Ammonia nitrate, a common white crystal fertilizer widely used by farmers, may be brought under regulation if the new Explosives Bill and comment by a senior legislator is anything to go by.
This comes in the wake of the use of ammonium nitrate in the bombs that rocked Soweto this week.
However, for ammonium nitrate to be used as an explosive it requires the extraction of calcium from the substance — a procedure that involves sophisticated machinery and chemicals. Ammonium nitrate comes in solid or molten form.
The Explosives Bill, to be debated in Parliament next week, requires anyone who wishes to buy any substance that could be used for the manufacture of explosives to have a permit, licence or authorisation to do so.
Mluleki George, chairperson of the safety and security committee in Parliament, says in the light of the Soweto bombings Parliament will have to consider its options in regulating the sale of agricultural fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate. He says Parliament might have to consider including a provision putting the onus on farmers to use fertilizers in a responsible manner.
According to the Bill, no person can possess, or carry out any activity relating to, explosives without a permit, licence or authorisation. Breaking the law carries penalties that include terms of imprisonment from 10 to 25 years.
African National Congress KwaZulu-Natal chairperson S’bu Ndebele, referring to the province’s history of political violence, said the Bill was introduced as a ”direct response” to ”real threats of internal anarchy by, for example, radical right-wing organsiations targeting government”. He says illegal arms caches from the apartheid era have yet to be uncovered.
”Today our province is swamped with illegal weapons used in cash heists, armed robberies and hijackings — military explosives are part of the problem and the main object of the Explosives Bill is to ensure adequate control over their illegal use and distribution.”
According to a United States Environmental Protection Agency pamphlet, Chemical Safety Alert, ”ammonium nitrate is classified as an oxidiser [fuel a fire] and a relatively stable explosive”. When the amount of ammonium nitrate exceeds 0,2% of combustible substances, it is classified as an explosive.
Martin Schonteich, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, says apparently ammonium nitrate was used in the Oklahama City bomb blast that killed 168 people in the US seven years ago.
”If packed in large quantities and mixed with motor oil, for example, ammonium nitrate can be very lethal. In the case of Oklahama, it was apparently packed into a truck … and this is the stuff that you can get over the counter,” Schonteich says.
Ammonium nitrate can explode when exposed to heat or subjected to pressure under conditions of confinement. Ammonium nitrate bombs are thus either made from stuffing the substance inside a metal pipe to make a pipe bomb or mixed with combustible materials or organic substances such as oils, petrol and diesel.
The manufacture of ammonium nitrate, its transportation and storage has resulted in several industrial accidents, dating back to the 1920s when two explosions occurred in Germany during attempts to break up large piles of solidified or caked ammonium nitrate-ammonium sulfate mixtures using a blasting explosive.
According to Encyclopaedia Britanica, ”farm manure long supplied enough nitrogenous fertilizer for agriculture, but late in the 19th century it was realised that agriculture was outgrowing this source”. Shortly before World War I, scientific research ”brought into commercial operation the method of ammonia synthesis … the immediate motivation for this great development was Germany’s need for an indigenous source of nitrogen for military explosives. The close interrelation between the use of nitrogen for fertilizers and for explosives persists to this day.”