When I first heard the report, a few questions jumped out at me. I was trained in the military, to destroy battle damaged equipement (mainly fire control instruments and big guns), whom better than a mechanic to train, to screw something up :laugh3: , along with some HAZMAT training. Pretty good school, they gave you the info and let you use your ingenuity to figure out the methods.
RDX or MDX, is pretty stable stuff, they use it in cannon shells, yes they fire it out of gun tubes. If I remember correctly, by wieght RDX has 20% more energy than TNT (which is mostly filler). Off the top of my head, I can think of a dozen, compounds, that have more energy per pound than RDX, that I can buy at the store.
RDX is a commercial product, used to make everything from shoe soles, to deodorant.
The amount missing, isn´t like advertised, the largest stash in history, it´s maybe a very small percentage of what´s produced by Dupont. And a pretty small part, of the total amount in Iraq (canon projectiles are filled with it).
RDX or MDX has a shelf life of about 10 years and retails for about $7-10 a pound. Not that hard to come by, most every country in the world has on hand, much more RDX, than has gone missing in Iraq, many by a factor of thousands.
Next question, is where did it come from? The RDX production facilities in Iraq, were destroyed in the first gulf war. If it was left overs, it´s shelf life could be near it´s end. If not, somebody was shipping it in, dispite the sanctions.
Remember $7-10 a pound retail. Wholesale maybe $2-3 pound= $1,500,000-2,000,000. About a dozen containers or 6 rail cars full.
Personnaly, I´d like to see, the results of the floor sweepings of the storage facility, and the cellulit tracers, which will tell, whom manufactured it.
Oh and by the way, RDX isn´t SDBS (super dupper bad stuff), but it´s not something you want to scatter around in your garden either. It´s a hazardous material, but then again so is Cocacola or gasoline.
