AFAIK, a Molotov cocktail is just a glass bottle filled with gasoline and with a rag stuck into the end. Light the saturated rag, throw the bomb, the glass shatters, and woof!
This image shows what appears to be a thick, silver liquid. What is it?
This image shows a woman putting white pellets into a bottle. There are some clues that the pellets are styrofoam, and not Airsoft BBs. I’ve heard that styrofoam dissolves in gasoline, and the resultant mixture is sort of an improvised napalm. Can someone enlighten me on what the image shows?
I don’t know about styrofoam, but back in highschool, I knew some guys who spent time in the Canadian militia (kind of like the US National Guard, sort of - part time soldiers, often teenagers looking to get some training prior to enlisting full-time when they turn 18). One of them showed us a manual they had on improvised munitions, that included a section on thing slike Molotov cocktails. They suggested mixing the gas with laundry detergent, for the reason you suggested - it made the stuff more sticky, so it would stay in place better while burning, and not just run off quickly.
I’m sure there’s other materials that would produce the same effect. That’s probably what’s going on with the “silver” stuff. Whatever they mixed it with just happens to be that color.
I made the Anarchist Cookbook napalm as a kid. I think there are a few different versions but the gas and Styrofoam one was the one we made.
We put maybe an inch of gas in a old coffee can. It didn’t seem like much but that inch of gas absorbed 100% of the Styrofoam that came with my Gateway computer, monitor and printer. It must have been 10 cubic feet or more.
The result was basically rubber cement in consistency. It burned hot, smelled, had black smoke and was sticky.
As others have said, probably Styrofoam in the second image.
A Molotov Cocktail is more than just flammable liquid. It is meant to be sticky so it clings to surfaces while it burns. Ideally at least. I am sure it has taken many forms using whatever is at hand.
And older boy* from across the street and I did this, too. And I do remember that a LOT of foam (sheets of insulation stolen from a construction site*) dissolved in the gas. We took it up the alley behind my parents’ house and lit it. We quickly freaked out by the amount of fire and the thick, black smoke you mentioned and knocked over the jar in our panic. This winner tries to stamp out the burning ‘napalm’ and caught his shoes on fire. He barely kicked them off in time to avoid a very serious injury.
I’m sorry to say I don’t quite remember how the story ends. Possibly a neighbor noticed and put it out with the bottom a metal garbage can. I don’t recall getting in trouble for it.
*He was a terrible influence on me. I have a bunch of stories about him (and his brother who I suspect was a a genuine psychopath and stole anything he could.) Since the one was older, he had his driver’s license a few years before I was old enough. I VERY narrowly avoided being his unwitting accomplice for a BB gun scandal. He went around shooting out something like 40 car windows and was witnessed doing it by a police officer. It was front page news in our admittedly sleepy suburb. The only reason I didn’t get in the car with him that night was that I had my bike with me.
When I was a kid a friend of mine had a US Army field manual on unconventional warfare/ improvised explosives or some such that had recipes for gelling gasoline about a dozen different ways using everything from Styrofoam to lye to animal blood to eggs and everything in between. I don’t think it was this manual specifically, but a quick search found TM 3-201-1 Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques which has all of those and more.
In his earlier days, David Letterman had a stunt where he put about an inch of nail polish remover into an aquarium, and dumped bag after bag of Styrofoam pellets, each of them several cubic feet, into that chemical, and they would “disappear” immediately upon contact. Sorry, couldn’t find videos.
(My copy of “The Anarchist Cookbook” is still in the shrinkwrap.)
The Molotov Cocktail is indeed of Russian/Soviet origin, or at least the name is, anyway.
It is of Finnish origin: during the Winter War of 39-40, the Finnish hadn’t many antitank weapons and used incendiary bottles to attack Soviet tanks close up. They were named “Molotov’s cocktails” after the Soviet ministry of diplomacy who stated that the Soviet planes bombing Helsinki were in fact dropping food and drinks…
As I understand it. The mixture runs into the interior through whatever gaps it can. Making it very uncomfortable for those inside. Also the extreme heat and stickyness will burn up grease seals and damage radiators hoses wireing.
How timely: Just yesterday (Feb. 28), WaPo has article on the history of the Molotov cocktail. It addresses some of the questions in this thread, like the styrofoam and the variety of flammable materials that might be mixed in.
BTW, a nit-pick that always grates me with any mention of styrofoam: The stuff we commonly call styrofoam these days is not, as best I understand it, really Styrofoam™.
This matters because when I was a child in school, we made Christmas and Hanukkah decorations out of Styrofoam™, and it’s not at all the same stuff as that plastic-ish foam stuff that’s used for food containers and plastic shipping packing peanuts and such today.
Thanks, I learned something. It turns out both are made from polystyrene foam, but one (the packaging material most folks are familiar with) is expanded and the other (Dow’s actual Styrofoam™ product) is extruded:
References to “Kleenex®” and “kleenex” appear to be, substantially, just different brands of the same kind of product. Likewise, “Band-Aid®” and “band-aid” appear to be basically the same product, just different brands. But . . .
The original “Styrofoam®” (I looked it up, and it’s ® not ™), at least what I think it is, doesn’t much resemble the stuff commonly called “styrofoam” these days. I was surprised to see, in @Machine_Elf 's post above, that they are actually the same material. So surprised, in fact, that I wonder if the “Styrofoam®” that I am thinking of is really the same stuff as the stuff mentioned in that post.
Napalm-B is something like 50% polystyrene, 25% gasoline, 25% benzene. That’s the optimized, military grade, produced in a chemical factory version.
You can get awfully close with gasoline and styrofoam- it’s the same basic thing, just without the additional benzene.
The original Molotov cocktails were improvised during the Spanish Civil War, but obtained their name in the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland, with the Finns calling them “Molotov Cocktails” after the Soviet foreign minister at the time.
The basic idea is that if you chunk a quart of gasoline or slightly thickened gasoline onto a tank, it’ll flow down into the cracks and crevices and mess up the engine, or otherwise set stuff on fire that shouldn’t be on fire.
