Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 24, 2004 – October 30, 2004 Archives:
This has been rumored in Washington for several days. And now the Nelson Report has broken the story.
Some 350 tons of high explosives (RDX and HDX [sic: actually it’s HMX, about which more below]), which were under IAEA seal while Saddam was in power, were looted during the early days of the US occupation. Like so much else, it was just left unguarded.
HMX and RDX – plastic industrial and nuclear HMX and RDX explosives and bombs:
Powerful explosive forces such as these are effective in penetrating steel and concrete. Add to this the plasticity of RDX and HMX (within proper limits, they can be heated without exploding and cast into a variety of shapes), and one comprehends their potential uses. Military dynamite is 75% RDX, 15% TNT, and 10% plasticizers and desensitizers. The plastic explosive Composition C4 (known simply as C4, and the stock-in-trade of terrorists) is 91% RDX and 9% plasticizer. Exploding HMX provides the detonation waves that compress an atom bomb’s uranium-235, thereby initiating the vast energies of nuclear fission. (Iraq has imported hundreds of tons of HMX.)
An inescapable truth is that military preparedness always requires newer and better explosives. In 1987, Arnold Nielson working at the US Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake synthesized hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane (designated as CL-20). Like HMX and RDX, CL-20 is a cyclic nitramine stable to handling and amenable to casting into shaped charges, but is up to 20% more powerful than HMX. In a test using shaped charges (30 grams each) of CL-20 and PBXN-5 (the explosive used in armor-piercing 30mm ammunition fired by the M230 chain gun on the AH-64 Apache helicopter), the CL-20 was able to penetrate seven one-inch steel plates compared to PBXN-5’s five plate penetration.
Great. So what little WMD-quality material Saddam had, secured under lock and key, has been missing since last year and the Bush administration has known about it all the time. This is the same materiél being used against American troops (what do you suppose is in those IEDs?). I don’t feel safer. Do you?
The NYTimes has the details here.
And at 454 grams to the pound ( (454 / 30) * 750 000 = 11 350 000), that makes for roughly 11.3 million charges of the type described, suitable for penetrating 7 inches of armor. Unarmored HUMVEEs would not stand a chance.
TAPPED: October 2004 Archives:
So how much boom do you get for 380 tons of the stuff? My friend and fellow blogger Phillip Carter, a former Army captain, e-mails with an attempt at a back-of-the-envelope calculation, using a “how many Oklahoma City bombings” metric. Here’s the result:
OK City = 5,000 pounds/2,300 kg of ammonium-nitrate and nitromethane.
This mix has a TNT equivalent ranging from 3%-10%, i.e. the OK City bomb is the equivalent of 150 – 500 pounds of TNT.
AQQ = 380 tons of RDX, HMX and PETN. RDX and PETN have a TNT equivalent value of 170%. Converted into TNT, the AQQ stockpile equals 646 tons or 1,292,000 pounds of explosives.
Convert this back into my OK City metric, and this means that the lost material at AQQ equals betwen 2,584 – 8613 OK City-size bombs. That’s one hell of a lot of material to be on the street — enough to fuel a car-bomb and IED-based insurgency for years, if not decades.
Chilling thought. Even if the order of magnitude is off by, say, two decimal places.
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