"Soon" in this case meaning two years.
when asked my opinion, an identified as such speculative but very plausible
Stop... just, stop.
Here is more of why you don't know jack about explosives.
To destroy something with explosives, your explosives need to be stronger than what your are trying to destroy. If you want to contain the explosives to a certain area, you need to tamp them with something stronger than the explosives. So you're trying to tear through a big ass steel girder inside a skyscraper with a bomb that is encased in something several times stronger than the girder and is much thicker and heavier than the girder as a necessary consequence.
Already, you can see where this is going to become problematic for your sooper sekrit ninja demolition team (or at least we can see it).
So how much tamping is needed?
Well, this is the wikipedia description of the USAF/USN/USMC Mk 84 bomb:
The Mark 84 has a nominal weight of 2,000 lb, but its actual weight varies depending on its fin, fuze options, and retardation configuration, from 1,972 to 2,083 lb. It is a streamlined steel casing filled with 945 lb of Tritonal high explosive.
The standard air to ground weapon of the US military is more steel than explosive, each one dropped contains enough steel to build a couple of pickup trucks.
But this steel does not weaken or contain the blast, in fact it strengthens it. The steel shell holds the mass of explosives together until all or most of it has fully reacted. it also contains the blast wave until it is strong enough to force its way through the shell.
Put simply, Tony, if you want to tamp the blast in such a way as to create the effect you described, where the blast is improbably focused in a single direction, you are going to need a casing that is many times the weight of the explosive. To get enough of a tamping effect, your initial layers are going to make the blast stronger. Only after adding a lot of tamping are you going to start making the blast weaker and then you will need to add a great deal more to nullify it completely.
My guess is, that we are talking about a big ass concrete block with outer layers of steel and kevlar to prevent spalling of the concrete upon detonation.
But wait... it gets worse!
You'll remember Tony a few years ago, you co-wrote an article with Steven Jones, Neils Harrit and a few others. Jones and Harritt were unable to get it published in any peer-reviewed journal so they settled on an internet message board in Pakistan with a 600 dollar posting fee. Except they were unable to meet even their lax standards so they went behind the editor-in-chiefs back to get it posted (when the E-in-C found out, she resigned her position and blew the whistle on Jones and Harritt).
Despite the attempt to defraud the Pakistani website, Russia Today, who never met a piece of anti-American or anti-semitic
propaganda pornography that they weren't willing to publish, immediately called in Neils Harritt for an interview.
Here is what he said:
Niels Harrit: I personally am certain that conventional explosives were used too, in abundance.
RT: When you say “in abundance,” how much do you mean?
Niels Harrit: Tons! Hundreds of tons! Many, many, many tons!
How many hundreds of tons was Harritt referring to? 200? 500? 700?
Either way, for every ton of high explosive your theory calls for, you will need several tons of concrete and steel to encase the explosives and prevent the kind of blast effects that would give the whole plot away.
Your ninja demo team would have been running about with tens of thousands of explosive charges about the size of Toblerone bars, each one encased in concrete blocks the size of washing machines tearing apart drywall and building fixtures to couple these monstrosities to the frames of the busiest office buildings in the world hoping that no one would notice and report these bizarre goings on the day after the worst terror attack in history,
all so that you can claim that the windows wouldn't have been broken by the blasts.
Got an explanation for this, Tony?
