Bomb disposal
Based on Wikipedia: Bomb disposal
On February 26th, 1884, a bomb exploded at Victoria Station in London. In the chaos that followed, authorities found a second device—a ticking clockwork mechanism that could detonate at any moment. Most people would run. Colonel Sir Vivian Dering Majendie walked toward it.
He disarmed it with his bare hands.
This was a decade before anyone had formally thought about bomb disposal as a profession. Majendie had essentially invented the job on the spot, developing techniques as he went—including the radical notion that perhaps you shouldn't handle explosives directly when you could use remote methods instead. His work during the Fenian dynamite campaign of the 1880s, when Irish nationalist bombers targeted British infrastructure, was officially credited with saving lives. But more than that, he established the fundamental principle that would define bomb disposal for the next century and a half: someone has to walk toward the thing everyone else is running from.
The Birth of a Terrifying Profession
The story actually begins a decade before Victoria Station. In October 1874, a barge called the Tilbury was making its way through Regent's Canal in London, carrying six barrels of petroleum and five tons of gunpowder—a floating bomb, essentially. When it exploded, it killed the entire crew, destroyed Macclesfield Bridge, and even damaged cages at the nearby London Zoo. Majendie, then a Major in the Royal Artillery, was called in to investigate.
What he learned from that investigation led him to draft the Explosives Act of 1875—the first modern legislation for explosives control. Think of it as the grandfather of every bomb squad protocol that exists today.
Across the Atlantic, New York City established its first bomb squad in 1903. They called it the "Italian Squad," and its mission was brutally specific: deal with the dynamite bombs that Mafia organizations were using to terrorize immigrant Italian merchants. Pay protection money or your shop explodes. Simple, vicious, effective. The squad would later be renamed the "Anarchist Squad" and then the "Radical Squad" as the nature of bomb threats evolved, culminating in the wave of anarchist bombings that swept through the United States in 1919.
But it was World War I that truly professionalized bomb disposal.
The Dud Problem
Here's something that doesn't often make it into history books: a staggering proportion of the artillery shells fired during World War I simply didn't explode. The swift mass production of munitions—factories churning out shells as fast as humanly possible—led to countless manufacturing defects. These "duds" littered battlefields across Europe, dangerous to both sides.
Imagine advancing across No Man's Land, and every few feet there's an unexploded shell that might go off if you look at it wrong.
The British Army responded by creating a dedicated section of Ordnance Examiners from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. Their job: figure out why these things didn't explode, and make them safe. It was the beginning of what we now call Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or EOD.
The Germans, meanwhile, were paying attention. In 1918, they developed something far more sinister than a dud: the delayed-action fuze.
The Psychological Weapon
A delayed-action fuze is exactly what it sounds like—a timing mechanism that causes a bomb to explode not on impact, but hours or even days later. The Germans realized something crucial: an unexploded bomb causes far more chaos than one that detonates immediately.
Think about it. A bomb explodes, there's destruction, emergency services respond, and life eventually resumes. But a bomb that might explode? That paralyzes everything. You can't use the road. You can't return to your home. You can't resume normal life until someone deals with it. And the people tasked with dealing with it face a terrifying uncertainty: is this a dud, or is it counting down?
Herbert Ruehlemann of Rheinmetall, a German arms manufacturer, pioneered what became known as UXBs—unexploded bombs designed to be unexploded, at least initially. These were first used during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and 1937, essentially a testing ground for the weapons that would devastate Europe in the coming years.
The Nazis, preparing for World War II, refined these weapons throughout the 1930s. When the Blitz began—the German bombing campaign against British cities starting in 1940—UXBs became a weapon of terror in their own right.
The Blitz: Trial by Fire
Every modern bomb disposal technician, anywhere in the world, can trace their professional heritage back to the London Blitz.
The scale of the problem was unprecedented. German bombs rained down on British cities, and a significant percentage didn't explode immediately. Some were duds. Some had delayed-action fuzes set for hours. Some had fuzes set for days. Some had anti-handling devices—mechanisms specifically designed to kill whoever tried to disarm them.
In the autumn of 1939, before the Blitz proper began, the first UXBs were relatively simple. Royal Air Force personnel and Air Raid Precautions volunteers could handle most of them. But when the Phony War ended in spring 1940 and real bombing began, the British realized they needed professionals. Lots of them.
The numbers tell the story of escalating crisis: 25 Royal Engineer bomb disposal sections authorized in May 1940. Another 109 in June. By August, 220. Between August 1940 and January 1941, 25 "Bomb Disposal Companies" were created, each with ten sections, each section consisting of a bomb disposal officer and fourteen personnel.
Six entire companies were deployed just in London by January 1941.
The Cat and Mouse Game
Here's where bomb disposal became truly horrifying. The Germans weren't just dropping bombs—they were engineering death traps specifically for the people trying to disarm them.
The Luftwaffe's ZUS40, introduced in 1940, was an anti-removal fuze. Its entire purpose was to explode when someone tried to remove the main fuze from the bomb. It was, in the most literal sense, a bomb designed to kill bomb disposal personnel.
This began a cat-and-mouse game that continues to this day. The bomb makers would develop a new mechanism. The bomb disposal teams would figure out how to defeat it. The bomb makers would add a new wrinkle. Back and forth, an endless deadly chess match.
The techniques used to disarm munitions are not publicized, for obvious reasons. Every piece of knowledge that becomes public is knowledge that bomb makers can use to create devices that defeat it.
British scientists and technical staff, including figures like Eric Moxey, worked frantically to develop methods and equipment to render these new threats safe. They were in a race against weapons they often encountered for the first time in the field, trying to reverse-engineer death traps in real time.
America Enters the Bomb Business
The United States War Department was watching the British experience with intense interest. In 1940, U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps observers were stationed at RAF Melksham in Wiltshire, England, studying British bomb disposal operations. The reports they sent back were sobering: this is coming our way, and we're not ready.
After Pearl Harbor, the British sent instructors to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where the U.S. Army established a formal bomb disposal school under the Ordnance Corps. Colonel Thomas J. Kane became the school's commandant and would later serve as Director of Bomb Disposal in the European Theater under Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Navy, meanwhile, established its own programs. In May 1941, British colleagues helped create the Naval Mine Disposal School at the Naval Gun Factory in Washington, D.C. A young officer named Lieutenant Draper L. Kauffman led the Naval Bomb Disposal School at University Campus in Washington. Kauffman would later become famous for founding the Underwater Demolition Teams—better known as the Frogmen, the direct predecessors of the Navy SEALs.
The first U.S. Army bomb disposal companies deployed to North Africa and Sicily proved too cumbersome. They were replaced in 1943 with mobile seven-man squads—smaller, faster, more flexible. The lessons learned were painful but valuable. In 1947, a new unified school opened at Indian Head, Maryland, under Navy direction, and the forerunner of the EOD Technology Center was established, charged with research and development of new tools, tactics, and procedures.
The Troubles: Thirty-Eight Years of Urban Warfare
If the Blitz was bomb disposal's trial by fire, Northern Ireland became its extended graduate education.
The Provisional Irish Republican Army, commonly called the IRA or PIRA, waged a bombing campaign from the early 1970s until the late 2000s. The bombs they employed ranged from crude pipe bombs to sophisticated victim-triggered devices using infrared switches. They pioneered the roadside bomb—what would later become infamous in Iraq as the IED—evolving their designs over decades with different explosives and trigger mechanisms.
They also developed improvised mortars, usually concealed in parked vehicles, often rigged with self-destruct mechanisms to destroy evidence.
The Ammunition Technicians of the Royal Logistic Corps (formerly the Royal Army Ordnance Corps) became the world's most experienced bomb disposal specialists through this brutal education. A specialist unit, 321 EOD, was deployed specifically to counter IRA bombing attacks against both economic and military targets.
The unit's radio callsign was "Felix," and there's a story behind it. When 321 Company was newly formed, it needed a callsign. A young signaller was sent to the Officer Commanding to get one. The OC, who had lost two technicians that very morning, decided on "Phoenix"—the mythical bird that rises from ashes. The signaller misheard it as "Felix" and the name stuck. Another version holds that the choice was deliberate: Felix the Cat, the cartoon character famous for having nine lives. Either way, the name captured something essential about the job.
During the thirty-eight years of Operation Banner in Northern Ireland, 23 British bomb disposal specialists were killed in action. 321 EOD became the most decorated peacetime unit in the British Army, with over 200 gallantry awards for acts of extraordinary bravery.
The Twenty-First Century: Adaptation and Innovation
The eruption of terrorism and low-intensity conflicts at the beginning of the new millennium pushed bomb disposal into another period of rapid evolution.
In the al-Aqsa Intifada, Israeli EOD forces disarmed and detonated thousands of explosive devices—suicide belts packed with shrapnel, laboratory bombs, rockets, improvised munitions of every conceivable type. Two teams gained particular reputations: the Israeli Engineering Corps' Sayeret Yahalom and the Israeli Border Guard's Gaza-area EOD team.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, roadside bombs became the signature weapon against coalition forces. These Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, could be assembled from almost anything—artillery shells, plastic explosives, fertilizer—and triggered by wire, radio signal, pressure plate, or infrared beam. A small one could destroy a Humvee. A large one could destroy a main battle tank.
British Ammunition Technicians from 11 EOD and Search Regiment were requested by U.S. commanders to support Marine Corps operations in clearing Iraqi oilfields of booby traps. They were among the first British personnel sent into Iraq in 2003, before the ground invasion proper.
Remote and Robotic: The New Tools
The key innovation of modern bomb disposal is distance.
If you can examine, manipulate, and neutralize a bomb without being near it, you dramatically reduce the risk. This principle, which Majendie intuited back in the 1880s, has driven the development of increasingly sophisticated remotely operated vehicles.
The British Wheelbarrow, first developed in the 1970s for use in Northern Ireland, became the template for bomb disposal robots worldwide. It's a tracked vehicle, remotely controlled, equipped with cameras, manipulator arms, and often a shotgun to disrupt bomb components without a full detonation. The name "Wheelbarrow" came from its creator's description of it as something to "wheel up to the bomb."
Modern successors include the Dragon Runner, a small robot that can be thrown through windows or into confined spaces, and the Chevette. At the larger end, armored bulldozers like the D7 MCAP and the D9R can clear areas and approach suspected bombs with the operator protected by heavy armor. Vehicles like the Trojan combine mine clearance with explosive ordnance disposal capabilities.
But robots can't do everything. Sometimes a human still has to walk toward the bomb.
The Bomb Suit: Walking Into the Blast
When robots can't reach, when cameras can't see clearly enough, when only human judgment and human hands will serve, bomb disposal technicians don their protective equipment.
The modern bomb suit is an engineering marvel of ballistic panels, trauma plates, and blast-deflecting geometry. It can weigh over 80 pounds. In summer heat, temperatures inside can become dangerous in minutes. Vision is limited. Movement is awkward. And despite all that protection, if the bomb is large enough and close enough, the suit won't save you.
The suit isn't really about surviving a direct blast. It's about surviving fragments, secondary effects, smaller-than-expected yields. It's about giving the technician a fighting chance if something goes wrong while keeping them functional enough to do delicate work.
Every bomb technician knows the suit's limitations. They wear it anyway.
Training: The Long Road
You don't become a bomb disposal technician quickly.
In the British Army, prospective Ammunition Technicians attend an intensive course at the Army School of Ammunition and the Felix Centre. The time from starting training to actually being placed on an EOD team is approximately 36 months—three years of learning explosives, fuzes, electronics, chemistry, psychology, and the endless variations of devices that want to kill you.
Royal Engineers who specialize in EOD have a shorter formal training period, but it's spread over several years and interspersed with operational experience. Between deployments, they might work in other engineering trades—construction, bridge building—before returning for more advanced bomb disposal training.
Royal Navy clearance divers spend their entire careers working with explosives. They deploy both in British waters and on operations worldwide, handling both improvised devices and conventional munitions.
In the United States, civilian Public Safety Bomb Technicians (sometimes called Hazardous Devices Technicians) must complete training at the FBI Hazardous Devices School at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. This school was modeled on the British program at the Felix Centre. Graduates become qualified not just to disarm bombs but to collect evidence and present expert testimony in court.
The Divisions of Labor
Different organizations handle different types of threats, and the divisions can be surprisingly complex.
In the United Kingdom, all three military services maintain EOD capabilities, but with different specializations. The Royal Logistic Corps handles conventional munitions and homemade bombs, as well as chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. The Royal Engineers focus on air-dropped munitions in peacetime and provide expertise in battle area clearance. The Royal Navy handles anything of an explosive nature found below the high water mark or deemed to be of naval origin.
There's a certain logic to that last one. If something explodes on the beach at low tide, it might be an old shell from a World War II shipwreck. That's a naval matter. But if the same object is found on a construction site a mile inland, it's an Army problem.
In the United States, military EOD covers both on-base and off-base calls unless a local civilian Public Safety Bomb Technician can handle it. These civilian technicians are usually police officers, though some teams are formed by fire departments or emergency management agencies.
In Spain's Basque Country, where Basque separatist bombings were common during the 1980s and 1990s, three different organizations share responsibility: the Policia Nacional, the Guardia Civil, and the regional Ertzaintza police. The Ertzaintza handles general civilian threats while the national forces focus on protecting their own assets and personnel.
The Range Clearance Problem
There's one aspect of bomb disposal that most people never think about: what happens to old military bombing ranges?
Before any such land can be repurposed—turned into housing developments, parks, farmland, or anything else—it must be cleared of unexploded ordnance. Decades of practice bombing, live fire exercises, and testing leave behind countless munitions that failed to detonate.
This work is usually performed by civilian specialists, often former military EOD technicians. They use specialized tools to examine the subsurface—ground-penetrating radar, magnetometers, metal detectors—and when they find something, they make it safe and remove it.
This isn't glamorous work. No one writes newspaper stories about it. But a single overlooked shell from a 1940s bombing range can kill a construction worker or a child at play.
Beyond the Bomb
Bomb disposal technicians do far more than disarm terrorist devices.
They dispose of old or unstable explosives from quarries and mines. They handle deteriorating fireworks that have become too dangerous to use. They support police raid teams that might encounter booby-trapped locations. They provide security sweeps for VIPs. They train other military and civilian personnel in explosives safety. They investigate accidents and incidents involving ammunition and explosives.
Any time something might explode and shouldn't, they're the ones who get the call.
The Weight of the Walk
There's a specific kind of courage required for bomb disposal that's different from other forms of military or police bravery.
A soldier in a firefight can take cover, return fire, call for support. A police officer in a dangerous situation can retreat, wait for backup, develop a tactical approach. But a bomb disposal technician, once they begin the long walk toward a device, is alone with it. There is no backup. There is no return fire. There is only the device and the knowledge that the person who made it was trying to kill someone exactly like you.
The technician approaches, studies, considers. Every wire might be a trap. Every component might be a deception. The bomb maker was intelligent, creative, murderous. The technician must be more intelligent, more creative, and willing to bet their life on being right.
Since Colonel Majendie walked toward that ticking clockwork bomb at Victoria Station in 1884, thousands of people have made that walk. Many have made it their careers. Some have made it their final act.
Every time a drone strike kills a bomb maker, every time a suspicious package is safely neutralized, every time children play safely on land that was once a bombing range, it's because someone was willing to walk toward the thing everyone else was running from.
That's what bomb disposal is. That's what it's always been.