This is the Thames Estuary. It's a busy shipping lane,
carrying everything from small pleasure boats to massive container ships
between the London docks and the English Channel.
Overhead is an approach path for some of London's air traffic.
But right there, in the middle of the Estuary, two miles offshore:
there are 1,400 tonnes of unexploded bombs.
In 1944, the SS Richard Montgomery was transporting munitions for the US Air Force.
She was moored here for the night,
and a combination of bad weather and bad decisions
meant she ran aground on the sandbank out there.
The weight of the bombs broke the ship in two,
and it's been sitting there ever since
as the tide digs a little crater around it.
Some of its cargo was cleared away, but not enough.
If the worst happens, it would be one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.
Seriously. As a comparison, the Russian army has tested something
nicknamed the Father of All Bombs,
which is the equivalent of 44 tonnes of TNT.
This boat has 30 times that.
There's an exclusion zone around it, of course,
marked out and listed on charts.
Occasionally some jackass will paddle up to the masts and pose for a photo,
but let's be honest, if years of storms and shifting sands haven't set it off,
that probably won't either.
So what are the risks? Well, no-one's entirely sure. That's the problem.
No-one knows what the conditions inside the ship are.
And there's no research on what seawater does to bombs over more than half a century.
They should be fine: they're in clear, cold water.
And while the TNT itself doesn't degrade,
its fuses will have worn away. Which would make it safe,
if it weren't for the 2,500 cluster bombs on the deck above
which could fall down on it,
and which might have a slight tendency to unexpectedly degrade and explode
even though they're not armed.
Possibly. Depending on who you believe.
So should something be done?
The Coastguard, along with the Receiver of Wreck,
the wonderfully-titled British civil servant in charge of this sort of thing:
they publish regular reports on the ship,
based on sonar and laser scans and occasional dives.
The consensus view is that it's safe,
but steadily degrading as tide and time take their toll.
It's probably fine to do nothing. And trying to clear it,
moving all that volatile material, well,
that could be a much, much greater risk to life,
let alone an enormous expense. And if it did go up,
perhaps the water would contain most of the explosion. But no-one's certain.
There are some extremely vocal people,
most of whom live near the thing,
who say the risk of leaving it is too great:
the worst-case scenario is that, suddenly,
there's one nudge by a wave in the wrong place at the wrong time --
and the equivalent of a small nuclear bomb goes off, taking out the nearby towns
-- and the nearby liquid gas storage --
first with a blast wave and then an actual wave.
This ship isn't just interesting because of what it contains.
It's interesting because it's an unknown.
There are risky things like this all over the world,
but generally we can quantify them,
we can say it's a one-in-a-million chance.
But this is a risk that it's impossible to put a number on,
or say anything other than, yeah,
it's probably going to be fine.
Doing nothing is probably the right thing to do,
and that's what the government's going to do.
But we don't know it's the right thing to do, not for sure.
The only way to know is to wait and see.
And maybe buy some good insurance.
"Small, far away! Small, far away!
"Father Ted reference, Google it."
[Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]