Post World War II Incendiary Weapons
Modern incendiary bombs usually contain thermite, made from aluminium and ferric oxide. The most effective formula is 25% aluminium and 75% iron oxide. It takes very high temperatures to ignite, but when alight, it can burn through solid steel. In WWII, such devices were employed in incendiary grenades to burn through heavy armor plate, or as a quick welding mechanism to destroy artillery and other complex machined weapons.
A variety of pyrophoric materials can also be used: Selected organometallic compounds, most often triethylaluminium, trimethylaluminium, and some other alkyl and aryl derivates of aluminium, magnesium, boron, zinc, sodium, and lithium, can be used. Thickened triethylaluminium, a napalm-like substance that ignites in contact with air, is known as thickened pyrophoric agent, or TPA.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army developed the CBU-55, a cluster bomb incendiary fueled by propane, a weapon that was used only once in warfare. Napalm proper is no longer used by the United States, although the kerosene-fueled Mark 77 MOD 5 Firebomb is currently in use. The United States has confirmed the use of Mark 77s in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Read more about this topic: Incendiary Device
Famous quotes containing the words post, world, war, incendiary and/or weapons:
“Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“The world is a cow that is hard to milk,—life does not come so easy,—and oh, how thinly it is watered ere we get it!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances ...”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)