It's certainly strange that it has never been heard of in the mass-media. In fact there are probably many examples of this. It wouldn't suprise me if the British Ministry of Defence keep such things secret until they are needed, after all, the sooner you apply new technology to the Military the sooner another country either copies or counters it.
I'm not sure to what extent the British MoD shares its secrets with the US. 
More examples of mass media coverage:
International Defense Review
April 1, 1993
SECTION: TECHNOLOGY; Vol. 26; No. 4; Pg. 328
HEADLINE: Taking the heat astonishing results with new material
BYLINE: Pamela Pohling-Brown
BODY: Tests still continuing with a new family of materials invented by British businessman Maurice Ward have produced outstanding results in flash, blast and impact protection far beyond those of classic fire and thermal barriers. So promising is the lightweight compound, registered as "Starlite", that defense companies are eager to buy into the project.
In an exclusive interview with IDR, Ward explained that Starlight was developed in response to an air disaster in which passengers died in an aircraft burning on the runway. It consists of a variety of (organic) polymers and co-polymers with both organic and inorganic additives, including borates and small quantities of ceramics and other special barrier ingredients -- up to 21 in all. Perhaps uniquely for a thermal and blast-proof material, it is not wholly inorganic but up to 90 per cent organic,. It chars slowly and emits virtually no toxic fumes under the application of heat. It is, above all, an intelligent material, able to tailor its response to the individual stimulus applied. It thus boasts a complex palette of properties and capabilities, some of which are not yet completely understood. Damage protection is due to several simultaneous effects, including reflective scatter and absorption.
The United Kingdom Defence Research Agency (DRA) has conducted tests which give rise to hopes of a wide range of applications. Apart from protection in aircraft against fire, these include protection of cabling in navy ships, linings to contain efflux in missile launchers, coating of launch sites for advanced vertical take-off and space aircraft (HOTOL, NASP) and, possibly, coatings for spacecraft. Starlite's EMP protection capability is perhaps less currently apposite than its properties against laser damage, as underlined by Professor Sir Ronald Mason, formerly chief scientific advisor to the UK Ministry of Defence, who joined the Starlite project some 15 months ago.
At AWE (the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Foulness), Starlite withstood simulated nuclear flashes of 400kcal/cm 2 /s,(1) energy levels which normally generate temperatures of around 10,000 degree C. Tests with the DRA under NATO auspices at the White Sands missile range, New Mexico, subjected a Starlite variant to both a simulated nuclear flash and a massive simulated nuclear explosion. The material withstood both and demonstrably provided protection to a composite substrate.
At RSRE (Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, Malvern), it was subjected to pulses from visual-wavelength lasers which would have burned holes through classic polymer material almost immediately. The target set was for the material to contain and withstand 100mW/cm 2 for one 15ns pulse. The frequency-doubled ND YAG (at 532nm) and TEA Co2 (at 10.6um) lasers used were focused to 66um and 124um respectively. Starlite showed little damage to the surface, merely small pits with the approximate diameter of the beam and with little evidence of melting.
Among the responses observed are the formation of a plasma of ionized gas which provides a protective layer in front of the incident surface. The plasma forms a so-called albido reflector virtually to counter incoming laser beams. In tests, Starlite's performance improved the higher the stress applied. This may be because some of the host polymer at a given spot is vaporized by the laser pulse, increasing the level of scatter by ceramic and other particles.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: December 12, 1994
Note: The original JDR article had a typographical error. The tests at AWE produced temperatures of 10,000°C, not 1,000°C. The Business Week article has the correct information.
NBC News; Dateline NBC:
Starlite Plastic Report
Dateline NBC August 24, 1993
Announcer: This is DATELINE NBC. Tonight:
JANE PAULEY: (Voiceover) Stronger than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a rocket engine, able to withstand even this...(An explosion is shown)...it's Starlite. And who invented it? A top scientist? Nope!
(Gun firing; rocket lifting off; Starlite title; scientist working)
Mr. MAURICE WARD: I spent quite an amount of time doing hairdressing.
PAULEY: (Voiceover) Tonight, see how a hairdresser may change the world.
Announcer: DATELINE, with anchors Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips, with Brian Ross, Deborah Roberts, Jon Scott, Lea Thompson, Faith Daniels, and John Cochran.
*****
Announcer: From our studios in New York, here are Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips.
STONE PHILLIPS: Good evening. Thanks for joining us. Science is full of accidents that produced great inventions. Penicillin, Teflon, even cornflakes were all developed through happenstance?something developed in the lab that wasn't planned, and out of it came a product we can't do without.
JANE PAULEY: And tonight, how a little luck and hard work have brought us a new discovery. It's a miracle substance called Starlite. It resists flames?even the intense heat of a nuclear flash. No one knows how valuable it will be, but as Jon Scott reports, it has a most unlikely inventor and a secret formula that a lot of people would like to get their hands on.
ONLY YOUR HAIRDRESSER KNOWS
JON SCOTT reporting: (Voiceover) North Yorkshire, England. It's the kind of place where not much ever happens, where conversations center on the best pint and chips, but 61-year-old resident Maurice Ward is about to change all that. Ward has discovered something that could revolutionize contemporary warfare, modern industry, commercial transportation, even the space program.
(North Yorkshire, England; military equipment; rocket lifting off)
Unidentified Actor #1 ("The Graduate"): I just want to say one word to you?just one word.
Dustin Hoffman: Yes, sir?
Actor #1: Are you listening?
Dustin Hoffman: Yes, I am.
Actor #1: Plastics.
(End of file footage)
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Maurice Ward has invented a new, almost indestructible plastic. And just who is Ward? An award-winning chemist? A physicist? An aeronautical engineer?
(Mr. Ward walking along the seaboard)
Mr. WARD: Not really. I spent quite an amount of time doing hairdressing.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) A hairdresser?
(Mr. Ward sitting in a room)
Unidentified Woman #1: He used to set my hair.
Unidentified Woman #2: Well, he was a good hairdresser. He had a good reputation.
Woman #1: I think he won a few competitions anyway.
Mr. FRED MacMURRAY: (From file footage) I'm not sure what we've got here, Charley, but if we've got what I think we've got, we've got something.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Like the absent-minded professor who invented Flubber, former hairdresser Maurice Ward has found his miracle. He calls this revolutionary discovery Starlite, or my plastic, and keeps it not in a safe or an armored car, but close by his side in a simple glass jar.
(Mr. Ward with his Starlite)
SCOTT: Looks like cake flour or plaster or something.
Mr. WARD: Yeah, that's right.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) His plastic, Starlite, can be rigid or rubbery. It can even be paste. But whatever the form, when Maurice applies his invention to another surface and then applies heat to that surface?well, watch what happens.
(Scott talking with Mr. Ward)
Mr. WARD: And you can see...
SCOTT: (Voiceover) A plastic that refuses to burn; a discovery that any Nobel Prize-winning scientist would envy.
(Mr. Ward demonstrating Starlite)
Mr. WARD: The world has spent billions of pounds for the last 45 years with thousands of the top physicists and Dr. Who?s without any success. And I've come in, I believe, from a different angle.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Under a butane torch at approximately 2200 degrees Fahrenheit the plastic glows red, even bubbles a bit, but it refuses to ignite.
(Mr. Ward demonstrating Starlite)
Mr. WARD: I move the torch away...
SCOTT: OK.
Mr. WARD: ...like so.
SCOTT: (Touching the surface of the Starlite) You can barely feel it.
Mr. WARD: Mm-hm.
SCOTT: Whoa!
You know what it does, but you don't necessarily know how it does what it does?
Mr. WARD: I'm perfectly happy to say that it is what it is, and it does what it does.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Maurice isn't the only one puzzled by its behavior. Some of the top scientific minds in Britain and the US haven't figured it out either.
(Scenes of Great Britain are shown)
Sir RONALD MASON: We don't, still, quite understand how it works, but that it works is undoubtedly the case.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Sir Ronald Mason is the former chief scientific adviser for the British Ministry of Defense.
(British Ministry of Defense building)
Sir MASON: I started this path with Maurice being very, very skeptical of it. I became totally convinced of the reality of the claims.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) In America, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is interested in Maurice' plastic. Program manager Rudy Nurangho is heading NASA's inquiries.
(Space control center; Mr. Nurangho)
Mr. RUDY NURANGHO: Well, the reason it makes it so special?this material?is because it does so many things, and is only one material.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Take, for example, those troublesome space shuttle tiles?the ones that keep falling off?had Starlite been available when the shuttle was designed, it might have been a lighter and less expensive alternative to the tiles. NASA is now eyeing Maurice' plastic for its new aerospace plane and for other uses on the shuttle.
(Space shuttle; men studying the tiles; futuristic space plane)
Mr. NURANGHO: Any place where is heat you have applications. Any place where is radiation?radiation coming in?it would?has applications.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) NASA's interest in Starlite was first sparked by an article in Jane's International Defense Review. It told how Starlite, in tests, withstood the most intense forms of energy. For example, lasers that would normally burn through half an inch of steel in a couple of seconds did little damage to the surface of Starlite.
Mr. WARD: They went sort of five, four, three, two, one, bzzt, and nothing happened.
SCOTT: It must have amazed even you?
Mr. WARD: Well, it did, obviously. I was relieved. I think they were trying to shoot my bit of Starlite down. I didn't think it would do it.
Mr. MacMURRAY: (From file footage) It's a breakthrough! A breakthrough!
SCOTT: (Voiceover) But Starlite's done even more than that. It has withstood simulated nuclear flashes in tests conducted by England's Atomic Weapons Establishment and by NATO.
(Simulated nuclear flash)
Mr. WARD: We took on the fluents of 70 kilocalories?three can vaporize a human being, OK??then took on the blast which I've seen shred an aircraft and it came back unscathed.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) There are many potential military applications. Coat a tank or a bomber with Maurice' plastic and protect it against the most frightening weapons of the future battlefield?lasers and maybe even nuclear bombs. Maurice focuses on more practical ideas.
(Tank; warplane)
Mr. WARD: Every day of the week you read about some family having been burnt through a house fire, and I feel that it's something whereby we should make it available to the average family to spray up the furniture, the carpets, the curtains, whatever, to prevent that sort of thing from happening.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Question is, how did a formula like this spring from the mind of a man who spent most of his adult life cutting and coloring the hair of the village ladies? Well, it seems Maurice has always been somewhat of an experimenter.
(Scott talking with Mr. Ward)
Woman #1: Oh, I remember him dying people's hair most peculiar colors.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) In the mid-70s, Maurice decided to try a new experiment, and with his family he opened a recycling business, first paper and then plastics. It was the 1985 Manchester air disaster in which 54 people died that prompted Maurice to begin his research into fireproof plastics.
(Maurice with his family; Manchester air disaster photos)
Mr. WARD: We realized that the people had actually been killed with the smoke and the toxic fumes rather than just the flames. I then started to look at what I felt would be a flame retardant. I believe it was around about Easter '86 I got my first significant piece of material which really was the forerunner of Starlite.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Maurice took his fireproof plastic to a friend at a chemical company. The man said it looked good in tests, but Maurice says his friend's boss didn't want to be bothered.
(ICI chemical plant)
Mr. WARD: His boss came on and swore at me, told me to clear off, so I threw it in the cupboard for a few years. I couldn't afford at that stage to put any more money into it.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) It's no great surprise that the former hairdresser had trouble spreading the word about his discovery. He hadn't attended a university, had no scientific training, but Ward wouldn't give up. He figured even if the scientific world wouldn't believe what he had done, the public would, if people could see how it worked on TV.
(Mr. Ward walking on the beach; driving in a car)
Mr. WARD: (Demonstrating Starlite on a TV show) It's glowing red hot, but just watch this. If I turn the flame off?and remember that it was producing 1200 degree Celsius?if I then crack it open, what's more, the egg hasn't even begun to start cooking.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Soon, everyone was knocking at his door.
(Mr. Ward sitting)
Mr. WARD: Well, a lot of people would love to have it. A lot of people are talking. A few people have tried to pinch it.
Unidentified Actor #3: (From file footage) Well, look who's here. It's the professor.
Mr. MacMURRAY: (From file footage) Careful, boys.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) In trying to pinch or steal his plastic, the companies that want it have been quite resourceful. Maurice caught one man putting a sample down his pants.
(Scene from "The Absent-Minded Professor")
SCOTT: That little chip that you're holding in your hands there...
Mr. WARD: Mm-hm?
SCOTT: What do you think that is, a billion dollar product?
Mr. WARD: People have said about it being multibillion as a market value. I mean, you?you value it for me. The world's been searching for it. They've spent billions of pounds on it, you know? So what's it worth?
SCOTT: (Voiceover) It's no wonder that Maurice keeps his mixture of 21 ingredients a secret. He refuses to patent Starlite because he doesn't want to publish the formula. And he withstands even the most persistent inquisitions.
(Mr. Ward demonstrating a sample of Starlite)
SCOTT: All right, Maurice, what's in it?
Mr. WARD: I suppose a bit of flour and baking powder.
Mr. MASON: The actual composition of Starlite is known to Maurice and one or two members of his family only.
Ms. JANE WARD: It's all?it's all up there. He won't let you write anything down on paper.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Jane Ward is the third of Maurice' four daughters, and says she and the rest of the family often wish Maurice would take the best offer and be done with it.
(Jane brushing a horse with Maurice)
Ms. WARD: We've got a bit sick of it?all the publicity, and people coming to the house and that. We just wish we could just settle down and carry on with a bit of peace and quiet.
SCOTT: So let's say you were nearing retirement age with a billion dollar formula in your brain. What would you do? Probably take life easy; maybe take up golf. Not Maurice, he's taken up a different sport?harness racing.
(Voiceover) He's traded in his barber's chair for the driver's seat of a racing sulky. We went with him to Musselborough, Scotland, for his very first race. We'll give him credit for being a clever inventor, and we've been told he gives a fine haircut, but as a harness driver Maurice has much to learn. Despite the cheers of his family, his horse finished way out of the money. But then, with Starlite on the horizon, he really doesn't need to worry about money.
(Mr. Ward harness racing)
SCOTT: The crass American question: What's the largest money offer you've received for this?
Mr. WARD: Thirteen million pounds worth for 45 percent.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) That's about 20 million US dollars to buy less than half of Starlite's future.
(Mr. Ward demonstrating Starlite)
Mr. MacMURRAY: (From film footage) There's a great future in plastics. Think about it.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) Maurice has thought about it, and hasn't made any deals because he believes the offers will get even better.
(Scott talking with Mr. Ward)
SCOTT: You're determined not to be squashed?
Mr. WARD: Not to be squashed, and they're not getting it for little.
SCOTT: (Voiceover) With the formula in his head, the future is in his hands. Clearly, when it comes to the making and marketing of his fireproof plastic, the former hairdresser intends to be in the driver's seat.
(Mr. Ward riding in a surrey)
PAULEY: NASA scientists say they hope to take a look at Starlite in a few months to see if it'll work for them.
c 1993 National Broadcasting Company, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Topic: Nuclear proof plastic invented in Scotland (Read 7985 times)