Never mind the phosphorous: check this out.
Gazans have noticed that there are bombs that produce mushroom clouds in various shades of red. Here, Garlasco admits, "I can only speculate. It looks like Israel is maybe using a new weapon that it was not using before: DIME - the dense inert metal explosive, consisting of 25 percent TNT and 75 percent tungsten, a heavy metal. You mix the two, in a fine grain, like pepper, and when the bomb hits the ground it aerosolizes. In less than a second, the mist dissipates and explodes."
He says the advantage of DIME is that "it strikes a very small area, 10 to 20 meters, and the fire it ignites burns out very quickly; if it hits us now, we will die, but no one around us will be hurt. The problem is that when you are killed - you are ripped to shreds and there is nothing left."
He says the advantage of DIME is that "it strikes a very small area, 10 to 20 meters, and the fire it ignites burns out very quickly; if it hits us now, we will die, but no one around us will be hurt. The problem is that when you are killed - you are ripped to shreds and there is nothing left."
Other evidence cited is that a large number of injured have been turning up in hospital absent limbs, apparently left behind in the shred zone.
Oh well. Coming soon to a conflict zone near you, I guess.
If it totally vapourizes the bodies of those caught within the lethal zone, it has the added advantage of making an accurate count of casualties nigh impossible and endlessly disputable.
Posted by: Fellow Traveller | January 17, 2009 at 09:20 PM
Reading this I thought, why in hell would anyone use Tungsten to do this? It will reduce the effective area of the explosion....not what most people are trying to do with an explosion. Biggest bang thrown the furthest is the usual aim.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_Inert_Metal_Explosive
"It is intended to limit the distance at which the explosion causes damage, to avoid collateral damage in warfare."
If we're going to have wars then that doesn't sound like a bad idea per se.
Posted by: Tim Worstall | January 17, 2009 at 11:13 PM
that doesn't sound like a bad idea per se
I read that comment and thought "I'm sure that's completely wrong. After all, it's Worstall."
And sure enough, if you read further down the article, there's the news that the tungsten powder causes cancer, and that DIME shrapnel wounds are basically inoperable because the fragments are so small. (A bit like the old X-ray-transparent flechettes.) Nice.
He's also wrong (of course) when he says that using tungsten will reduce the effective area of the explosion. It won't. The blast radius is small because the splinters are so small that they get slowed and stopped by air resistance. A tungsten-cased conventional bomb wouldn't have a significantly smaller radius of effect than a steel-cased bomb.
Posted by: ajay | January 19, 2009 at 02:37 PM