The explosive material in a conventional bomb: what does it look like?
What does TNT look like? C4?
What does the actual explosive material in a nuclear warhead look like?
What does the magnet in an MRI machine look like?
Google Images, my friend. Google Images.
I cannot find a pic of raw TNT anywhere. My Google-Fu is weak today it seems.
Nuclear Warhead or more commonly seen warhead (these days)
Those don’t actually show the “explosive material,” though. In a fission bomb, that’s just uranium, which is a rather boring looking metal, or plutonium, which looks similar.
In a fission-fusion bomb, you’ve got a fission-bomb shell which causes hydrogen to undergo fusion. It’s hard to take a picture of hydrogen in its usual state.
Here is a chart that actually shows all of those things
Many years ago in the army, I played around with quarter-pound blocks of TNT in a demolition course. I can’t recall for sure, but it was a block shaped like a pound of butter, and I think it was dark gray in color. Like many explosives, it was not that touchy by itself, it needed a detonator to set it off.
Back then, FYI, dynamite was mostly sawdust that had soaked up nitroglycerin. Cases had to be turned now and then to keep the nitro from pooling on the bottom, which could be dangerous as that stuff could be set off with a minor shock or blow. Otherwise dynamite was quite stable and also needed a blasting cap to set it off. I think now they use some other porous material.
As to material in an atomic bomb, I don’t think I want to know.
For some idea of what the material in a nuclear bomb looks like tryThis article.
I’m not sure if the pictures feature actual plutonium or just a look alike (the captions aren’t very clear), but it must be pretty close.
There was a fascinating article in the December 15th New Yorker magazine about a man who is pretty much obcessed with building an exact-in-every-detail model of the first atom bombs.
he’s examined a number of original casings (spares or experimental, one assumes), and has been able to back-engineer a surprising amount of features.
Every detail? :eek:
Well, HE and fissionable material excepted. It was an excellent article, with the portrait of the long-range trucker who muses on Little Boy’s internal structure while delivering goods across county every bit as interesting as the technical details of the bomb(s).
I, on the other hand, should be more obsessed with proofreading.
Ah! Love the scientific detail! 
Great pictures! I always wondered about that stuff. Any idea what the stuff inside a hand grenade looks like? Would it be similar?
Wiki says that trinitrotoluene is a yellow solid. Assuming it as crystalline as many similar small organics that are solid at room temp, it probably looks like yellow salt, or perhaps yellow talcum powder, depending on the nature of the crystals.
Some of the low melters (TNT melts at 80C - I think of that as on the low side) tend to be somewhat waxy. Particularly if they’re not very pure.
Tangentially, John Coster-Mullen actually posted to a GQ thread on the Dope about a year ago after I’d cited part of his research: see #36 in this thread.
That’s rather disappointing. I’d always assumed that uranium was gold colored or something similar.
Uranium ore can be yellow, yellow-green in color. You can get uranium glass even and it was used in ceramics as a glaze to make a yellow(ish) color.
I’m surprised they let Hitlerso close.
Hitler did get to inspect the aftermath of the explosion that he barly survived from, the assasination attempt featured in Valkryie.