Trying to Make Ammonium Nitrate Less Explosive

Washington Post:

Ammonium nitrate, which packs a fearsome punch, is used in more than 60 percent of the Taliban’s bombs. It’s also essential to farming; without it, thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis would starve.
This spring, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories announced that he had found a special additive that blunted the fertilizer’s blast without damaging crop yields...
A light rain fell as Best and his team started to make two bombs in five-gallon plastic paint buckets. The first bomb was made from traditional ammonium nitrate fertilizer — the kind that’s used by insurgents every day in Afghanistan. The other bomb contained the Sandia fertilizer, which includes an iron sulfate additive that is supposed to split the ammonium nitrate into two nonexplosive compounds: iron nitrate and ammonium sulfate.
The iron sulfate gave the Sandia fertilizer a light greenish tint. One of Best’s scientists worked silently, pouring fine aluminum powder, which fuels the blast, into the two plastic buckets of fertilizer.....Ten years ago, the bombs used in Iraq and Afghanistan were mostly old artillery shells that insurgents found in dumps and buried along regularly traveled roads. The military countered by adding layers of thick armor to their trucks. So began a decade-long game of cat and mouse; move and countermove.
Iraqi fighters, with help from Iran, built high-tech devices that could pierce the American armor. The Afghan insurgents turned to fertilizer bombs, which are cheap, easy to make and devilishly hard to detect. A typical bomb kills with razor-sharp shrapnel. A fertilizer bomb contains no metal. It kills with a wave of intense energy that passes through the thickest armor.

Based on the test, the modified ammonium nitrate was 5% less explosive.  Back to the drawing board.  I'm not exactly how they were planning on keeping folks who would like to see us get bogged down somewhere from providing our enemies with regular ammonium nitrate, but it is interesting nonetheless.  It is also interesting that the article said that since fewer soldiers are getting blown up with IEDs (mom called them IUDs the other day, and I had to correct her),  the government might kill the program.  You know, because we'll never invade another shithole country where fertilizer or other easily built explosives might be widely available.