> in my obviously completely inexpert opinion, I wouldn't have recommended
I'm pretty confident they had some of the best experts on the case.
The UK has some of the best bomb-disposal minds, the IRA campaigns on the mainland during The Troubles ensured that. Just look it up on wikipedia ... double-digit number of bombs planted in some years !
Does defusing a brand new IRA bomb involve the same set of skills as defusing a decades-old Luftwaffe one? I would have thought it's a rather different problem.
IED has progressed immensely since the internet and the best bomb disposal techs are the people who'd been doing it recently and they're mostly in the middle east.
Over a thousand or about 60% of the Provisional IRA kills were British soldiers. So yea they got hit hard. I haven't seen any evidence that they actually improved their bomb disposal techniques though. The British Army kept getting successfully bombed into the 90’s.
I'm pretty confident they had some of the best experts on the case.
The UK has some of the best bomb-disposal minds, the IRA campaigns on the mainland during The Troubles ensured that. Just look it up on wikipedia ... double-digit number of bombs planted in some years !