The Pentagon is hurrying to find new explosives

America’s wars RDXHMXRDXHMXETCare high-tech affairs. Many of the bombs and missiles with which it has in recent days, as part of an effort to protect shipping in the Red Sea, were guided to their targets by lasers or signals from satellites.But the business ends of such weapons are looking rather long in the tooth. and are the two most common explosives in American weapons. was invented in 1898. dates from 1941. As Bob Kavetsky, who runs the Energetics Technology Centre (), a research group in Maryland, puts it, America’s explosives have been made with mostly “the same processing, literally, since World War II”.