Word: amatol
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Rice farmers by day, they fought by night. Their bullets were chunks of brass curtain rod, which the women had sharpened by whetstone; the cartridges were loaded with a mixture of dynamite, amatol, and the flash powder from Chinese firecrackers. For every two men, there might be one obsolete rifle and 15 rounds of ammunition; with luck, a platoon would also sport several carbines or an automatic weapon. Yet these ragtag guerrilla forces, scattered across 36,000 square miles of mountain and malarial jungle, were able to tie down a large number of enemy units, kill 7,000 Japanese troops...
...wait for the moderates. One night last week in the Street of the Prophet, a gang of terrorists were literally hoisted on their own petard. Their car, a 1941 Plymouth, swerving under the impact of a British machine-gun burst, hit a traffic island. Then, with door open and amatol mines falling out, it swerved and hit a child, crumpled into a tree, and exploded, blowing the two occupants into tattered shreds. Several houses on both sides of the street collapsed as the mines went off. All that remained of one Arab-style villa was a wall with a torn...
Disaster arrived in an 8,000-ton, Canadian-built Liberty ship. Swarms of dockers began unloading her cargo of scrap metal, timber, 708 bales of cotton, $4,293,500 in gold bullion, 300 tons of high explosive (TNT, amatol) in little black canisters. Fire interrupted their work...
When the potent new explosive goes into mass production, it will head an impressive list of U.S. military explosives. Chief items: TNT, amatol (a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate for artillery shells and aerial bombs), smokeless powder (long in use as a propellant), tetryl (used in shell boosters to provoke the detonation of laggardly TNT or amatol). Least sensitive of all the Ordnance powders is ammonium pictrate, which is used in armor-piercing projectiles because it can wham through steel without going off at first impact...
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