Editing Incendiary Weapons (section)

===White Phosphorus and Other Potential Warcrime-Enabling Substances===

For when you want to burn everything in a 20-meter radius, almost nothing beats White Phosphorus, aka Willie Pete. This stuff is the most potent incendiary commonly available, to the point that its use in artillery has rendered flamethrowers militarily obsolescent.

Then there's napalm, which is just gasoline mixed with a thickening agent such that it's useful in an incendiary bomb. The thickening agent means that the gasoline sticks to whatever it hits, which has some obvious benefits for firebombing, to the point that "hit them with napalm" has become almost synonymous with "firebomb them" in modern warfare.

The most notable inflammatory substance, besides WP, napalm, and naphtha, is chlorine trifluoride, ClF<sub>3</sub>. Most notable, here, because it's so potent that it's a better oxidizer than Oxygen and more difficult to handle than Fluorine gas, which puts it in fairly rarified circles. It will burn things that you previously assumed wouldn't burn, like sand, asbestos, bricks, concrete, and even Carbon Dioxide. It will react violently anything, to the point that no delay in reaction with any substance has ever been measured; this includes the raw metals used to store it, and only a thin oxidation layer that forms on any metal exposed to it allows it to be stored even somewhat "safely" (for very dubious values of "safety" since that layer breaks down rapidly when heated). To give you some idea: It's considered too volatile for use as rocket fuel, and those people love their volitiles. Note that it's very unsafe nature means that it only gets brought up as an incendiary<ref>The stuff sees commercial use in cleaning surfaces for semiconductor manufacturing; if you wondered why semiconductor plants are so expensive, the fact that they ''actually need'' stuff like ClF3 (which, again, '''burns Carbon Dioxide''') should give you some idea of just how hard it is to make advanced chips.</ref> in hypothetical situations, such as "what's the most damage you could do with magical alchemy in the real world?". <ref> Well, that and it's meaner, uglier cousin, CFl'''5'''. But unlike CFl3, that chemical has only been studied in laboratories, as even the crazy people will see the problems with CFl3 and say "nope nope nope" to anything using CFl5, and as such is somewhat obscure.</ref>