I don't think I'd ever considered prior to now how much more economic it would be to release "The one nuclear bomb [TerroristOrganisation] can afford to muster" in a shipping choke-point, rather than a city.
For the Suez Canal a huge bomb is just going to make it bigger and easier to navigate in one spot.
Blow up the locks for the Panama Canal and you have some seriously inconvenienced shipping companies.
But even in both cases the result is that they have to take the long way around. It makes the shipping slower and more expensive, but it was a tiny fraction of your costs to begin with so most companies survive just fine.
For the Suez Canal a huge bomb is just going to make it bigger and easier to navigate in one spot.
A huge bomb to one side of the canal would displace rock and mud in to the channel and make it shallower. That would be enough to close it to large ships until it could be dredged again.
Although, if terrorists really wanted to wreak havoc in the canal they could scuttle a large ship while it's sailing in it. That would necessitate dismantling and removing the entire thing.
> In October 1967, the officers and crews of all fourteen ships met on the Melampus to found the "Great Bitter Lake Association" which provided mutual support. Crew members continued to regularly meet on board their ships, organized social events, founded a yachting club and held the "Bitter Lake Olympic Games" to complement the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Life boat races were arranged and soccer games were played on the largest ship, the MS Port Invercargill, while church services were held on the West German motorship Nordwind and movies were shown on the Bulgarian freighter Vasil Levsky.[2] The Swedish Killara had a pool.[3]
> In time, it was possible to reduce the number of crew members on board the ships, and in 1969 the ships were gathered into several groups to further reduce the number of crew necessary for their upkeep. Those crew that were left to maintain the vessels were rotated every three months. In 1972, the last crew members of the German ships were finally sent home, with the maintenance of the ships left to a Norwegian company.
I remember back in the early 90s attending a CEBIT trade show (at the time perhaps the largest computing show in the world -- the show floors covered acres) and being astonished to see that the Bundespost delivered mail, including the usual trade show flyers, to each display booth. Yes, uniformed postal workers wheeling the usual delivery carts up and down the aisles.
I think we forget how important transporting physical media (usually just paper) was back in those days. The penny post used to deliver twice a day in cities. Now I check my mail every 4-6 weeks and there's rarely anything important in it.
I suspect it's not the use of the bomb that is the biggest concern.
I would think someone with a bomb on some kind of bulk Hazmat carrier and the threat of blowing it up would shut down traffic for a lot longer. Nobody is going to want to get close to do anything about it.
LNG or Oil are the two I can think of, but there's probably a lot of other bulk Hazmat carriers.
The major canals aren't around big population centers so blowing something like that up wouldn't make a huge impact. Also due to the structure of a canal (limited blast containment; most of a ship is above the surface) the actual damage would be limited.
No they’d be geniuses because they would cause economic losses to powerful people a lot like how the good Friday agreement came about quite quickly after the IRA broke every office window in the finicial district of London with a truckload of fertiliser. No-one was killed and glaziers rates went up 10 times for a few months. It caused a big disruption to the financial district but most ordinary people weren’t that bothered by it. Actual terrorism, chopping peoples heads off or letting off bombs in the metro doesn’t acheive anything, it just pisses ordinary people off and makes them want the government to bomb you right back.
You’re right, I misremembered. I’m not saying that the IRA weren’t bad, they killed more people than 9/11, but they learnt that killing random people was bad for PR and adapted thier tactics to economic targets in the 90’s. I’m from London and I lived through the IRA bombing campaign of the 90’s and the various ISIS attacks of the 2000’s. The IRA made me annoyed, angry maybe but not terrorised, they phoned in warnings and thier attacks were mostly inconvenient. The 7/7 suicide bombers were a completely different intent, they were out to kill as many random people as possible, the IRA weren’t by that stage.
But who cares if it terrorises? I mean, I care if my tube train seems scarier than last week but I'm irrelevant. If the goal of Islamic terrorists is to have America or Britain change its foreign policy towards Islamic countries, I think that Islamic terrorism has achieved the opposite of that. If the IRA's goal was to change the position of the British government from 'we don't negotiate with terrorists' then the bombs that had a big impact on the financial centre of the UK had the effect of changing that policy. I'm arguing that terrorising normal people only has the effect of turning normal people against your cause, much like the Blitz which was designed to terrorise the population didn't make the British want to surrender to Germany, and when Britain did gain the upper hand, the British public were happy for the British state to visit worse destruction on German cities.
The main effect of terror is destabilisation, which is also what breeds terrorism. Islamic terrorism in Europe turns people against their muslim demographics, and most importantly promotes populism and right-wing politics in general. Those are all pretty auto-destructive things. Some normal reactions to terrorism is to alienate some demographics or to exact revenge on some countries, both of which just create more recruits for the terrorist. It makes sense if you don't take that universal-islamic-state narrative too seriously.
Dozen or so ships would be enough to blockade both Suez and Panama... That would cause substantial damage to global shipping industry... Not even that expensive. Hundred or two hundred million would do...
Panama is not that busy. A much better target would be the kiel canal (Nord- Ostsee Kanal in German), which is the busiest waterway in the world 25000 ships yearly vs 19000 ships for the Suez vs 12000 for Panama.
So, another thing to worry about :)