Re: Other explosives
With rockets, first there is only a single rocket being fired at a time, and not a thousand bombers dropping their payloads.
Those (bombing raid) explosions would occur over several minutes, maybe even several tens of minutes, roughly the same time that a rocket would need to reach the upper atmosphere. Where it would then actually punch through the ionosphere, although the disturbance caused by that would be over a much smaller area than the cumulative blast front from a bombing raid once that reached the ionosphere.
Secondly, it's being lit one end and burned relatively slowly compared to the entire lot exploding in a millisecond so you don't get a shockwave.
Not always.
Which also makes me wonder how large an effect Buncefield, Pepcon or Enschede would have had, compared to the average bombing raid
