Talk:Plastic explosive

This article was selected as the article for improvement on 6 March 2017 for a period of one week.

Changes

OK, I have made such extensive changes to this page that I list my reasons here. Edits included:

Deleted "usually" from "usually soft and hand malleable", since by definition they must be. Changed "have the added benefit" to "may have the added benefit", since this need not be the case.
First plastic explosive was (so far as my researches can discover) Nobel 808, invented well before WWII and not based on RDX.
RDX + beeswax is Composition A, which was not obsoleted by C4 (it is still manufactured), and although pressable is not considered a plastic explosive.
The composition C series was begun during WW II, not the sixties.
PBX (polymer bonded explosives) are unrelated to plastic explosives (except in that they both go bang). In fact one of their key features is that they set very hard!
While plastic explosives are generally fairly safe, they are not necessarily safer to handle than "traditional" explosives. In fact there are several "blasting agents" in long use which are much more stable.
Change "Well-known varieties include" to "Varieties include", since Semtex and C4 are the only ones that are actually well known.
Detasheet is an interesting material, but it is semi-rubbery, not plastic (despite the Wiki page which also requires correction).
Tried to clarify relationship to terrorism; my information is that it is not that common, actually.

--Roger 12 September 2003

Yeah, but you took out a number of examples like wax, and oils and other parts too. Reasons for that?

Also, the PBX ambig page shunts directly here, if PBX are not plastic explosives, could you put something up there explaining what they are, and why they are not plastic esplosives?

~ender 2003-09-12 04:23:MST

It said that "Current binders are a range of oils, waxes and plasticizers such as ..." and then listed two materials that are neither oils nor waxes. Furthermore "Current..."? Apart from a trace of mineral oil in some formulations of C4, I don't know of any modern ones that do so. If you know of some examples, please add them.

Which bits do you mean by "other parts too"?

I'm working on a PBX stub now. -- Roger 11:31 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

If I knew more, I'd be editting the article myself :P

For example talk about why plastic explosives were around:

dangerously sensitive and needed impossibly careful handling. To reduce the sensitivity the explosive could be mixed with inert agents. The first efforts in wartime mixed the explosives with materials like beeswax, although possessing many of the properties of plastic explosive they were unpleasant to handle and degraded rapidly.

adding binders and stabilizers, the resultant material was safer and easier to handle than traditional explosives and also held a greater charge per volume.

I'd say that C4 was an example of plasticizers, and hence not a reason to remove oils and waxes.

Current binders for plastic explosives are a range of oils, waxes and plasticizers; such as polyisobutylene and di(2-ethylhexyl)sebacate used as the binder and plasticizer in C-4.

~ender 2003-09-12 04:52:MST

OK, adding why plastic explosive is used is a good idea, and I will do so. But the section you are quoting in italics is not it; in fact it's very close to plain wrong. RDX + beeswax, as I mentioned above in point 3, is not a plastic explosive at all. The adding binders and stabilizers part is a reference to Semtex, which I actually added more info to, but took out the safer and easier to handle because it isn't really true (there are some "traditional" explosives that Semtex is safer than, and others that it is not).

I don't know why a trace of oil is listed in some compositions of C4, but it is not described as the plasticizer; that is di(2-ethylhexyl)sebacate. As I said before, I do not know of any current PE that uses oil as its plasticizer. --Roger 12:15 12 September 2003 (UTC)

Detonation?

Shouldn't something be mentioned about how plastic explosive is detonated and what definitely does NOT cause it to detonate? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 212.50.133.22 (talk • contribs) 15:49, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Probably not. Detonation of explosives is already covered under explosive materials, and there is nothing more specific that can be said for plastic explosives. For example different grades of semtex span a wide range of sensitivities. But feel free to add something if you like. -- Securiger 07:06, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Merge

I have suggested that Nobel 808 be merged into this article. Nobel 808 still has only two sentences after two years, and I have never found any more information than is listed there already. We might as well merge it to this article, and make it a redirect. -- Securiger 09:54, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm against meging noble 808 and c2 explosive since they are two separete compounds. There also other stabilizing materaials should we merge them too ? i think not. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.11.51.102 (talk • contribs) 23:06, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting that we merge Nobel 808 with C2 (we don't even have an article on C2 explosive, it's a redirect to this article!). I'm suggesting that because the Nobel 808 article is a 2 sentence substub, and quite possibly will always be a substub (because the stuff added in early 2004 is the only publicly available information on the subject that any of us have been able to find in more than two years), it would make more sense to merge it into this article, so folks are more likely to come across it, read about it, and — if sufficiently interested — possibly do some more research. As for merging other articles: if we can only find two sentences worth of information on the subject then yes, absolutely they should be merged. We are not talking about discarding information here, just arranging it so it is easy to read, use and research. The 90% of the world that still doesn't have ADSL does not want to go loading up a new page to discover we only have two sentences which could just as well be included in the main article. (BTW, Nobel 808 was an explosive, not a stabiliser.) -- Securiger 06:55, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My (draicone) say: I'm for the merger, nobel 808 clearly isn't a very informative article and it makes sense to put it into this article.

Just an editing note...

Removed C2 link as it was a self link.

Engineers

What type of engineer uses PE? The article says engineers and combat engineers and links each to its own article but these designations cover too broad a spectrum of disciplines to be helpful, e.g.: do electronics engineers use PE (I am one and I don't)? Also, a combat engineer is simply an engineer who uses his/her expertise for combat purposes, so including such begs the question. Likely candidates are mechanical or mining/metalurgical engineers but it must be a very specialized activity requiring special training, which may be interesting to expand on a little in the article. If the article is going to mention who uses PE it might also benefit from information about under what conditions (regulatory, environmental, task-related) PE can be used and if special rules apply to PE that do not apply to other types of explosives. Jelsova (talk) 01:01, 7 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dubious terrorism claims

I don't doubt that terrorists have used C-4 at one time or another, but the two examples we give are rather doubtful:

In October 2000, terrorists used C-4 to attack the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors[2]

The cite given at present is an interview with the brother of one of the murdered sailors. He has no expertise in explosives, which isn't anywhere near the main topic of the interview anyway. What he actually says -- in partial answer to a question about Saudi involvement in the attack -- is:

First, the attempted attack aboard the "USS Sullivan" in January of 2000, which was failed because they had too many explosives on the boat, so it sank. But they salvaged the same boat out of the harbor, put a new motor on it, then lined it with Semtex, a C-4 explosive, and used it in the "Cole attack.

Now, I don't want to make personal criticisms of the guy -- he is an aggrieved relative, not a bomb investigator -- but this contains several errors. The first target was USS The Sullivans (DDG-68), not USS Sullivan. Semtex and C-4 are completely different explosives. An additional, minor error is that in the US Federal indictment against al-Badawi (which is pretty well the sole public source for information on the attempt against USS The Sullivans) the boat is described as sinking immediately at the beach, rather than in the harbour, and nothing is said about replacing the motor. (A submerged OBM is quite simple to repair so long as it stops running before water enters the cylinder(s), which is usually the case.) The same indictment says nothing about the nature of explosives except that it was tested for waterproofness.

Several other sources -- and possibly even this one -- allude to statements by Robert Finke. But those statements, as can be seen here, are speculation.

So we have no good cites either to say that C-4 was used in this attack, nor indeed that any plastic explosive was.

In 1996, terrorists used C-4 to blow up the Khobar Towers U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia.

No cite is given, so I added a cite tag. Our article on the Khobar towers bombing does not mention the type of explosive used, and a brief search has not turned up any other source that does. (In fact one source states that the due to limited co-operation from the Saudi authorities, US investigators were unable to collect explosive traces for analysis.) Our article's main reference for details (the indictment) also does not explicitly describe the type of explosive, but does provide some details that make plastic explosives quite unlikely. Specifically, the terrorists initially sourced a moderate quantity of plastic explosive, but their smuggler was detected by the Saudi authorities and the PE was seized. So they instead used some other sort of explosive which was used in a much larger quantity, and was mixed with gasoline in the bomb. C-4 does not work well mixed with gasoline. Whereas another well known explosive, frequently used in large scale terrorist attacks because it is much cheaper than the alternatives, needs to be mixed with a liquid hydrocarbon to work. -- 202.63.39.58 (talk) 09:30, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Dubious blasting claim

The gelignite article claims this plastic explosive is commonly used in mining. This contradicts the claim in this article that plastic explosives are not commonly used for applications like this. ~KvnG 18:19, 6 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Very poor list of plastic explosives

The list of Plastic Explosives used in each country are so minimal as to be worthless. It is difficult to find any definitive list for any country but I know what we used and our main explosive in warheads was PE6 or Plastic Explosive No.6. Recently PE7 has been introduced, it is PE4 with a marker chemical and batched in metric amounts. The following UK commercial site lists C4, PE4, PE6, PE7 and PE10, Primasheet and ACE (Advanced Cutting Explosive). So that is the minimum list of plastic explosives I can prove for the UK, though I wouldn't necessarily agree that ACE is a plastic explosive. http://www.epc-groupe.co.uk/edsl/products.php Chann94501 (talk) 22:01, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nobel 808

Dear wikipedians, I've noticed that "Nobel 808" redirects to this article; and after reading the "merge" discussion in this Talk Page agree that a stub with just 2 sentences is way too little to be an independent article. However, the paragraph where this explosive is mentioned seems confusing (at least to me)... can any of the editors involved in merging "Nobel 808" into this article please rewrite that paragraph? Also I suggest to put a heading for this (and any other not well described) explosive in this article, or maybe add a list, to locate more easily the information. Thanks & regards, DPdH (talk) 12:35, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Questionable association of Nobel 808 with the July Plot

Article claims without citation that British Nobel 808 plastic explosive captured by German forces was the material used in the July Plot bomb. I have been unable to find sources supporting the statement. Worse, the statement is seeing a fair amount of copy-pasting across the web, which may be confirmed with a quick Google search. As an individual, I would not be surprised if the claim turns out to be true, but as it stands, I can't imagine it meets any encyclopedic standards. Would advise removal of the statement unless someone with greater expertise can chime in.

Dsty292 (talk) 13:00, 17 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]