Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

There have been many extremely large explosions, accidental and intentional, caused by modern high explosives, boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions (BLEVEs), older explosives such as gunpowder, volatile petroleum-based fuels such as petrol, and other chemical reactions. This list contains the largest known examples, sorted by date. An unambiguous ranking in order of severity is not possible; a 1994 study by historian Jay White of 130 large explosions suggested that they need to be ranked by an overall effect of power, quantity, radius, loss of life and property destruction, but concluded that such rankings are difficult to assess.^[1]

The weight of an explosive does not correlate directly with the energy or destructive effect of an explosion, as these can depend upon many other factors such as containment, proximity, purity, preheating, and external oxygenation (in the case of thermobaric weapons, gas leaks and BLEVEs).

For this article, explosion means "the sudden conversion of potential energy (chemical or mechanical) into kinetic energy",^[2] as defined by the US National Fire Protection Association, or the common dictionary meaning, "a violent and destructive shattering or blowing apart of something".^[3] No distinction is made as to whether it is a deflagration with subsonic propagation or a detonation with supersonic propagation. The resulting explosions can still be ranked by their effects however, using TNT equivalence.