10.06
The controlled demolition conspiracy theories claim that the collapse of the North Tower, South Tower and 7 World Trade Center was not caused by the plane crash damage, nor by resulting fire damage, but by explosives installed in the buildings in advance. It is rejected by the mainstream media and the engineering community.
Demolition theory proponents, such as physicist Steven E. Jones, architect Richard Gage, software engineer Jim Hoffman, and theologian David Ray Griffin, argue that the aircraft impacts and resulting fires could not have weakened the buildings sufficiently to initiate a catastrophic collapse, and that the buildings would not have collapsed completely, nor at the speeds that they did, without additional energy involved to weaken their structures. Jones has presented the hypothesis that thermite or superthermite was used to demolish the buildings.
Many mainstream scientists refuse to debate conspiracy theorists to avoid giving them unwarranted credibility. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has rejected the theory. Specialists in structural mechanics and structural engineering generally accept the model of a fire-induced, gravity-driven collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, an explanation that does not involve the use of explosives.
This belief that the towers would not have collapsed without external interference (something other then the planes), largely roots from the belief that the burning temperatures of jet fuel (1,000 degrees Celsius) would not melt the steel support structure of the WTC. This would be valid if it weren’t for the fact that at 1000 degrees Celsius steel weakens to 10% of its room temperature strength. This alone would be enough for the weight to collapse in on itself, but the damage caused by the plane’s impact ensured the collapse.