Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot Com where
Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question. In the
Speaker 1: movie Salt, could Evelyn Salt really have created an exploding
Speaker 1: missile like you see in the movie? At the beginning
Speaker 1: of the movie Salt, you see Evelyn Salt get outed
Speaker 1: by a Russian agent and she is about to get
Speaker 1: locked up, and she tries to escape, and she ends
Speaker 1: up on this vacant floor of an office building, and
Speaker 1: she needs a way to create a diversion. So what
Speaker 1: she does in the movie is she disassembles a table
Speaker 1: to create or to find a tube that she can
Speaker 1: use as a missile launcher. And she finds some chemicals
Speaker 1: and she mixes them together and she loads them into
Speaker 1: a little cartridge that she finds at the bottom of
Speaker 1: an office chair, and then she uses a CEO to
Speaker 1: fire extinguisher to launch this thing and incapacitate a small
Speaker 1: team of people who are trying to capture her. So
Speaker 1: you watch it and you notice that she's mixing two
Speaker 1: chemicals together. One of them is clearly marked as a
Speaker 1: bottle of ammonia, and the other is a smaller bottle
Speaker 1: with a dark red liquid in it. After mixing, she
Speaker 1: gets this really kind of thick, reddish fluid that she
Speaker 1: puts on some paper towels, loads into her little missile,
Speaker 1: and then fires it. Is there any truth to this?
Speaker 1: Is it possible to mix together any two maybe household
Speaker 1: kind of chemicals and get an explosive that could incapacitate
Speaker 1: a team of trained commandos? Most likely the writers of
Speaker 1: the movie are trying to suggest that she's making something
Speaker 1: called nitrogen triiadide, and it is a real chemical that
Speaker 1: really can be made out of two simple chemicals that
Speaker 1: you might find around the house. Traditionally, when you make
Speaker 1: nitrogen try iodide, you take iodine crystals and you you
Speaker 1: grind them up into a powder, and then you mix
Speaker 1: that with the ammonia. And in the movie they're using
Speaker 1: liquid iodine instead, but still those two chemicals will make
Speaker 1: an explosive that can be pretty powerful. If you go
Speaker 1: on YouTube, you can first of all find videos about
Speaker 1: how people make this stuff, and you can also find
Speaker 1: videos about how it explodes. And what you notice in
Speaker 1: the exploding videos is that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly
Speaker 1: sensitive to any kind of pressure. In some videos, you'll
Speaker 1: see them activated with just a touch of a feather
Speaker 1: and it will explode with just that much disturbance. So
Speaker 1: it's a very, very sensitive explosive. So the good news
Speaker 1: is it really is possible to make a shock or
Speaker 1: an impact sensitive explosive out of household chemicals that are
Speaker 1: relatively easily available. But there are two problems with the
Speaker 1: movie version that we see in Salt. First, she has
Speaker 1: no time to dry her mixture and it wouldn't work
Speaker 1: in the wet state that's shown in the movie. And second,
Speaker 1: you can see and if you watch any of the
Speaker 1: videos on YouTube, that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly touchy.
Speaker 1: It would definitely explode on impact, but it would probably
Speaker 1: also explode during the launch process or the loading process
Speaker 1: if it actually had been dry, So this might not
Speaker 1: be the perfect thing to use for a missile as
Speaker 1: shown in the movie. Now we can ask a second
Speaker 1: bonus question, would Evelyn Salt actually have any hearing left
Speaker 1: after a career of being a spy? As shown in
Speaker 1: this movie, the explosion that she creates with nitrogen tri
Speaker 1: iodide is just the first of many many explosions and
Speaker 1: gunshots that her ears have to endure. She's in an apartment,
Speaker 1: a small apartment, her small apartment when they throw a
Speaker 1: flashband grenade in, and that grenade is powerful enough to
Speaker 1: blow out the windows, so it certainly would have done
Speaker 1: something to her ear drums. She's in a steel ship
Speaker 1: where she dropped several grenades in close proximity to her ears.
Speaker 1: That would be another set of explosions that would have
Speaker 1: an effect on her hearing. She's in car accidents. She's
Speaker 1: in a stone tunnel when she sets off an explosion
Speaker 1: that's enough to take out the whole floor of a cathedral.
Speaker 1: She stands in front of a bulletproof glass window and
Speaker 1: shoots a whole handgun magazine and then a machine gun
Speaker 1: magazine at it. She would probably, in fact, she would
Speaker 1: certainly be deaf if this is her normal lifestyle, because
Speaker 1: the ears can only take so much of this kind
Speaker 1: of punishment before either you blow out the ear drums
Speaker 1: or you just completely deadened their sensitivity to sound. So
Speaker 1: we would probably if this were a real movie, see
Speaker 1: a woman who's constantly replaced the batteries and her hearing aids,
Speaker 1: or who is using sign language instead of speaking. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to see some of the videos I talked
Speaker 1: about in this podcast, you can go to Google and
Speaker 1: type in brain Stuff Evelyn Salt, and it'll take you
Speaker 1: right to the blog posts I did that contains the videos.
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