- 5/22/2025
An in-depth and heart stopping look at the ultimate chemical reaction – the explosion. Using high speed photography and dramatic reconstruction, the film will chart the tarnished history of explosives: the terrible accidents, the scientific ingenuity and ultimately, the carnage of war and terrorism.
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00:00Tonight on NOVA, the power, the magic, the chemistry of explosives.
00:12From the secret experiments of early alchemists to the legal legacy of Los Alamos,
00:19explore the way we blow things up.
00:26Kaboom!
00:30NOVA's Explosive Adventure
00:47In the back of this van, there's enough explosive power to blow apart an entire building.
01:01It's part of a test to understand the nature of explosions,
01:05a task that has become increasingly important in a world haunted by the threat of terrorist bombs.
01:21Today, Ground Zero is a test range of the New Mexico Technical Institute,
01:26where explosive scientists have been conducting trials for the FBI.
01:33Remote cameras, installed behind blast-proof slabs of steel,
01:37will capture what happens when the van blows up.
01:49The explosion will be filmed at several thousand frames per second through a mirror.
01:57Metal fragments are expected to be thrown thousands of yards,
02:01so everyone on the site must take shelter in an underground bunker.
02:13Clear to charge?
02:15Okay.
02:17Here we go. Countdown.
02:19Five, four, three, two, one.
02:25When an explosive detonates, there is a rapid rearrangement of atoms,
02:31which sets off a powerful train of events.
02:37A supersonic shockwave ripples across the sand,
02:41and rises above the New Mexico skyline.
02:46The initial shockwave shatters everything in millions of a second.
02:50The air blast, which follows, spreads debris over a mile.
02:55Finally, half a second after detonation, a rock shatters the mirror.
03:05The shockwave is a powerful shockwave.
03:09Finally, half a second after detonation, a rock shatters the mirror.
03:26The devastation is frightening, even in this barren landscape.
03:32So how can a simple rearrangement of atoms unleash enough energy
03:37to scatter fragments over two miles?
03:53Ah, hello. The experiments are very nearly ready.
03:58Few people know the secrets of explosive power better than Sidney Alford,
04:03an internationally renowned explosive engineer.
04:09Like a modern-day alchemist, he can persuade the most innocent household ingredients
04:14to unlock their chemical bonds to reveal explosive potential.
04:21His cottage in England is littered with less innocent remnants
04:25of his clandestine explosive operations around the world.
04:29But this will be a controlled backyard explosion, reduced to the simplest elements.
04:38To create a simple explosion requires three essential ingredients.
04:43A means of ignition, a fuel source, and oxygen to support the rapid combustion,
04:51which, if confined, will produce an explosion.
05:00And there we have a very elementary explosion.
05:04We had flour, an everyday substance, which constituted the fuel component,
05:10and we had oxygen in the surrounding air, constituting the oxidizing component.
05:16We had a combustion chamber, which produced the fuel component,
05:21and we had oxygen in the surrounding air, constituting the oxidizing component.
05:27We had a combustion chamber, now full of smoke,
05:31and we had a source of ignition, the candle, now extinguished.
05:35The degree of confinement was minimal.
05:38Flour is not known for its high energy content,
05:42and therefore we had a very gentle explosion.
05:52The first explosive mixtures were discovered by accident.
05:57In the 9th century, Chinese alchemists produced a thick toffee made from honey, saltpeter, and sulfur.
06:05They hoped that by eating the substance, they might live forever.
06:09In fact, it nearly killed them.
06:12The mixture burst into flames and burnt down the alchemists' hut.
06:19They had unwittingly prepared a crude form of gunpowder.
06:24An ancient Chinese manuscript urges readers not to repeat the experiment.
06:34Eleven centuries later, Christopher Cullen, an ancient Chinese history scholar,
06:39ignores the warning and invites Sidney Alford to help him try out the forbidden recipe.
06:45You're the experienced pyrotechnicist, so I think we'll trust your judgment of the proportions.
06:51All right, let's try it.
06:53Sidney Alford was skeptical of success.
06:56Honey contains water, which he thought might dampen any pyrotechnic prospects.
07:01Another slight stir.
07:03The whole aim of all this that's going on here
07:06is to find a way to make the human body as perfect and as long-lasting as the universe
07:12to achieve physical immortality.
07:15So, really, it's the beginnings, ultimately, of the entire pharmacological industry,
07:20the same basic aim.
07:22Is this what you're trying to achieve, Sidney, when you make gunpowder?
07:25I tend to try to make things explode rather than achieve immortality,
07:28if possibly even limit the mortality of other people.
07:31Yes, that's the awful paradox.
07:33Here they were trying to find a way how to make everybody live forever,
07:36and the result is something that kills people.
07:40We've also got text talking about all kinds of mixtures that go off whoosh,
07:44including this one that we're trying here,
07:46which a 9th century text actually gives in a list of dangerous procedures
07:51that no one should ever attempt.
07:54How's it going? Any bubbles?
07:56I think I will prefer a longer mixing stick fairly soon.
07:59Being prudent, our intrepid alchemists decided to brew a small test batch.
08:06Yes, the bubbles stopped.
08:08Quite decidedly, yes.
08:10This is looking...
08:12Chemistry is just beginning to happen now, yes?
08:14Otherwise there'll be an outbreak of chemistry.
08:17So far it's just been physics, you know, warming things up and mixing them.
08:21Excuse me, these fumes are not water alone.
08:24Look, it's not dispersing or dissipating.
08:26No, I can see the yellow there.
08:27Something's happening now.
08:28Oh, something is going to happen now.
08:30I'm there.
08:31Very good.
08:37I like that.
08:39Sorry about that.
08:40Alchemists playing with fire.
08:42Some things never change.
08:44We never doubted it.
08:45They never believed me.
09:04From these early experiments,
09:06the Chinese developed gunpowder for use in rockets and firebombs.
09:13These were the world's first pyrotechnic weapons.
09:17They were also used to make the first fireworks.
09:25Fireworks hold an irresistible attraction.
09:28The Reverend Ron Lancaster enjoys mesmerizing children with his demonstrations.
09:34The fireworks obviously have force.
09:36I mean, you're releasing a tremendous amount of energy.
09:39As the reaction proceeds, the subatomic particles that are involved
09:44are getting more and more excited
09:46in order to produce the effects that you are producing.
09:49And whether there is some kind of connection
09:52between the various electrons getting excited
09:56and people getting excited at the same time, I don't know.
09:59But certainly the two things go together.
10:01There's no doubt about it.
10:05In an unlikely trinity,
10:07the Reverend Lancaster used to combine God, fire and brimstone
10:11until he stopped teaching chemistry to concentrate on fireworks,
10:15an interest he shared with his school friends.
10:18Whilst all the other friends that I have
10:22obviously lost their interest, I didn't.
10:26The only explanation I can give you of that is
10:29that once you've smelt black powder,
10:31it's with you for the rest of your life.
10:33In other words, there's a suggestion that, for some people,
10:36it's sort of inner blood,
10:38and that's certainly, without any doubt, the case with me.
10:52The Reverend Lancaster now has his own fireworks factory
10:56and with his son Mark,
10:58who also has black powder in his blood,
11:00he is preparing for one of the biggest fireworks displays
11:03ever to be seen in London.
11:05It will celebrate the end of the Second World War.
11:09One of the main kinds of fireworks we will be using at VJ Day
11:13are star shells.
11:15Star shells, which this is just a baby one,
11:17are a kind of firework
11:19which actually get fired out of these mortar tubes.
11:22So you'd place a star shell inside the mortar tube.
11:25And then the gunpowder lifting charge forces this out of the tube
11:29and the larger ones go up to heights of about...
11:32up to about 1,000 feet and then explode.
11:36Here we have some of the larger shells
11:39that we will actually be using on the Thames.
11:41This is an 8-inch shell.
11:43This is one of your specials?
11:45Yes, those are very much my department, yes, still.
11:48And Mark Lancaster makes them as well.
11:50I'm not sure if it's symbolic, but I've made the 6-inch shell.
11:53He's made an even bigger one, the 8-inch one.
11:55Perhaps when I get older I'll be able to make those as well.
11:58But not yet.
12:00To launch it, you actually put it inside this 8-inch mortar
12:04and lower it all the way down to the bottom.
12:06And that means that this mortar will fire the shell up to about 1,000 feet
12:10and then it explodes.
12:12It does at least three interesting things before going out
12:15and has a spread of about 300 feet.
12:17So it's a pretty serious firework.
12:23MUSIC PLAYS
12:53MUSIC CONTINUES
13:23MUSIC CONTINUES
13:53MUSIC CONTINUES
13:59It's really like nothing else on Earth.
14:02You have to remember that you're standing on a very small, hollow steel barge
14:06with about four tonnes of explosive surrounding you
14:09with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
14:11And once it starts going off,
14:13the whole barge can move up to six inches down in the water.
14:16The sound is unbelievable. It's wonderful.
14:18You really feel as if you have entertained and earned your keep for the day.
14:39The explosions that engulf the London sky
14:42celebrate the end of a conflict that saw an escalation of explosive power
14:47culminating with the atom bomb.
14:51Indeed, the tarnished history of explosives
14:54has been dominated by dangerous experiments
14:57that many perpetrators vainly hoped would never be repeated.
15:07The man who lit the fuse of European warfare
15:10was an English friar who perfected more explosive blends of gunpowder.
15:15When the flame of powder toucheth the soul of man,
15:19it burneth exceeding deep.
15:23At a Franciscan monastery in Oxford,
15:25Roger Bacon spent several years
15:28investigating the magical properties of gunpowder.
15:31Medieval travellers from the East
15:33probably brought the basic recipe to Europe.
15:40Gunpowder consists of three ingredients.
15:43The most important is the white powder called saltpeter.
15:47Its modern name is potassium nitrate.
15:50It contains chemically bound oxygen
15:52that supports rapid burning of the two fuels,
15:55sulphur and charcoal.
15:57Properly refined and mixed,
15:59they form an explosive mixture
16:01originally called black powder.
16:05MUSIC
16:12Making black powder burn was easy,
16:15making it explode much harder.
16:18The secret lay in the quality of the saltpeter.
16:23If you throw saltpeter on the fire,
16:26it's very obvious that something special happens.
16:29It causes the fire to burn very fiercely locally
16:33and it generates sparks.
16:35And the greater the extent to which saltpeter is purified,
16:40the more violent this reaction.
16:44Saltpeter is very often the white stuff
16:48that you can scrape very fine crystals from the walls of cellars.
16:53It's also the stuff that can...
16:56..that oozes out of piles of soil and earth,
17:01and contaminates with vegetable rubbish.
17:10Because saltpeter naturally occurs in soil,
17:14it is often contaminated.
17:16Roger Bacon found a way of purifying the brown sludge
17:20by concentrating the mixture
17:22and crystallizing out the white powder.
17:26Many of the things Roger Bacon tried in 1242,
17:30Sidney Alford repeated as a schoolboy in 1942.
17:38By increasing the ratio of saltpeter to charcoal
17:42and confining the powder in a paper tube,
17:45he discovered an extraordinary property.
17:49Bacon had made his first bang.
17:53Roger Bacon was a scholar
17:55who laid the foundations for modern science.
17:59He always wrote up his experiments,
18:02but his black powder investigations frightened him.
18:05He foresaw the dangers
18:07if this formulation fell into the wrong hands
18:10and decided to encode the recipe in an anagram in the Latin text.
18:15The passage ends with the words
18:18Nothing so dangerous could remain secret.
18:21He knew that the more the powder was confined,
18:24the bigger the explosion.
18:48Roger Bacon didn't understand the chemistry,
18:51but what happens when gunpowder ignites
18:54is a violent transformation of solid ingredients
18:58into a rapidly expanding mixture of hot gases.
19:05If trapped inside a container,
19:08they will also cause an explosion.
19:11Now we should take exactly the same quantity of gunpowder,
19:15but this time confined in a cardboard tube.
19:18The effect will be rather different
19:20and I think it would be a good idea to do this outside.
19:29This enhanced confinement will increase the speed of burning,
19:34so quite a high pressure can develop
19:38and should give more oomph, to use a technical expression.
19:46Firing.
19:48Four, three, two, one.
19:53Enough oomph to blast the helmet 50 feet into the air
19:57and enough oomph to change the course of European history.
20:03Think of what is shown by the fact that in 1449,
20:07the King of France did a tour of Normandy
20:10and using his siege train,
20:12knocked down castles held by the English
20:15at the rate of five a month.
20:17It was the death knell of the old feudal system
20:21based on the stone castles
20:24and the castles were destroyed.
20:27It was the death knell of the old feudal system
20:30based on the stone castle, the mounted knight and so on
20:34and the whole social system that went with that.
20:37And what it meant was that the people who could dispose of the power
20:41to produce gunpowder weapons
20:43were the ones who could control society.
20:47For nearly a thousand years, gunpowder ruled the world.
20:55Because it will only explode when confined,
20:59it's called a low explosive.
21:01But there's a different type of explosive
21:03that will unleash its fury in the open, without confinement.
21:08This unstable oil has fuel and oxygen
21:11chemically combined in one molecule.
21:14Its name is nitroglycerin.
21:17It's a high explosive,
21:19which can be triggered by a hammer blow.
21:22Now, nitroglycerin and quite a lot of other explosives
21:26can be triggered by a hammer blow.
21:29It's a high explosive,
21:31which can be triggered by a hammer blow.
21:34Nitroglycerin and quite a lot of other explosives
21:38decompose in a very different way from gunpowder.
21:41Gunpowder essentially burns.
21:46People in the trade use a fancy Latin word for it, deflagration,
21:50but it means no more than burns.
21:53In the case of nitroglycerin, however, the mechanism is very different.
21:57Not only does that material contain much more chemical energy
22:01for a given mass,
22:03but also it decomposes very much more quickly,
22:06and this makes the explosion much more violent.
22:20The first high explosives were discovered by accident
22:23in the 19th century,
22:25when chemists began adding nitric acid to organic compounds
22:29to make new medicines.
22:32The Italian scientist Ascanio Soprero
22:35started experiments with organic glycerin.
22:38He created a new oxygen-rich compound, nitroglycerin.
22:44He did not realize how dangerous this liquid was
22:47until his lab exploded.
22:50Many chemists had been mauled by this beast.
22:53It held an irresistible fascination.
22:56I'm not sure that he would have realized the full potential
22:59of this new material that he'd just prepared.
23:01Certainly he would have suffered a very severe headache
23:03through tasting the nitroglycerin.
23:07The power of nitroglycerin far surpassed other explosive materials.
23:13Yes, I suppose it did have a certain attraction,
23:16but being a liquid material, it wasn't very easily handled,
23:19and it wasn't very safely handled.
23:22Breaking the bonds between nitrogen and oxygen,
23:25the so-called nitro groups,
23:27creates the gases which release the explosive energy.
23:33Many explosives contain nitro groups
23:36because it stores a lot of energy.
23:39The way to make an explosive is to store chemical energy
23:42in as much as possible.
23:44And so if you have hydrocarbon material
23:48and you put nitro groups on it,
23:51that sort of winds up a spring,
23:54stores potential chemical energy in there.
23:57The more you put on the molecule, the more energy there is.
24:01And it's just that it's a good way
24:05to store a lot of energy in the molecules.
24:10Some chemical bonds are so unstable
24:13they can be triggered by the touch of a feather.
24:17I'd like to demonstrate an explosive that I haven't made
24:20and demonstrated for over 20 years now.
24:23To most schoolboys, it's called nitrogen triiodide.
24:26Now, this is an explosive composed of nitrogen and iodine
24:30in a very unhappy relationship.
24:32You might describe it as being a very unhappy marriage.
24:35These elements are just waiting for an excuse to suddenly burst apart.
24:39It's so sensitive, so sensitive that even a fly landing on it
24:42might set it off.
24:44So if you'd kindly put on your ear protection and your eye protection,
24:47I'll now demonstrate.
24:54In this laboratory,
24:56scientists studied the anatomy of an explosion
24:59using the ultimate in slow-motion photography.
25:03To capture a moment of detonation on film
25:06requires a camera that can run at a million frames per second.
25:12In this laboratory,
25:14scientists studied the anatomy of an explosion
25:17using the ultimate in slow-motion photography.
25:20A million frames per second.
25:29Historically, the term high explosive
25:32refers to an explosive which is actually detonating,
25:35whereas the term a low explosive
25:38refers to something that's merely burning very fast.
25:41And that can be very fast.
25:43That could be burning at speeds of maybe 1,000 metres per second,
25:47but it's still just a fast burn.
25:49It isn't actually detonating.
25:51The process of detonation is a very specific and different phenomenon.
25:55If you were going to start a detonation,
25:58you might have a burning reaction
26:00or you might have something that generated a small pressure wave.
26:04And as that goes through some of the explosive material,
26:08it compresses it, which heats it,
26:11and raises its pressure.
26:14And so the reactions, the chemical reactions,
26:17are going faster and faster.
26:27As the shock wave travels through the explosive,
26:30it triggers a series of chemical bond ruptures
26:33which release enormous amounts of energy.
26:36When the chemical reaction accelerates,
26:39it drives the shock wave at supersonic speed.
26:43The chemical reactions behind the shock wave
26:46give it the push that keeps it going.
26:49And you can produce pressures that are like 100,000 atmospheres
26:55which can go through, you know, can make holes in steel plates
27:00and you can do useful things with it.
27:07The incredible power of high explosives
27:09can be demonstrated on a three-inch thick slab of steel
27:13with a simple weapon that Sidney Alford has developed.
27:17This device is a shape charge.
27:19It's almost full of explosive and it has a metal cone in the front.
27:23They land up, forming a sort of slug,
27:26and it will travel very, very fast.
27:29This metal cone will be compressed by the explosion into a projectile.
27:40Firing!
27:42Four!
27:43Three!
27:44Two!
27:45One!
28:01Here we are.
28:06One slab of steel.
28:09One rather large hole.
28:14The copper cone, which was about that diameter,
28:19four inches in diameter,
28:21was squeezed down to a projectile
28:24of about one and a half inches in diameter
28:28and it was travelling extremely fast,
28:31several times the speed of a rifle bullet.
28:34It would have penetrated this
28:36at tens if not hundreds of metres of range.
28:41And this is mild steel.
28:44It does it on armour.
28:51The warhead of this armour-piercing shell
28:54is full of high explosive.
28:56Back at the New Mexico test range,
28:58they investigate the characteristics of different explosives.
29:02In this case, they want to see
29:05if the shell can be accidentally detonated
29:08by a stray fragment from a bomb blast.
29:11To avoid accidents,
29:13most modern explosives are designed to be difficult to set off,
29:17but they need to be tested to make sure.
29:22Using a sled track,
29:24the engineers will fire a lump of metal on the end of a rocket
29:28to simulate debris hitting the warhead at high velocity.
29:41The target warhead contains special explosives
29:44that should not go off under these conditions.
29:47Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
29:59It fails the test.
30:04The unpredictability of high explosives
30:07has always been a problem since investigations first began.
30:18The father of high explosives was Alfred Nobel.
30:22He was the inventor of high explosives.
30:25The father of high explosives was Alfred Nobel,
30:28the Swedish industrialist.
30:31In the 1850s, gunpowder was the only available explosive,
30:36so the commercial potential for something more powerful,
30:39like nitroglycerin, was clear.
30:42But its tendency to explode without warning
30:45made it too dangerous to handle.
30:48Danger has never been a deterrent
30:52among scientists that are obsessed by following an object to its end.
30:58On the contrary, it can provide a powerful stimulant for them
31:02to tame a dangerous substance or instrument.
31:07If you look at the work with the atom bomb and so on,
31:10you find the same Madame Curie in radium and so on.
31:14They knew it was very, very dangerous, but they still kept at it.
31:23Nobel realized that unless nitroglycerin could be detonated reliably,
31:28it had no future.
31:31He experimented with the idea of using a small gunpowder charge
31:35to act as a detonator.
31:38These prototypes were like firecrackers with a long fuse.
31:42It was a significant breakthrough.
31:45Without the invention of the detonator,
31:48handling high explosives would have remained a perilous act.
32:03Although nitroglycerin was now much safer to set off,
32:07it remained hazardous to manufacture.
32:19Alfred Nobel and his family began producing nitroglycerin by the bucketful.
32:24He was tempting fate.
32:26In 1864, a violent explosion destroyed the laboratory,
32:31killing his younger brother, Emil.
32:34Alfred was devastated,
32:37but refused to halt work on the treacherous liquid.
32:41One might guess that he was, in fact,
32:45trying to conquer the enemy that had killed his younger brother's life
32:50and to render this beast harmless.
32:53And, of course, his personality being what it was,
32:57he went on, regardless of criticism or objection from his family and so on,
33:04because a true scientist often has a mannical side to him.
33:10In the next ten years, he built dozens of nitroglycerin factories.
33:15Few survive today. Most have blown up.
33:19This one in Norway is a working museum.
33:23Inside the reaction vessel, cooling coils kept the chemistry under control.
33:27But if the temperature rose by even a few degrees, it was time to run.
33:32All around the nitroglycerin plant you will see barriers built,
33:37built barriers to protect against fragments,
33:40because sometimes they had explosions,
33:43and, of course, these explosions would then cause a lot of wooden pieces
33:48being thrown for hundreds of yards through the air.
33:57To help avoid accidents, open pipes and gravity
34:00controlled the flow of nitroglycerin.
34:03Pumping was out of the question.
34:05Friction between moving metal parts would have been fatal.
34:10The abbreviation of nitroglycerin is NGL.
34:15That's why this strange device here is called Angel Boogie.
34:22There are no moving metal parts.
34:25You see a rubber seal here, a rubber pipe, a wooden clamp.
34:31And the nitroglycerin was then transported to the next production house.
34:40Raw nitroglycerin does not like being moved.
34:44In the 1860s, it was killing so many people
34:47that it was giving Nobel a bad name.
34:50Nitroglycerin was banned in America.
34:55He had to find a way of making it less reactive
34:58and tried absorbing it with inert powders.
35:01One of the most successful was a porous white clay called Kieselger,
35:06which could absorb four times its own weight of nitroglycerin.
35:10This was Nobel's most famous invention, dynamite.
35:16It was used for rock blasting everywhere
35:19and made him one of the richest men in the world.
35:25Nobel's Business Empire
35:40Even though Nobel's business empire was huge,
35:43he never stopped experimenting.
35:47One night, he was awakened by a sore cut on his finger.
35:51He dressed it with a protective film of nitrated cotton,
35:54a preparation called newskin.
35:59This gave him the idea of mixing a similar solution with nitroglycerin.
36:05The result was blasting gelatin,
36:08which retained the power of nitroglycerin and was as safe as dynamite.
36:14Blasting gel is still used today.
36:22Demolition engineer Mark Lowazzo
36:25is setting charges inside a large apartment complex
36:29scheduled for destruction in Dundee, Scotland.
36:33It's got a lot of power, a lot of shattering ability,
36:36and the cantilevers we're dealing with are highly reinforced.
36:39They're carrying a tremendous load at the 17-story building above it,
36:42so with all that reinforcing steel,
36:44we needed to be sure that we took the cantilevers out.
36:48We've got about 1,570 separate charges in the building,
36:54and they're all wired together in what is called parallel series.
36:59Once we push the button, all of them go off on a given cue.
37:05On this job, Mark is helped by his daughter Stacy.
37:10The center will be the first point of motion,
37:13the center of the structure, and it will walk this way.
37:16And the point is, it will move when it's ready.
37:19We simply give it a bit of a push,
37:21and we wait for the structure to respond,
37:23and then our timing with delays
37:25moves just ahead of what the structure is likely to do.
37:28We call it cajoling, forceful persuasion.
37:31That's what explosives are all about.
37:33They're a catalyst, nothing more.
37:35They set up their firing post several hundred yards from the building.
37:395, 4, 3, 2, 1, fire.
37:56I think the fascination that people have with explosives demolition
37:59is very similar to the fascination
38:01that people have with nuclear weapons.
38:03Explosive demolition is very similar to the fascination
38:05that people have with car crashes at racetracks.
38:13People like to flirt with danger.
38:15They like to flirt with death.
38:20And when they see a building coming down, they're doing just that.
38:23They come out, who knows, maybe they see us mess up.
38:26Hopefully they've got a long way.
38:29Explosives are tools.
38:34It's a tool that affects everyone's life.
38:37People don't realize that the highways that they ride on,
38:40the buildings that they live and work in,
38:42were partially put there with explosives,
38:44the quarrying operations to make the concrete.
38:47People don't think about explosives as being an everyday thing.
38:52The Loazzo family has masterminded
38:54some of the world's most spectacular demolition jobs,
38:58like the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas,
39:00which was accompanied by a cascade of pyrotechnic effects.
39:12Three generations of Loazzos have dynamite in their blood.
39:17Three generations of Loazzos have dynamite in their blood.
39:21My father said, this is mine and this one's yours.
39:24Gave me a crew of laborers and sent me on my way with a diagram
39:28and checked on me quite a bit,
39:31but really gave me pretty much free reign there.
39:33And fell in love.
39:35How old were you then?
39:36Fifteen. Fifteen years old.
39:40Now the Loazzo family is in Hungary,
39:43planning to destroy old Soviet Scud missile launchers.
39:49NATO top brass will be coming to witness the decommissioning,
39:52so they are planning to turn it into an explosive event.
39:58They are using whatever explosives are locally available.
40:01In this case, the plastic explosive Semtex.
40:05This is a fourth of a 2.5 kg Semtex block
40:10that we're suspending inside the cabins.
40:13We don't want to put it against any elements
40:15because it would send it much too far.
40:17There's too much energy here.
40:21That'll do it.
40:33Semtex is a Czechoslovakian product
40:35and it is what we in the industry say hot
40:39because you literally can mold it.
40:41It is a plastic explosive.
40:44You can mold it into any shape that you want.
40:47It also is forgiving
40:51in that you can handle it pretty aggressively.
40:56It's not that it's difficult to set off,
40:58but nothing that I'm doing is going to create a problem,
41:02that's for sure.
41:03It's going to take a blasting cap
41:05or, in this case, a piece of detonating cord
41:08to set it off.
41:10But once the Semtex gets going,
41:12nothing is going to stop it.
41:22So one small chapter of the arms race
41:25will soon come to an end.
41:27The man who made the race possible
41:29was Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.
41:32The nature of warfare was transformed by his ideas.
41:39Nobel was quick to realize
41:41that if his high explosives were used in weapons
41:44instead of gunpowder,
41:46there would be enormous advantages.
41:49Now, the trouble with gunpowder,
41:51as a propellant for small arms,
41:53you can see it's that smoke.
41:56You can see it, you cannot but see it.
41:58Imagine you're firing with perhaps 20 colleagues
42:01using the same sort of powder,
42:03you can be sure that the enemy can most certainly see it.
42:07That's very unhealthy.
42:09Nobel realized that it would be most advantageous
42:15if he could develop a powder
42:17which didn't produce that awful smoke.
42:20By mixing nitrocellulose with nitroglycerin,
42:23Nobel was able to produce a smokeless powder.
42:28He called it ballastite, and it's still used today.
42:36Now, smokeless powder has another very considerable advantage
42:41over gunpowder.
42:42The first bullet I fired has stopped within this block.
42:46The second one has gone through five blocks
42:50and lodged in the sixth.
42:52It has considerably more penetrating power
42:55than the one driven by black powder.
42:57The reason for which this is possible
43:00is there's simply more energy available
43:03in a given mass of powder.
43:05This means that much higher pressures can be generated
43:08in the breech and, of course, in the barrel of the weapon,
43:12and, of course, the terminal effect is much more devastating.
43:18Nobel saw the opportunity for making new weapons
43:21that would use his smokeless munitions,
43:24and he bought the Swedish gun manufacturer, Bofors.
43:29However much he loathed the stigma,
43:32he was now an arms merchant,
43:34yet he claimed to be a pacifist.
43:37Now, he explained this contradiction
43:40by saying that he was trying to make a weapon
43:45by saying that he was trying to perfect the ultimate weapon
43:49so that in this way he would make war impossible in the future,
43:54like the atom bomb.
43:56Also, he explained that they were evil arms,
44:00but they exerted a very powerful fascination for him.
44:04But I believe that such an intellectual man
44:08would easily find himself in a quandary.
44:14As to his attitudes, on one hand, the peace advocate,
44:17and on the other hand, the arms merchant.
44:23Eight years before he died,
44:25Alfred's obituary was mistakenly printed in a French newspaper
44:29which described him as the merchant of death.
44:33He was haunted by his reputation
44:35and resolved to leave a legacy that would never be forgotten,
44:39the Nobel Peace Prize.
44:42Further awards would honor excellence
44:44in literature, science, and medicine.
44:47This was how he wanted to be remembered.
44:52He became obsessed with his own death.
44:55He endured terrible headaches from working with nitroglycerin.
44:59Yet, ironically, later in life,
45:01he had to take it as a medicine for his heart disease.
45:12Nobel had built an empire founded on an unstable molecule
45:16which would kill millions of people.
45:20He was a lonely man, tortured by his own success.
45:25His conscience would never be clear.
45:29Woman singing opera
45:49Millions of tons of high explosives
45:52were fired in the First World War.
45:55It was a stark equation.
45:58One ton of munitions for each human life lost.
46:03Over the century, the roll call of high explosives lengthened.
46:07TNT, Ametol, Torpex, Semtex,
46:11each growing in chemical complexity and power.
46:19I should like to be able to create a substance or a machine
46:23with such a horrific capacity for annihilation
46:26that wars would become impossible forever.
46:30In the New Mexico dawn of 1945,
46:33Nobel's ghost was aroused.
46:36You are here to participate in an atomic maneuver.
46:41Atomic weapons are truly powerful,
46:44but they don't mean the end of all life as so many people think.
46:48You can live through an atomic attack,
46:51and by taking common sense precautions,
46:54live to fight another day.
46:57Watched from a safe distance,
47:00this explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.
47:05You're probably saying, so it's beautiful.
47:08What makes it so dangerous?
47:11You can have a chemical explosion
47:14in which the heat and gas is produced
47:17by the energetic decomposition of a material, an explosive.
47:21Or you can have a nuclear explosion
47:24where the product is really just energy.
47:27There's no gas given out as such in the course of a nuclear explosion,
47:31and the blast that you get from a nuclear explosion
47:34is purely caused by vaporization of the surroundings.
47:38And what's happened is there has been direct conversion of mass into energy
47:42by Einstein's famous equation E equals mc2,
47:45and that is where the energy has come from.
47:48It's only a fraction of the mass of the original atom that's been lost,
47:52but that fraction, when you sum it over all the atoms of plutonium or uranium
47:56in a nuclear device, that provides a huge amount of energy.
48:01Bacon and Nobel would have recognized Robert Oppenheimer's symptoms,
48:05that irresistible urge to witness a new form of explosive power.
48:10This time, it was a bigger bang in a bigger backyard.
48:14But the dream was the same,
48:17a belief that the experiment was so dangerous,
48:20it need never be attempted again.
48:23It was a dream that would never come true.
48:26A belief that the experiment was so dangerous,
48:29it need never be attempted again.
48:32Before dawn on July 16, 1945,
48:35at the Alamogordo Army Air Base in New Mexico,
48:38a small band of military and civilian technicians waited nervously.
48:42After the bombs had been dropped on Japan,
48:45the scientists returned to restage the first test for the cameras.
48:49Two minutes to go.
48:52Stretched out on the sand, tensely expectant,
48:55were General Groves, Dr. Bush, and Dr. Conant.
48:59In the control shack was Dr. J.R. Oppenheimer,
49:02who, assisted by Dr. I. Robbie and others,
49:05had directed the making of the bomb itself.
49:08The automatic control's got it now.
49:11Rob, this time the stakes are really high.
49:14It's going to work all right, Robert,
49:17and I'm sure we'll never be sorry for it.
49:19When they first started planning these tests,
49:21there was some fairly strong consideration
49:23that the detonation of the nuclear weapon
49:25would start an atmospheric chain reaction,
49:27and obviously that would be the end of the world.
49:30But the calculations that they did at that time
49:32showed quite conclusively
49:34that there was no danger of an atmospheric chain reaction,
49:37but it was a worry to begin with.
49:39Minus ten seconds.
49:43Minus five seconds.
49:45Now!
49:49When it went off in that New Mexico dawn,
49:52that first atomic bomb,
49:54we thought of Alfred Nobel and his hope,
49:57his vain hope,
49:59that dynamite would put an end to all wars.
50:05The outtakes from this atomic melodrama
50:07are painful to watch.
50:09The pathos of the script,
50:11all too obvious to Oppenheimer.
50:14This time, Rob, the stakes are pretty high.
50:19It's going to work all right, Robert,
50:21and I'm sure we'll never be sorry for it.
50:24Twenty years later, the script had changed.
50:28A few people laughed.
50:32A few people cried.
50:34Most people were silent.
50:39I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture,
50:43the Bhagavad Gita.
50:46Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince
50:52that he should do his duty,
50:56and to impress him,
50:59takes on his multi-armed form
51:02and says,
51:04now I am become death,
51:06the destroyer of worlds.
51:11I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
51:15In the nuclear standoff which followed,
51:18there were times when the end of the world did seem close.
51:22Yet the Cold War was a war of words,
51:26a war which never happened.
51:29Now the old weapons are lined up,
51:32linked together by shock tube and simtex,
51:36awaiting annihilation.
51:38Simtex, awaiting annihilation.
52:04This is a large megaphone
52:07and it's going to focus.
52:09A lot of sound, directly at the audience.
52:11Right at the audience, right there.
52:18Oh, they're going to like this a lot.
52:20Yeah.
52:22What do you put inside?
52:24Everything.
52:25Everything we have left over,
52:26we're going to make like a mortar out of it.
52:28Project sound and a lot of sparks and stuff like that.
52:31That's the finale.
52:33Why not?
52:38So lift up your fists
52:45and let the world know
52:54Can it be that simple?
52:57Is that the end?
53:00The search for the ultimate explosion will not stop.
53:05And one day, there'll be another experiment
53:08that will wish had never been attempted.
53:35A fuse is lit.
53:37A shell launched.
53:39Gunpowder explodes in a blaze of light and color.
53:42It's a pyrotechnic show at NOVA's website.
53:45For the anatomy of a firework,
53:47head to pbs.org.
54:05To order this show for $19.95 plus shipping and handling,
54:09call 1-800-255-9424.
54:14And to learn more about how science can solve the mysteries of our world,
54:19ask about our many other NOVA videos.
54:34NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.
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