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Ask HN: Could the fertilizer shortage be caused by weapons manufacturing?

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Re: Ask HN: Could the fertilizer shortage be caused by weapons manufacturing?

#11

Post by h2odragon »

PaulHoule wrote: post #7
eimrine wrote: post #2

Ammonium Nitrate can make a big boom but I don't think that all boomable chemicals are being made from the same ingredients.

Almost all explosives except for this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetone_peroxide contain nitrogen. (TATP is not used as a military explosive because it will blow up if you look at it the wrong way.) In a lot of cases that is going to come from nitric acid which in turn is made from ammonia which could otherwise be used to make fertilizer. As you point out, Ammonium Nitrate is a powerful explosive which is c…

What's the ratio of "nitrates input" for fertilizer vs explosives? A ton of ammonia is fertilizer all by itself but processed might only be 100kg of TNT (totally ignoring all the other inputs).

Re: Ask HN: Could the fertilizer shortage be caused by weapons manufacturing?

#12

Post by rapjr9 »

If anything the situation is probably the reverse, that fertilizer/chemical shortages are causing shortages of explosives for making weapons. Building more Stinger's is currently projected to take a year or two because of difficulties in getting parts. One "part" is the high explosive, whose ingredients come from China, now being affected by lockdowns. If the West was at war with both Russia and China they would likely have to divert some fertilizer to weapons manufacture and agriculture would suffer both from the shortage of imported fertilizer and the extra demand due to weapons manufacture. Even so I'd expect the effect to be small, agriculture must use a lot more chemicals than explosives do.
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