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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (11087)	6/5/2006 10:06:51 AM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 22250

> Also many thousands of litres of dieseline or acetone or whatever needed to make it pop en.wikipedia.org >>Ammonium nitrate has found many uses as a strong oxidiser component of explosives. Most commonly, it is mixed with a hydrocarbon, usually Diesel fuel (oil) or, sometimes, kerosene. Because of the ready availability in bulk of the raw materials, ammonium nitrate/fuel oil (ANFO) mixtures have occasionally been used for improvised bombs, for example by the Provisional IRA and in the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. However the greater bulk of material use in the OKC bombing was an improvised "kinepak" mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane and this is considerably more destructive than ANFO, at least when unconfined. (Both components can detonate as pure compounds.) True Kinepak and Kinestiks were marketed by Gerald Hurst's company and were binary mixtures that were mixed directly before use on construction sites, and other small scale civilian uses. According to Nichols' later testimony, McVeigh was trying to put together an even more powerful explosive mixture made from the reaction products of anhydrous hydrazine and ammonium nitrate, in essence this would have been "Astrolite-G". Apparently this effort failed largely because McVeigh could not afford the extremely high cost of such a large amount of hydrazine. Astrolite is said to rival the destructive power of military explosives and exceed most commercial ones, according to promotions in the early seventies.<< Making a bomb is not as simple as placing a telephonic order for ammonium nitrate. >>Rouen, France, 1940 During a bombing raid on 1940-06-05, a bomb exploded in a warehouse containing ammonium nitrate: the fertiliser was dispersed around the crater, but did not explode.<<