The "Ammonium Nitrate" story from Beirut is clearly a bullshit cover story. Watching the videos of the fire before the blast there were multiple rapid small explosions that would be reminiscent of ammunition stores of rockets, grenades and/or mortar shells "cooking off" in a fire… then the whole thing goes in one big boom.

The story is that it was held in the warehouse for six or seven years after being confiscated? AN sucks up water like a fiend, it's the stuff in your first aid cold packs that when mixed with water, reacts and sucks up heat as part of the reaction. If it was haphazardly stored in a cheap-ass port warehouse in the the ME it had plenty of time to suck up moisture and become inert. That's why McVeigh soaked it with diesel fuel to make ANFOS (ammonium nitrate fuel-oil solution) - the diesel keeps the water out. But nobody uses ANFOS for fertilizer!

Also, Ammonium Nitrate, or the diesel mix version, don't just go off when there's a fire, it's really stable for a high explosive compound… and it lacks BRISANCE, the ability to shatter steel due via high blast velocity (these are reasons why the military doesn't use the shit - low power to weight, doesn't shatter steel, hard to set off… We trust farmers and rock blasting companies with tons of the stuff, FFS.

So, if it WAS ANFOS, it was intended to be a bomb from the get-go: not sure how the Hell you "concentrate" AN; in its solid pure form it's about as "concentrated" as you can get. My guess from the video is that they were storing weapons in there, most likely old Soviet stuff that was smuggled in, and we just watched one of Hezbollah's multi-million dollar weapons caches go BOOM, probably with a little help from one of their enemies (or some utter moron).