Advanced Energetic Materials Emerge For Military and Space Applications

In a research effort that is little known outside the defense community, teams of chemists, working primarily in industrial and government labs, are developing a new generation of explosives and propellants for potential military and space applications. "We've had some tremendous discoveries, only some of which could be talked about until now because of security issues," says scientific officer Richard S. Miller of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Arlington, Va., a major funding source for basic research on propellants and explosives. "It's an area many people aren't familiar with, but it's fascinating chemistry." A significant amount of work on new high-energy materials is conducted at defense companies, often with support from federal agencies like ONR and the Army's Armament Research, Development & Engineering Center (ARDEC) at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J. Considerable research on energetic materials is also being done at the national laboratories (especially Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia), ...