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The Thermite Argument

January 28, 2013 

Kendra Blewitt of San Francisco sent me "The Thermite Argument," an excellent essay which explains very well the evidence of Thermite in the demolition of the World Trade Center.  As Blewitt wrote: 

In my opinion the thermite argument is so strong that it serves as a sort of litmus test as to who is real and who is working for the perpetrators... The thermite argument is what they fear, because it is so strong.


The hot dust of the demolished Twin Towers contained large amounts of active thermitic material and tiny droplets of molten iron, a by-product of a thermitic reaction.  This evidence proves that a highly sophisticated form of super-thermite was used to pulverize the towers, an act of mass murder that killed several thousand people. 

The Thermite Argument 
by Kendra Blewitt

It is not just probable opinion that three World Trade Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition. It is a rock-solid empirical truth that this happened. 

There are a number of strong arguments that explosives brought down the WTC buildings, not fire as claimed:

(a) Steel framed buildings have been in existence for a hundred years and not on one single occasion in all that time has fire caused such a building to collapse.

(b) The buildings fell much faster than they would have if the official "pancake" theory were true. They fell at close to freefall acceleration, which could only happen if there was no resistance from below as the mass above came down floor by floor; and this is what you would expect from controlled demolition, whereas the pancake theory cannot account for this.

(c) The buildings collapsed neatly into their own footprints, which would be unlikely by the "pancake" theory.

(d) Heavy beams of steel that weighed tons were sent flying perpendicular to the two tallest buildings at speeds of 50 mph, which the "pancake" theory cannot explain.

(e) Eyewitnesses heard explosions. Reliable eyewitnesses such as firemen heard these explosions.

(f) "Squibs" can be seen on film taken of the two tallest buildings as they fell. (Squibs are solid particles shooting out of the building like puffs of smoke.) Controlled demolitions often produce such squibs, however they are hard to explain by the pancake theory.

(g) Evidence was destroyed contrary to both law and common sense when the steel support beams found in the rubble were hastily sent to Asia to be melted down as scrap metal. If explosives had been used, an examination of these steel beams from the rubble would have been able to prove it, meanwhile it was important for firemen to know what had happened so that in the future they would know whether it was dangerous to enter tall steel buildings in order to put out fires. It is hard to see why these steel beams were hastily shipped to Asia to be melted down unless it was to destroy the evidence they contained.

Each of the above is a good argument, and the fact that there are so many good arguments makes each one of them stronger. However there is an argument that is stronger than the sum total of all of these, namely the thermite argument. The thermite argument is completely irrefutable.


The active thermitic material found in the dust of the World Trade Center releases more energy per gram than any other explosive used in demolition.

The thermite argument is like a three-in-one Trinity. The three that are one are: (a) the discovery of high-tech “nano thermite” in the dust of the rubble, (b) the discovery of tiny spheres of iron in the dust of the rubble, (c) molten metal and extremely high temperatures that existed in the rubble for weeks after the event.

Before I quote from Niels Harrit’s article that was published in a scientific journal in 2009, entitledActive Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, I will discuss the meaning of the tiny spheres of iron that were found in the dust samples, also the meaning of the high temperatures of the rubble that lasted for weeks.

The significance of the tiny spheres of iron is that when the most common type of thermite burns it creates pure iron as a by-product. This happens because common thermite is a "sand" of small particles of iron oxide mixed with small particles of pure aluminum, and what happens in the “fire” is the aluminum steals the oxygen atom from the iron oxide and the result is aluminum oxide, plus enormous energy in the form of heat, plus pure iron.

The iron oxide/aluminum thermite fire burns so hot that the pure iron that is produced is actually turned into a vapor! It is only a vapor momentarily because the much colder air it is immersed in cools it way down almost instantly—it is a vapor only for a brief moment, then it cools further to become a liquid for a brief moment, then it cools even more and assumes the solid state. During the brief moment when the hot iron is a liquid, the phenomenon of surface tension (an electrical force) gives it a spherical shape—like in the case of a raindrop, where water vapor assumes the liquid state due to cooling, and surface tension gives it a spherical shape, which subsequently becomes a raindrop shape as it falls with velocity though the resisting air.


The dust from the destroyed World Trade Center contains a large amount of iron spheres, like the one seen in a micrograph from the USGS survey of the dust.

These tiny spheres of iron were numerous in the dust of the 9/11 debris; and these iron “microspheres” are to be expected from a thermite reaction, and the official pancake theory cannot explain them—in fact nothing can explain these iron microspheres except a thermite fire.

The significance of the high temperatures of the rubble that went on for weeks, on the other hand, along with eyewitness accounts of molten metal at the bottom of the rubble heap, can be explained by the hypothesis that the rubble contained large amounts of unburned thermite, and this was still burning inside the rubble. There is no other good explanation for the source of heat—certainly the official pancake theory caused by jet fuel fire, along with common office fires, cannot explain these high temperatures that lasted for weeks.

Now I will present the third part of this Trinity argument. Below is the conclusion of a published scientific paper by Niels Harrit, Steven Jones and others. (Harrit is a chemistry professor at Copenhagen University and is a distinguished scientist who has more than 50 publications in high quality scientific journals.)

We have discovered red/gray chips in significant numbers in the dust associated with the World Trade Center destruction. We have applied SEM/XEDS and other methods to characterize the small-scale structure and chemical signature of these chips, especially of their red component. The red material is most interesting and has the following characteristics:

1. It is composed of aluminum, iron, oxygen, silicone and carbon. Lesser amounts of other potentially reactive elements are sometimes present, such as potassium, sulfur, lead, barium and copper.

2. The primary elements (Al, Fe, O, Si, C) are typically all present in particles on the scale of tens to hundreds of nanometers, and detailed XEDS mappings shows intimate mixing.

3. On treatment with methyl ethyl ketone solvent, some segregation of components occurred. Elemental aluminum became sufficiently concentrated to be clearly identified in the pre-ignition material.

4. Iron oxide appears in faceted grains roughly 100nm across whereas the aluminum appears in thin plate-like structures.  The small size of the iron oxide particles qualifies the material to be characterized as nano-thermite or super-thermite.

5. Analysis shows that iron and oxygen are present with a ratio consistent with Fe2O3. The red material in all four WTC dust samples was similar in this way. Iron oxide was found in the pre-ignition material whereas elemental iron was not.

6. From the presence of elemental aluminum and iron oxide in the red material, we conclude that it contains the ingredients of thermite.

7. As measured using DSC, the material ignites and reacts vigorously at a temperature of approximately 430 degrees C, with a rather narrow exotherm, matching fairly closely an independent observation on a known super-thermite sample. The low temperature of ignition and the presence of iron oxide grains less than 120 nm show that the material is not conventional thermite (which ignites at temperatures above 900 degrees C) but very likely a form of super-thermite.

8. After igniting several red/gray chips in a DCS run to 700 degrees C, we found numerous iron-rich spheres and spheroids in the residue, indicating that a very high temperature reaction had occurred, since the iron-rich product clearly must have been molten to form these shapes. In several spheres, elemental iron was verified since the iron content significantly exceeded the oxygen content. We conclude that a high temperature reduction-oxidation reaction has occurred in the heated chips, namely, the thermite reaction.

9. The spheroids produced by the DSC test and by the flame test have an XECS signature (Al, Fe, O, Si, C) which is depleted in carbon and aluminum relative to the original red material. This chemical signature strikingly matches the chemical signature of the spheroids produced by igniting commercial thermite, and also matches the signatures of many microspheres found in the WTC dust.

10. The carbon content of the red material indicates that an organic substance is present. This would be expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive. The nature of the organic material in these chips merits further exploration. We note that it is likely also an energetic material, in that the total energy release sometimes observed in DSC tests exceeds the theoretical maximum energy of the classical thermite reaction.

Based on these observations we conclude that the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.

In case someone objects that the samples of WTC dust had been “doctored,” there are two answers: (a) Conventional thermite could have been purchased by almost anyone at that time but nano-thermite was only made in government laboratories in 2001, and it would have been virtually impossible for “conspiracy theorists” to obtain it, (b) There is extremely strong evidence for high temperatures and molten metal in the rubble heap that went on for weeks, and this implies a thermite fire.

Aside from these material considerations there is the question of the moral character of the four individuals who provided the dust samples. One of the four was an artist, Janette MacKinlay, who at the time lived in an apartment in Manhattan that was in very close vicinity to the World Trade Center. The samples she supplied came from dust that had poured in through a window that broke during the event and filled her apartment with a thick layer of dust. MacKinlay collected a quantity of this dust and subsequently used it in her art displays. She had been doing this for several years when she heard that Professor Jones of BYU wanted WTC dust samples for analysis. Was MacKinlay, a person well known in art circles, morally capable of involvement in a plot intended to slander people with the accusation of mass murder?

In conclusion, there is no doubt whatsoever that the WTC buildings were brought down by the science of controlled demolition. Nano-thermite (along with conventional explosives, very likely) had been installed in the buildings before the supposedly hijacked jetliners flew into them and exploded in a jet fuel fire. It was this thermite that had been planted inside the buildings along with other explosives that may have been employed that caused the three buildings to spectacularly crash down to the ground with huge clouds of powdered material filling the air while 3,000 people were trapped inside two of these buildings. It was this and not a weakening of the steel support beams due to heat from burning jet fuel along with regular office fires ­­(or fire alone in the case of Building 7) which is the claim that is official.

That it was planted thermite along with possible other planted explosives that caused the three WTC buildings to collapse, and which caused the deaths of 3,000 people who were trapped inside the two tall towers, is not speculation. This is rock-solid empirical truth. 

Sources:

"Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" by 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, Vol. 2, pp. 7-31
http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tocpj/articles/V002/7TOCPJ.htm