Rocket balls could be used to destroy WMD

Danger Room:

The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize sites containing chemical or biological weapons: rocket balls. These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno. The makers call them "kinetic fireball incendiaries." The Pentagon doesn't want to talk about them, but published documents show that the fireballs have undergone tests on underground bunkers.

There are plenty of bombs which could destroy a lab, and bunker-busting weapons can tackle hardened underground facilities. But blowing up weapons of mass destruction is not a good idea. Using high explosives is likely to scatter them over a wide area, which is exactly what you want to avoid.

Two special high-temperature incendiary bombs — named "CrashPAD" and "Shredder" — were quietly rushed into service for the use against WMDs few years ago. CrashPAD is based on the Mk.84 bomb and is intended for soft targets; the BLU-119/B Shredder is a modified BLU-109 bunker-buster for hardened or underground targets. The filler for both is a combination of explosive and incendiary, which is more effective than explosive alone, but hardly safe. An explosion causes overpressure and releases a plume of hazardous material. However, without any explosive the incendiary will not be adequately dispersed.

The incendiary must also maintain the temperature for a prolonged period, to ensure that anything dangerous is destroyed. That means heating up the entire structure for more than just a few seconds. Existing incendiaries tend to burn fiercely but quickly.

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There is more.

The fireballs apparently do the job. It sounds like a weapon that will really scare the antiwar groups probably more than it will scare the bad guys. It would be interesting to see a comparison to a thermobaric bomb. Their main advantage is that they don't break open the area where the WMD is stored.

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