Can people really build missiles from scratch?

In the film Salt, Angelina Jolie's character creates a missile from handy household ingredients -- but could this happen in real life? Tune in as Marshall breaks down the science behind improvised explosives.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot Com where
smart happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question. In the
movie Salt, could Evelyn Salt really have created an exploding

(00:20):
missile like you see in the movie? At the beginning
of the movie Salt, you see Evelyn Salt get outed
by a Russian agent and she is about to get
locked up, and she tries to escape, and she ends
up on this vacant floor of an office building, and
she needs a way to create a diversion. So what

(00:42):
she does in the movie is she disassembles a table
to create or to find a tube that she can
use as a missile launcher. And she finds some chemicals
and she mixes them together and she loads them into
a little cartridge that she finds at the bottom of
an office chair, and then she uses a CEO to
fire extinguisher to launch this thing and incapacitate a small

(01:05):
team of people who are trying to capture her. So
you watch it and you notice that she's mixing two
chemicals together. One of them is clearly marked as a
bottle of ammonia, and the other is a smaller bottle
with a dark red liquid in it. After mixing, she
gets this really kind of thick, reddish fluid that she

(01:26):
puts on some paper towels, loads into her little missile,
and then fires it. Is there any truth to this?
Is it possible to mix together any two maybe household
kind of chemicals and get an explosive that could incapacitate
a team of trained commandos? Most likely the writers of

(01:46):
the movie are trying to suggest that she's making something
called nitrogen triiadide, and it is a real chemical that
really can be made out of two simple chemicals that
you might find around the house. Traditionally, when you make
nitrogen try iodide, you take iodine crystals and you you
grind them up into a powder, and then you mix

(02:09):
that with the ammonia. And in the movie they're using
liquid iodine instead, but still those two chemicals will make
an explosive that can be pretty powerful. If you go
on YouTube, you can first of all find videos about
how people make this stuff, and you can also find
videos about how it explodes. And what you notice in
the exploding videos is that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly

(02:34):
sensitive to any kind of pressure. In some videos, you'll
see them activated with just a touch of a feather
and it will explode with just that much disturbance. So
it's a very, very sensitive explosive. So the good news
is it really is possible to make a shock or
an impact sensitive explosive out of household chemicals that are

(02:55):
relatively easily available. But there are two problems with the
movie version that we see in Salt. First, she has
no time to dry her mixture and it wouldn't work
in the wet state that's shown in the movie. And second,
you can see and if you watch any of the
videos on YouTube, that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly touchy.

(03:16):
It would definitely explode on impact, but it would probably
also explode during the launch process or the loading process
if it actually had been dry, So this might not
be the perfect thing to use for a missile as
shown in the movie. Now we can ask a second
bonus question, would Evelyn Salt actually have any hearing left

(03:38):
after a career of being a spy? As shown in
this movie, the explosion that she creates with nitrogen tri
iodide is just the first of many many explosions and
gunshots that her ears have to endure. She's in an apartment,
a small apartment, her small apartment when they throw a
flashband grenade in, and that grenade is powerful enough to

(04:00):
blow out the windows, so it certainly would have done
something to her ear drums. She's in a steel ship
where she dropped several grenades in close proximity to her ears.
That would be another set of explosions that would have
an effect on her hearing. She's in car accidents. She's
in a stone tunnel when she sets off an explosion

(04:23):
that's enough to take out the whole floor of a cathedral.
She stands in front of a bulletproof glass window and
shoots a whole handgun magazine and then a machine gun
magazine at it. She would probably, in fact, she would
certainly be deaf if this is her normal lifestyle, because

(04:45):
the ears can only take so much of this kind
of punishment before either you blow out the ear drums
or you just completely deadened their sensitivity to sound. So
we would probably if this were a real movie, see
a woman who's constantly replaced the batteries and her hearing aids,
or who is using sign language instead of speaking. If
you'd like to see some of the videos I talked

(05:07):
about in this podcast, you can go to Google and
type in brain Stuff Evelyn Salt, and it'll take you
right to the blog posts I did that contains the videos.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join How Stuff Work staff as we
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(05:29):
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