Word: powders
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...calmly instructing readers of a civil defense pamphlet to be sure to carry their bank books with them into homemade shelters. It is also about a citizenry which prefers not to face the horrors. "Strontium-90?" blinks a man-on-the-street interviewee. "That's some kind of gun-powder, isn't it?" The film pans again and again from complacent ignorance to horrible consequence, asking, in effect, after each bland remark, "But what...
...root of the trouble is the powder for the M-16's .233-cal. ammunition...
Small but magnum-loaded, the round is one of the most cantankerous in the history of American small-arms. Since 1964, when the Army was informed that Du Pont could not mass-produce the nitrocellulose-based powder within the specifications demanded by the M16, Olin Mathieson Company has supplied most ammunition for the rifle with a high-performance ball propellant of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine...
Known as Olin WC 846, the new powder is capable of firing an M-16 round at the desired 3,300 ft. per sec. and has unexpectedly increased the rifle's automatic rate of fire from about 850 shots a minute to 1,000. The result is that the "little black rifle," as the M-16 is fearfully called by the Viet Cong, tends to jam because the powder leaves behind a dirty residue that clogs the faster-moving automatic parts...
...fatal. Tests with the WC 846 ball propellant show that a buffer-equipped M-16 now jams approximately only once every 4,000 shots. According to the Army's criteria, one jam every 1,001 rounds is acceptable. To compensate for the debris left behind by the new powder, all M-16s now being produced have chromium-plated chambers that are less likely to cause jamming and are easier to keep clean...