Name: 5 of the World's Most Dangerous Chemicals
Uploaded: 2018-07-19T10:19:40.000Z
Duration: 10 min 45 s
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In a secret bunker on the German-Polish border

Nazi agents were overseeing the production of a recently discovered chemical

It exploded when it touched water, it was lethal when inhaled,

and when it decomposed it spit out deadly hydrofluoric acid.

When loaded into a flamethrower and ignited
it could burn at

The plan was to arm troops with "Substance N"

and use it to melt allied bunkers into hot porridge

But then after studying it for a while even the German soldiers were like

"Whoa."
experiments with "Substance N" were discontinued because

the Nazis decided it was to dangerous to work with.

Should give you some kind of sense of what we're dealing with

here when we talk about the most dangerous chemicals in the world.

I'm talking about things that explode when you touch them,

things so poisonous that if even a millionth of a gram went up your nose, it would end up killing you

things that could even disable you because of their totally, debilitatingly, horrifying smell,

and yes, chemicals so severe,
that even the Nazis thought they were crazy.

Let's start with what the Germans had in that secret weapons bunker

They originally planned to produce 90 tons of the stuff every month

but only made about 30 tons throughout the whole war

what they'd concocted was chlorine trifluoride,

the most vigorous fluorinating agent known to humanity

fluorinating agents rip other molecules apart to replace their hydrogen atoms with fluorine

the result is what chemists called a 'violently exothermic reaction',

it's much more dangerous to handle than even fluorine gas,

which as anyone with a degree in chemistry could tell you

is not a sentence that you get to say very often

oxidizers are compounds that steal electrons from other chemicals in a reaction

and they are what make combustion possible.

chlorine trifluoride is so good at this, that it can burn stuff that sane people might think of as non flammable, like

bricks or asbestos or things that have already been burned

oxidizers are also used to ignite rocket fuel and in

the very short time that us rocket scientists thought about using this stuff as a propellant,

they quickly learned that this idea was bad

and the early 1950s, the first time that US scientists tried to ship chlorine trifluoride in bulk

the steel tank cracked and a full ton of it spilled out

it burned so hot that the chemical ate through an entire concrete floor

and then a meter of dirt and gravel beneath that

One eye-witness described the spill only by saying

Chlorine trifluoride is still manufactured and is used by semi-conductor companies to clean their equipment

The good news is that you can store it safely in a regular steel drum

as long as it's air-tight and you're really, really careful,

because, it instantly scorches the inside lining of the container

leaving behind a nonreactive plating of metallic fluoride.

Nonreactive is not a word that we're gonna need when discussing the next chemical on our list

"Azidoazide azide", the most explosive chemical compound ever created

This twitchy little compound is a part of a class of chemicals known as

And it does what it does because nitrogen just wants to be left alone

A nitrogen atom bonded with another nitrogen atom is one of the most stable molecules on earth

Their electrons form an extremely strong triple bond with each other,

which, in nature can usually only be broken by a molecule being hit by lightning

The strength of that bond means that when two nitrogen atoms snap together,

they release a tremendous amount of energy.

So if you look in a molecule of AA.. 
We're gonna call it AA cause Azidoazide Azide is hard

It has 14 nitrogen atoms and because of the way the molecule was structured,

Instead, they're stuck in a loosely bound high-energy state

and are dying to move to a more stable lower energy state

which means releasing a lot of pent-up energy in the process.

As a result, AA is both highly reactive and heck-a explosive.

How sensitive is this stuff? Well, it's actually hard to say, because it's too sensitive

A team of German chemists created it in 2010 with the help of the US army,

in an effort to develop more energetic compounds.

they said, and I quote, "The sensitivity of C2N14 is beyond our capabilities of measurement...

...even the smallest possible loadings in shock & friction-tests led to explosive decomposition."

To give you a list of how touchy this stuff is,

here's a list of things that make Azidoazide explode:

dispersing it in solution,
leaving it undisturbed on a glass plate,

exposing it to bright light,
exposing it to x-rays,

putting it in a spectrometer,
turning on the spectrometer,

They had it in a shock-proof explosive case, in a dark climate controlled room...

I think somebody said something mean about it somewhere, and it was like:

The lead scientists on the team that synthesized it called it: "A very exciting discovery."

If I worked with Azidoazide Azide, waking up every morning,

and seeing that I still had all my fingers would be a very exciting discovery.

Next up, let's talk about Dimethylcadmium

which means it it has a molecule in which carbon has bonded with a metal

So far we've talked about chemicals that explode

And don't get me wrong; Dimethylcadmium, it does that too

But that is not what makes it so dangerous

It is, in all likelihood, gram-for-gram the most toxic chemical in the world

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5 of the World's Most Dangerous Chemicals

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