

The Boston Globe gets a look at a DB of every bomb the US has ever dropped - eob
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/07/29/century-data-and-destruction-chronicled-air-force-officer/5m2HK2CP9UcwwJzMhtdQOO/story.html

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pan69
"One particularly relevant example: From October 1965 to May 1975, at least
456,365 cluster bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, according
to the records analyzed. Cluster munitions, designed to release small
bomblets, often did not explode on impact and still pose a hazard to
villagers."

Apparently Laos is the most bombed country in the world:

"During the Vietnam War, Laos was the target of the heaviest US bombing
campaign since World War II, making Laos the most bombed country in
history."[1]

I believe the story is that US B52 bombers would take off out of Thailand to
drop their load on Vietnam targets. However, if they bypassed their target
they were not allowed to dispose of their load on Vietnam terriroty. Since the
bombers can't land with their load on board it has to be disposed of before
landing. Apparently Laos was the place of choice. [2]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_Harvest>

[2] <http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/bombies-the-secret-war/>

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greghinch
> Apparently Laos is the most bombed country in the world

Yep that is unfortunately true, and many people there are still suffering from
this today. The famed Ho Chi Minh Trail went primarily through eastern Laos as
well. It's such a shame, Laos is a wonderful, beautiful country full of good
people who were never involved in any conflict.

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dfc
It is worth pointing out that the article never claims that the database
contains information on _every bomb the US has ever dropped._ The article
clearly states that more information is needed, eg:

    
    
        "For the Korean War Robertson found the detailed mission records for the 
        first 10 months of the three-year conflict but he is still trying to 
        get his hands on the rest."

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sampsonjs
"The database, he said, has recently been used to investigate civilian deaths
in Afghanistan and to judge claims by Iraqi villagers that bombs containing
depleted uranium contaminated their water supply."

Wait, how about we have a "hackathon" to figure out ways to stops those bombs
from being dropped in the first place! That would be totes awesome!

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danso

       He worked nights and weekends finding out. 
       Robertson unearthed 1,000 original World War I 
       raid reports, and entered each by hand. For World War II,
       he scanned roughly 10,000 hand-written or typed pages.
       More modern conflicts meant combing a hodgepodge of
       conflict-specific databases.
    
    

This is the kind of thing I wish they [the Pentagon] would open up to
hackathons. How many hours of this valuable historian's time was wasted doing
manual entry, something that could've been expedited with some mTurk + OCR
work? Not all civic data projects draw attention, but this one at least has
the cachet of notable history, worldwide good (to help identify areas of
possible unexploded unordinance) and, of course, things that go boom.

~~~
Someone
Those reports could contain phrases like "we didn't see our target, so we
dropped them on the city". Making them public could be painful for some people
and might lead to litigation.

I also guess most of the time spent will be spent in interpretation (is this
target code consistent with what we know happened from other sources?), not in
data entry.

~~~
jt2190
Are you sure that the reports aren't already public? Are you saying that
aircrews were allowed to pick their own secondary targets if their primary
targets were not reachable?

~~~
Someone
Saying: no. That 'could' and that 'guess' give that away. I do think there
will be quite a few non-public reports in there, certainly for recent history
(Iraq, Afghanistan)

