The Utah inventor who perfected the technology behind the Oklahoma City bomb is saddened by its sinister application but doesn't feel at all culpable for the tragedy.
Melvin A. Cook, the first man to commercially use ammonium nitrate as a powerful explosive, says he was thinking first of safety when he invented the process 40 years ago."People misuse technology that has benefited mankind . . . that's sad and unfortunate. But I never told anybody about making a bomb," Cook said.
The 83-year-old Salt Lake resident has dozens of patents and awards for his work as an explosives inventor, including the 1968 Nitro Nobel Gold Medal from the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences.
He is still recognized as one of the foremost experts in the industry and was sought out by federal authorities following the blasts at the World Trade Center in New York and in Oklahoma.
His invention of ammonium nitrate-based "slurry" earned him the highest accolades of his illustrious career. The process also revolutionized mining techniques and launched his multimillion-dollar company, IRECO, which he later left to start Cook Slurry Co.
The inventor said he knew in the hours after the Oklahoma bombing that the simple technology he advanced decades ago was the force behind the slicing explosion.
"I knew it was exactly that . . . it so simple to initiate yet so powerful," he said.
He recalled that the nation first witnessed the explosive potential of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in 1947 when a French ship blew up in the harbor of Texas City, Texas.
About 600 died, and a large part of the city was destroyed.
The chemistry of that explosion had been the inadvertent introduction of a wax coating onto the ammonium nitrate fertilizer bags that filled the ship's loading bays.
The coating made the fertilizer "hot," Cook said. At certain heat and pressure point, it exploded, disintegrating the ship, surrounding dock and buildings. More than 5,000 people were injured.
Eight years later, according to news reports of the day, do-it-yourself "powder monkey" farmers, ranchers and contractors were using the fertilizer as oxidizer and diesel oil as the "balancer" to blow out stumps and rocks.
The stuff was cheap, easy to handle and infinitely safer than dynamite.
However, it was not perfect, and Cook knew it.
His slurry could be described as a refinement of the science behind the home-grown explosive.
In the beginning, it was a mix of ammonium nitrate, aluminum pow-der and water. His first test was mixed in a wheelbarrow and poured down a drill hole, demonstrating how easily it could be handled.
The bottom line for Cook is that it eliminated the use of more volatile dynamite in some types of mining - and that is what he thinks of when he reflects on the implications of his invention.
"My objective has always been safety and saving lives."