High Density Reactive Substances

[Deepwater6]

This is an article about the US Navy's attempt to increase the explosive power of missles by at least 5 times the current strength. It is also supposed to limit collateral damage. I guess if your trying to hit one car in a convoy that is possible, but when you send one into a little hut in Afghanistan your going to take out whoever is inside, friend or foe.

 

They label the new form of munitions (HDRM's) "high density reactive materials" Hopefully we can find some other uses for the material other than weapons. Alot of things that started out as weapons went on to be of help to mankind in some way or another.

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14581097

[CraigD]

This is an article about the US Navy's attempt to increase the explosive power of missles by at least 5 times the current strength.

Scary stuff! :( By making a “reactive material” (something like magnesium powder bounded with a oxidizer like Teflon) into a strong material suitable for projectile casings, weapon makers have devised a casing that shatters into a fine powder and burns explosively on impact/detonation of a conventional explosive/electrical ignition.

 

It is also supposed to limit collateral damage. I guess if your trying to hit one car in a convoy that is possible, but when you send one into a little hut in Afghanistan your going to take out whoever is inside, friend or foe.

As with most reasoning about “collateral damage”, it takes some somewhat convoluted thinking to understand the reasoning behind this claim. In short, as best I can tell, it amounts to “if the weapon can make a big enough boom that it almost certainly kills who or what it was aimed at, we can stop shooting sooner, and are less likely to kill what we weren’t aiming at.”

 

Weapon technology aside, situations where humans are trying to kill one another, with anything from nuclear weapons to exotic nanometer scale explosives to blunt stones, is symptomatic IMHO of a terrible breakdown in communication and government, and need to be addressed by these disciplines, and eliminated. Earth’s militaries and their governments, principally the US’s, have I think strayed far down a bad and slippery moral slope of treating people who intend, or who they suspect intend, to hurt their citizens or commercial interests, as opposing militaries to be killed without warning, not as suspected criminals due legal process.

 

Though it put their police folk at greater risk of injury and death, the morally proper thing to do with a hut sheltering suspected criminals is to, with the authority of a court gaining its legitimacy from the consent of their neighbors, forcefully but peacefully search it, trying and sanctioning those found guilty of crimes.

 

Hopefully we can find some other uses for the material other than weapons. Alot of things that started out as weapons went on to be of help to mankind in some way or another.

Your hope is well-founded, I think, Deepwater. There already are potential and realized peaceful applications of nanometer-scale reactive materials, such as safer and more powerful engineering explosives and rocket fuels, and manufacturing technologies like reactive bonding, with applications in areas from electronics to biomedical.