Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot Com where smart happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question. In the movie Salt, could Evelyn Salt really have created an exploding missile like you see in the movie? At the beginning of the movie Salt, you see Evelyn Salt get outed by a Russian agent and she is about to get locked up, and she tries to escape, and she ends up on this vacant floor of an office building, and
she needs a way to create a diversion. So what she does in the movie is she disassembles a table to create or to find a tube that she can use as a missile launcher. And she finds some chemicals and she mixes them together and she loads them into a little cartridge that she finds at the bottom of an office chair, and then she uses a CEO to fire extinguisher to launch this thing and incapacitate a small
team of people who are trying to capture her. So you watch it and you notice that she's mixing two chemicals together. One of them is clearly marked as a bottle of ammonia, and the other is a smaller bottle with a dark red liquid in it. After mixing, she gets this really kind of thick, reddish fluid that she puts on some paper towels, loads into her little missile, and then fires it. Is there any truth to this?
Is it possible to mix together any two maybe household kind of chemicals and get an explosive that could incapacitate a team of trained commandos? Most likely the writers of the movie are trying to suggest that she's making something called nitrogen triiadide, and it is a real chemical that really can be made out of two simple chemicals that
you might find around the house. Traditionally, when you make nitrogen try iodide, you take iodine crystals and you you grind them up into a powder, and then you mix that with the ammonia. And in the movie they're using liquid iodine instead, but still those two chemicals will make an explosive that can be pretty powerful. If you go on YouTube, you can first of all find videos about how people make this stuff, and you can also find
videos about how it explodes. And what you notice in the exploding videos is that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly sensitive to any kind of pressure. In some videos, you'll see them activated with just a touch of a feather and it will explode with just that much disturbance. So it's a very, very sensitive explosive. So the good news is it really is possible to make a shock or an impact sensitive explosive out of household chemicals that are
relatively easily available. But there are two problems with the movie version that we see in Salt. First, she has no time to dry her mixture and it wouldn't work in the wet state that's shown in the movie. And second, you can see and if you watch any of the videos on YouTube, that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly touchy.
It would definitely explode on impact, but it would probably also explode during the launch process or the loading process if it actually had been dry, So this might not be the perfect thing to use for a missile as shown in the movie. Now we can ask a second bonus question, would Evelyn Salt actually have any hearing left after a career of being a spy? As shown in this movie, the explosion that she creates with nitrogen tri iodide is just the first of many many explosions and
gunshots that her ears have to endure. She's in an apartment, a small apartment, her small apartment when they throw a flashband grenade in, and that grenade is powerful enough to blow out the windows, so it certainly would have done something to her ear drums. She's in a steel ship where she dropped several grenades in close proximity to her ears. That would be another set of explosions that would have
an effect on her hearing. She's in car accidents. She's in a stone tunnel when she sets off an explosion that's enough to take out the whole floor of a cathedral. She stands in front of a bulletproof glass window and shoots a whole handgun magazine and then a machine gun magazine at it. She would probably, in fact, she would certainly be deaf if this is her normal lifestyle, because the ears can only take so much of this kind of punishment before either you blow out the ear drums
or you just completely deadened their sensitivity to sound. So we would probably if this were a real movie, see a woman who's constantly replaced the batteries and her hearing aids, or who is using sign language instead of speaking. If you'd like to see some of the videos I talked about in this podcast, you can go to Google and type in brain Stuff Evelyn Salt, and it'll take you right to the blog posts I did that contains the videos. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join How Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works I Fine app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.