In Dime and Dimer, Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, describes Dense Inert Metal Explosives:
This is a weapon designed to splatter thousands of tiny tungsten pellets into everybody within a 4-meter radius, without hurting anybody who happens to be standing outside that radius. In tests at the Air Force Research Laboratories, the freakish thing worked so well that it destroyed most of the instruments placed within its 4-meter destructo-zone. They actually had to design new metrics that could withstand those high-temperature tungsten pellets.At the same time, a big part of the design effort was developing a casing that wouldn’t hurt people. They came up with a nice light carbon-composite casing that shreds into harmless confetti.
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To see why they’ve put so much effort into a weapon like this, you have to understand that it’s being used in Gaza by the IDF. There’ve been reports out of Gaza that when the Israelis blast one of these Hamas guys outside a coffee house or his home, there’ve been weird injuries to the people standing next to the target — their arms and legs get sheared off clean, as if God himself lowered a big rotary saw over him and lifted him up into the sky like a core sample from an oil rig, along with the odd arm or leg of other people who happened to be inside the magic 4 meters. The wounds have supposedly stopped clean at that point, cauterized by the blast.
The Israelis aren’t the only ones looking at DIME munitions. The US military is looking at such weapons too:
The Small Diameter Bomb will be a small bomb — less than 6 feet long, less than 8 inches in diameter, and weighing less than 300 pounds. By contrast, versions of the Joint Direct Attack Munition — the primary GPS-guided bomb currently in the U.S. arsenal — range in length from 10 feet to more than 12 feet and in weight from 1,000 lbs. to 2,000 lbs.The Small Diameter Bomb’s diminutive size gives it two great advantages. First, aircraft can carry more of them, and thus attack more targets per mission. The new F-22 fighter can carry two 1,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions or, alternatively, eight Small Diameter Bombs. The B-2 bomber will be able to carry more than 200 of the little bombs. Second, the Small Diameter Bombs will limit collateral damage. If the target is a house, a car or even an individual terrorist, a small bomb will work just as well as a bigger bomb. With GPS guidance, generals no longer need a big blast to compensate for a near miss.
The Pentagon is poised to go even further. It is researching what it calls focused lethality munitions, which could be fitted to small bombs in the future. These munitions are encased in a composite material that, unlike steel, will not fragment into thousands of pieces of shrapnel upon detonation. This means that the effect of a bomb’s explosion is far more focused around the point of impact — ideally, nothing but the intended target itself is destroyed. To increase the bomb’s effect on its intended target alone, the Pentagon is also experimenting with Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), which uses tungsten powder in the explosive to act as a kind of shrapnel at close ranges. Because the shrapnel itself is only a powder, however, it cannot travel nearly as far as the steel fragments resulting from traditional bomb blasts.
Naturally, such precise munitions are considered a crime against humanity — because tungsten powder can cause cancer.