Publications - Warhead Technology

At the request of its Steering Committee and several customers, NIMIC has collected information in relation to test facilities that offer their IM testing services commercially to outside customers.

From its initial concept in the 1970s, Insensitive Munitions (IM) have developed and are now recognized as one of the key considerations when designing and/or procuring munitions.

NIMIC RESTRICTED  -  The report is restricted, the title and the abstract are unclassified, unlimited distribution

AC/310 SG 4 agreed that the fundamental differences in approach to IM national policies should be resolved before preparing a new edition of STANAG 4439 and tasked NIMIC to conduct an investigation of IM methodologies applied by each country for assessing the IMness of munition

The aims of the meeting were:

One area that has created great interest over the last few years in the insensitive munitions field is the existence and properties of reduced sensitivity-RDX (RS-RDX).

A NIMIC workshop, entitled IM Design Technology, sponsored by the Defence Ordnance Safety Group (DOSG, UK) in September 2003, was held in Shrivenham, UK. The aims of the workshop in respect of gun propelling charge design were:

This document contains a guideline for performing an assessment of the IMness of a munition throughout all phases of its development cycle. It is important to note that this document does not impose a procedure.

Depending on the circumstances in which people conduct their work, be it the military or industrial safety environments, the term Threat (and) Hazard Assessment (THA) has tended to have different interpretations and to be conducted using different approaches.

Thermal threats to munitions lurk everywhere and a wide range of heating rates is expected in the actual threat environment.