering the aftermath of fighting in Beirut, the EOD teams I watched were working with gear that would look prehistoric compared to what's available now.
Pero el trabajo es siempre peligroso.
But the work is always dangerous.
La tecnología ayuda, pero no es perfecta.
The technology helps, but it is not perfect.
Never perfect.
And there's a detection problem that doesn't get enough attention.
Metal detectors are the obvious tool, but they only work at relatively shallow depths.
Ground-penetrating radar can go deeper but produces a lot of false readings.
There are researchers right now working on new detection methods, including chemical sniffers that detect explosive residue migrating up through the soil over decades.
¿Los productos químicos suben por la tierra?
The chemicals rise through the earth?
No sé esto.
I did not know this.
Very slowly, over many years, trace amounts of explosive compounds leach into the surrounding soil.
It's actually how some sniffer dogs are trained, to pick up those faint chemical signatures.
The dog's nose, in certain conditions, is still more sensitive than anything we've engineered.
Los perros son increíbles.
Dogs are incredible.
Trabajan con la policía y el ejército.
They work with the police and the army.
And they have been for a long time.
But let me bring this back to the bigger picture, because I think there's an implication here that people don't often connect.
Climate change.
¿El cambio climático y las bombas?
Climate change and bombs?
Explica, por favor.
Please explain.
Flooding and soil movement.
As weather patterns shift, rivers flood differently, coastal erosion accelerates, and ground that has been stable for eighty years gets disturbed.
There are documented cases of unexploded ordnance surfacing on beaches, or being moved by floodwaters.
The ground that's been holding these things quietly in place is not as static as we assumed.
Es un problema nuevo.
It is a new problem.
Muy moderno.
Very modern.
A very modern version of a very old problem.
And then there's the sea.
The Baltic, the North Sea, the English Channel, all of them have enormous quantities of munitions dumped after both World Wars.
Some estimates put the figure at over a million tons across European waters.
They've been sitting on the seabed for decades, and warmer, more acidic ocean water is corroding them faster now than before.
El mar cambia también.
The sea also changes.
El agua es diferente hoy.
The water is different today.
Different and more corrosive in ways that matter for these particular objects.
And some of those underwater munitions contain chemical weapons.
Mustard gas, for instance.
The corrosion is not just releasing explosive compounds;
it's potentially releasing toxic ones.
This is an active area of scientific research right now, how to neutralize or safely recover these things from the seabed.
El gas mostaza bajo el agua, eso es terrible.
Mustard gas under the water, that is terrible.
No lo sé.
I did not know this.
Most people don't.
After World War Two, the Allied powers dumped vast quantities of captured German chemical weapons into the Baltic Sea.
It was considered the fastest and most practical solution at the time.
Decades later, fishermen have pulled up shells that still contained active mustard gas residue.
A few have been burned by it.
El pasado no desaparece.
The past does not disappear.
Vuelve de formas distintas.
It returns in different forms.
That's exactly what's happening in Plymouth this week, isn't it.
Someone is building something new, and they hit the past.
And the past still has the capacity to kill.
Sí.
Yes.
Construimos el futuro sobre la historia.
We build the future on top of history.
Literalmente.
Literally.
Quite literally, in this case.
And the people of Plymouth who had to pack up and leave their homes for a night, that's not an abstract lesson.
That's their Wednesday.
Para ellos es muy real.
For them it is very real.
Toman su ropa y salen.
They take their clothes and leave.
You know, something you said a few minutes ago stuck with me, Octavio.
You said "vuelve de formas distintas." It comes back in different forms.
I realized I don't think I've heard "formas" used quite like that before, meaning forms or ways rather than shapes.
Sí, "forma" tiene dos significados.
Yes, "forma" has two meanings.
Una forma es una figura.
A forma is a shape.
Pero también es una manera.
But it is also a way or manner.
So "de formas distintas" is essentially "in different ways." And that's different from "de maneras distintas," which would be the same thing?
Or is there a shade of difference?
Son muy similares.
They are very similar.
Los dos son correctos.
Both are correct.
"Forma" es más común en español informal.
"Forma" is more common in informal Spanish.
So if someone asks how you got to work, you might say "de una forma rápida" rather than "de una manera rápida." Both work, but "forma" is the one you'd actually hear in a bar in Madrid.
Exacto.
Exactly.
"Forma" es más natural.
"Forma" is more natural.
"Manera" suena un poco más formal.
"Manera" sounds a little more formal.
Filed.
Forma.
I will absolutely use it wrong the next time I see your mother and then blame you entirely.
Alright, that's our episode for this week.
Thank you for listening to Twilingua.