Napalm

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A napalm airstrike during the Vietnam War

Napalm is a flammable, gasoline-based weapon invented in 1942. The name is a portmanteau word for naphthenic palmitic acids. It was developed during World War II by the United States. In 1980, its use against civilian populations was banned by a United Nations convention.

1 Background
2 Usage in warfare
3 Trivia
4 See also
5 Notes

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Background

During World War I both the Allies and Germany used gasoline (petrol) as a weapon in flamethrowers, but gasoline by itself burns too quickly to be an effective incendiary device. A substance was needed which would produce a powerful and persistent fuel but would not consume itself too quickly.

Though researchers had found ways to make jellied gasoline earlier, many of them required rubber as a principal component, which during wartime was a scarce commodity. In 1942, researchers at Harvard University (led by Dr. Louis Fieser) and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps found a rubber-less solution: mixing an aluminum soap powder of naphthalene and palmitate (naphthenic acid and palmitic acid, sodium palmitrate) with gasoline. This produced a substance which was highly flammable, yet slow burning. In World War II, incendiary bombs using napalm as their fuel were used against the German city of Dresden and during the firebombings of Japan.

After World War II, further refinement and development of napalm was undertaken in the United States by the government and its affiliated laboratories. It was then used in the Vietnam War. Modern "napalm" contains neither naphthenic nor palmitic acids (despite the name), but often uses a bevy of other chemicals (including benzene and polystyrene) to stabilize the gasoline base. This new substance was named 'napalm B' and is manufactured by Dow Chemical Company.

See Bombing of Tokyo in World War II and Bombing of Dresden in World War II for more information on the usage of napalm in the Second World War and chemical warfare for more details on chemical weaponry.

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Usage in warfare

June 8, 1972: Kim Phúc, center, running down a road near Trang Bang after an ARVN napalm chemical attack. (Nick Ut / ©Associated Press)

Riverboat of the U.S. Brownwater Navy deploying napalm during the Vietnam War

Napalm bombs were first used during the Battle of Tinian. In World War II, Allied Forces bombed cities in Japan with napalm, and used it in bombs and flamethrowers in Germany and the Japanese-held islands. It was used by the Greek army against communist guerilla fighters during the Greek Civil War, by United Nations forces in Korea, by Mexico in the late 1960s against guerrilla fighters in Guerrero and by the United States during the Vietnam War.

"Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine," said Kim Phuc, known from a famous Vietnam War photograph. "Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius."^[1]

Like many Vietnamese children before and after her, Phuc sustained third-degree burns to half her body and was not expected to live. But thanks to assistance from an American photographer, and after surviving a 14-month hospital stay and 17 operations, she became an outspoken peace activist.

International law does not prohibit the use of napalm or other incendiaries against military targets^[2], but use against civilian populations was banned by a United Nations convention in 1980 ^[3]. The United States did not sign the agreement, but claimed to have destroyed its napalm arsenal by 2001.

The United States had reportedly been using incendiaries in the 2003 invasion of Iraq ^[4]. In August 2003, U.S. Marine pilots and their commanders confirmed the use of Mark 77 firebombs on people.

"We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches," said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. "Unfortunately there were people there ... you could see them in the cockpit video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect." ^[5]

These bombs contain a substance "remarkably similar" to napalm. This substance is made with kerosene, a polystyrene derivative, and other additives. ^[6]

Recipes for napalm type substances are commonly circulated on the Internet. These typically purport to produce a thickened gasoline-based substance using soap or polystyrene as a jellying agent (very similar to the napalm of the Vietnam war). The methods described for producing such a substance are often dangerous, as is its use (due to flammability, adhesiveness, and poisonous fumes from burning polystyrene). It is also highly illegal to produce incendiary weapons in most countries.

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Trivia

In the film Fight Club, the screenwriters were originally going to have Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) recite a working recipe for napalm. However, after questions of safety were brought to the attention of the producers, they substituted his lines with a fake recipe.

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