Point TT-5: The Claim that the World Trade Center Dust Contained No Thermitic Materials

The Official Account

Although NIST did not perform any tests [1] to determine whether there were incendiaries (such as thermite) or explosives (such as RDX and nanothermite) in the WTC dust, it claimed [2] that such materials were not present.

The Best Evidence

Unreacted nanothermitic material, “which can be tailored [3] to behave as an incendiary (like ordinary thermite), or as an explosive,” [4] was found in four independently collected [5] samples of the WTC dust (as reported [6] in a multi-author paper in a peer-reviewed journal).

References for Point TT-5

[2] NIST conducted only a hypothetical experiment and “found no evidence of any blast events.”

[3] The quoted phrase is from Dr. Niels Harrit, Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Nano-Science Center, University of Copenhagen. E-mail to Elizabeth Woodworth, copied to Dr. David Ray Griffin, June 19, 2011.

[4] The

said:

The 221st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society held during April 2001 in San Diego featured a symposium on Defense Applications of Nanomaterials. One of the 4 sessions was titled Nanoenergetics. This session featured speakers from government labs (DOD and DOE) and academia. … A number of topics were covered, including … Metastable Intermolecular Composites (MICs), sol-gels, and structural nanomaterials. … At this point in time, all of the military services and some DOE and academic laboratories have active R&D programs aimed at exploiting the unique properties of nanomaterials that have potential to be used in energetic formulations for advanced explosives and propellant applications. … Nanomaterials, especially nanoenergetics, could be used for improving components of munitions. … Nanoenergetics hold promise as useful ingredients for the thermobaric (TBX) and TBX-like weapons, particularly due to their high degree of tailorability with regards to energy release and impulse management.

(pp. 43-44).

[5] Dr. Steven Jones discusses the “chain of custody” of the dust samples in

at 3:30 and 7:58 minutes, and at 0 minutes at

[6] Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, and Bradley R. Larsen,

The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2: 7-31.