Amagazine is an item or place within whichammunition or other explosive material is stored. The word is taken originally from the Arabic wordmakhāzin (مخازن), meaning "storehouses", via Italian and Middle French.^[1][2][3]

The term is also used for anammunition dump, a place where large quantities of ammunition are stored for later distribution. This usage is less common.

In the early history of tubeartillery drawn by horses (and later by mechanized vehicles), ammunition was carried in separate unarmored wagons or vehicles. These soft-skinned vehicles were extremely vulnerable to enemy fire and to explosions caused by a weapons malfunction.

Therefore, as part of setting up anartillery battery, a designated place would be used to shelter the ready ammunition. In the case of batteries of towed artillery the temporary magazine would be placed, if possible, in a pit, or natural declivity, or surrounded bysandbags orearthworks. Circumstances might require the establishment of multiple field magazines so that one lucky hit or accident would not disable the entire battery.

The ammunition storage area aboard awarship is referred to as a magazine or the "ship's magazine" by sailors.

Historically, when artillery was fired withgunpowder, a warship's magazines were built below the water line—especially since the magazines could then be readily flooded in case of fire or other dangerous emergencies on board the ship. An open flame was never allowed inside the magazine.

More modern warships use semi-automated or automatedammunition hoists. The path through which thenaval artillery's ammunition passed typically has blast-resistant airlocks and other safety devices, including provisions to flood the compartment with seawater in an emergency.

The separation of shell and propellant gave the storage of the former the name "shell room" and the latter "powder room".

Surface warships that have carriedtorpedoes, and ones that still do (such as theMark 46 torpedo forantisubmarine warfare), have had torpedo magazines for carrying these dangerous antiship and antisubmarine weapons in well-defended compartments.

With the advent of missile-equippedwarships, the term missile "magazine" has also been applied to the storage area forguided missiles on the ship, usually carried below the main decks of the warships. For ships with both forward and aftsurface-to-air missile launchers, there are at least two missile magazines. Sometimes the magazines ofguided-missile frigates andguided-missile destroyers have carried or do carry a mixture of various types of missiles:surface-to-air missiles,antisubmarine missiles such as theASROC missile, andanti-ship missiles such as theHarpoon missile. See especially theOliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, owned by several different navies around the world, in which one 40-missile magazine carries a mixture of all three types of missiles: surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, and surface-to-underwater.

Inaircraft carriers, the magazines are required to store not only the aircraft carrier's own defensive weapons, but all of the weapons for herwarplanes, including rapid-fire gun ammunition,air-to-air missiles such as theSidewinder missile,air-to-surface missiles such as theMaverick missile,Mk 46 ASW torpedoes,Joint Direct Attack Munitions, "dumb bombs",HARM missiles, and anti-ship missiles such as theHarpoon missile and theExocet missile.

Naval magazines face considerable risk ofdetonation, especially in cases of attack, accident, or fire. Such detonations have sunk many warships and caused many other incidents.^[4]

Battleships were highly armored to protect from external attack, but the strength of the construction aids to constrict and worsen the impact of internal explosions, as the rigid steel does not allow blast waves to dissipate. TheUSSIowa turret explosion was such an example: in 1989 a loading incident caused a gun turret explosion, which spread to further powder stores in the turret, which eventually killed all 47 men in the turret. The turret served to contain the blast, protecting the rest of the ship, but amplified the blast inside the turret ensuring deadly conditions.^[4][5]

During World War II, many ships met their end via magazine detonations. During the 1941Attack on Pearl Harbor, theUSS Arizona was destroyed when a Japanese armor-piercing bomb punched through her deck and detonated in proximity to the ship's ammunition magazine, which was caught on film. The magazines of theJapanese battleshipYamato exploded in 1945 after hours of continuous assault by Allied aircraft, utterly destroying the ship and leaving few survivors.^[6][7]

• Ammunition dump
• Armory
• Arsenal
• Gunpowder magazine
• Gunroom

• Garzke, William H.; Dulin, Robert O. (1985).Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press.ISBN 978-0-87021-101-0.OCLC 12613723.

• Colonial Williamsburg Magazine