Downloaded from https://www.everyspec.com PREFACE The usefulness and dependability cf systems which serve man are contingent upon the effective performance of the components which make up those systems. So it is with the weapon systems of war. In centuries past, vast effort has been expended in improving the performance of war machines. Improvements of this century have included rigorous application of scientific principles to warfare in an effort to optimize the performance of mechanisms of war. As the laws and rules of mathematics, physics, and chemistry have been applied to war and its machines, war has become more complex and more deadly.
Perhaps no component of weapon systems has been studied more thoroughly than sources from which energy can be conveniently and quickly liberated in great quantity. From the days of Crecy in 1346, when guns began competition with sharp-edged weapons, until the end of World War II, when 85%of the casualties were attributed to conventional explosives, the trend toward more and improved explosive has continued. Since 1945, the use of atomic energy has opened a vast new magnitude of effectiveness from a new source of energy, the atom and its parts.
In this portion of the text those fundamental facts which must be known to permit the student to understand how energy is stored, liberated, and applied in military devices will be discussed. Those facts include a discussion of the theory of the release of chemical and nuclear energy, thermochemistry, explosives classification, and the properties of representative explosives. A reasonable knowledge of all these fundamental facts is required if the military leader is to understand the performance, as well as the capabilities, of his increasingly complex weapons. The study begins with a review of the theory of basic chemical energy reactions as they apply to explosives. 111