Just after Sputnik, my grade school had an advanced science course in which we constructed & experimented with Heathkit electronics, played with substances such as dry ice, liquid nitrogen, liquid mercury (no hazmat suits!), built & test-fired model rockets, and generally had an enormous amount of fun. I can't recall all the chemicals we played with, but my clothing later shredded due to fiber failure after multiple exposures. The exact same course, held in the exact same location (Detroit), would today land the entire class (including the teacher) in Guantanamo or the Ecuadorian Embassy. There was a brief period circa 1960, when MIT was admitting a number of students who had blown portions of their bodies apart after engaging in various forms of model rocketry. In junior high, I got a chance to play with some amazingly funky chemicals, simply because they would grow beautiful crystals. I'm trying to envision a proof of the existence of N60 (nitrogen fullerene, mentioned in the Riad Manaa article below). Perhaps it should be a wordless proof -- something akin to Frank Nelson Cole's proof of the compositeness of Mersenne-67 in 1903. At 02:13 PM 2/17/2017, Eugene Salamin via math-fun wrote:

If you have fond childhood memories of hacking with explosives and other nasty stuff, have a look at http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-wi... .

Just scratching the surface of his examples (but don't scratch the chemicals): Molecules with lots of nitrogen (like C2N14), chlorine trifluoride (sets water, sand and asbestos on fire), all sorts of azides, and horribly smelling selenium compounds.

Following links, I found this nice page from Livermore https://str.llnl.gov/str/June01/Manaa.html

It says "the Department of Energy's most sophisticated high explosive in nuclear weapons, TATB (1,3,5-triamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene)."

Believe it, or not.

Another link leads to the out of print book "Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John D. Clark.

It's hard to find, and sellers are asking $10,000, but you can download the PDF for free.

I've recommended it to Dover to reprint.

-- Gene