A particular detail about the massive Aug. 4 explosion in the port of Beirut caught my attention, and also reminded me of Shakespeare and of a fight in a shoe shop in Khartoum 40 years ago.
The eye-catching detail was that the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that detonated had been stored there at the dock since 2014, after being confiscated from a Russian ship. Knowing it was exceedingly dangerous, customs officers had tried to get rid of it — they wanted to give it to the Lebanese military — but had been thwarted in court. So a vast cache of a highly volatile chemical sat year after year on the edge of a densely packed city population. Thousands of people are now dead or wounded as a result, and 300,000 have been displaced. The explosion was literally just waiting to happen.
