The children woke up. There are explosions outside again. Yesterday there were so many that they blended into a steady roar. It even got me wondering: if you combined all the explosions into one, what would the TNT equivalent be? Here’s my calculation: Between December 29 and January 10, no fewer than 50,000,000 firecrackers and fireworks charges go off in Moscow. (That figure is just a rough estimate based on the population. I couldn’t find any statistics.) Pyrotechnics websites say the pyrotechnic composition has a TNT equivalent of 0.25 for firecrackers and 0.33 for fireworks. Let’s take the average: 0.29. Let’s assume that the average firecracker and a single fireworks burst weigh 1 gram (which I don’t think is too far from the truth). That gives us 50 metric tons of pyrotechnic composition × 0.29 = 14.5 metric tons of TNT. Not all that much. But enough to blow up 65–70 high-rise apartment buildings. By the way, while looking for data on the power of pyrotechnic mixtures, I found a huge number of texts on the subject of "How to make a bomb in your kitchen." And the descriptions were quite competent. The ingredients suggested were all easily available. Making detonators and other related devices was also explained in a very simple and clear way. I even found myself envying kids today. I remember filing down the metal base of a helicopter wheel to get a little magnesium, and then setting it off by mixing it with potassium permanganate. One little bomb took an hour of work. The only explosive recipes available to me were in my father’s "Officer’s Encyclopedic Dictionary" (a Soviet/Russian military reference book). But those were industrial manufacturing formulas. The only thing that was suitable for home use was black powder. But that was complete garbage. A metal tube packed with sulfur scraped from matches exploded much better.
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