Chemical warfare

[Chris Conlon]

At 12:47 AM 12/31/98 +0000, xxalexx at ix.netcom.com wrote:

>Would hydrogen peroxide work?  I thought this was used as rocket
>fuel, and also to clean cuts and teeth.  Should have a large 
>pecentage of H2 and O2 available.  Is cheap and can be found in 
>all drug stores.

The drug store stuff is 3-5%, and fairly safe. Might as well be
water for our purposes.

You can get ~30% H2O2 without too much hassle but I wouldn't call
it cheap. Maybe in bigger drums it would be. I'm guessing that
injecting this could be vaguely similar to nitrous, in that it
would provide more oxygen, and likely increase the risk of
detonation depending on conditions. At 70% water, my wild guess
is that you would not have much extra risk of detonation, but
I know some people on here have actually *done* this, so I'll let
them say. I feel pretty certain that if you were using say 90%
peroxide, you'd have detonation issues much worse than
running nitromethane. (Not that you would want to be anywhere
near such concentrated H2O2, well not *me* anyway!)

H2O2 as jet fuel or rocket fuel (in combination with kerosene,
hydrazine, whatever) supposedly was nearly pure H2O2, and
was supposedly rather dangerous to handle. Just mixing strong
H2O2 with any reducing agent is pretty much asking for a violent
reaction, even w/o an ignition source.

All the gloom and doom aside, I bet there is some strength of
H2O2 that could be injected, and provide a combination of water
injection, extra O2, and a little bit of extra energy since
H2O2 decomposes exothermically. How bout somebody else figure
out what % and how much to use, then let me know? ;)

...

In my (*ahem*) "spare time" I like to design and build explosives,
kind of a hobby left over from earlier years. In particular I
appreciate *elegant* explosives, where an explosive can be said
to be elegant in the way that a machine or piece of code can be
considered elegant. (Either ya know already what I mean or I can't
explain it.) One elegant explosive which I haven't had the time
to build yet is a combination of CaC2 and H2O2 in a sealed
container. CaC2 is the stuff in miner's lamps. Add water and it
makes heat, plus acetylene gas. Heat up H2O2, it gives off more
heat, some O2, and water. See where this is going? Add a confined
space so the pressure goes way up...

The problem is that I'm fairly convinced that any usable strength
of H2O2 will oxidize all the acetylene the moment it's formed.
Sure, you'll still get an explosion, but unless you build up
enough hot oxy-acetylene mix under pressure, you won't get it to
*detonate*, and that's what I was looking for. Ah well. There
are solutions to the problem... but none I've yet found are elegant.

   Chris C.