What is the strongest chemical bond in nature? (This is a bit of a trick question, and is counterintuitive).
The triple bond dissociation energy of carbon monoxide "can be" 1072 kJ/mol and this represents the strongest chemical bond known, much stronger than CO2 for instance. The CO triple bond resembles molecular nitrogen, which is almost inert but with lower ultimate bond strength. The triple bond is the not the only key, since bond strength varies with distance. Here is the catch-22: with CO the bond distance at STP is not optimized, so in effect what should be an inert gas is instead a fairly good oxidizer. This can change with either refrigeration or cavity confinement to force closer bond distance. I am mentioning this only as a curiosity for now, since many chemical reactions "on paper" do not work out in practicality. And in any event, the only way to use this factoid would be if it resulted in a high commercial value for carbon monoxide. Why ? Well, in a perverse way it could relate to the hydrogen economy. If we want cheap hydrogen, then "valuable CO" is one way to get to it (by way of coal and the water-shift reaction). So how does cold-confinement convert toxic CO into a valuable molecule? Wild-guess time. In the context of the caveat above (this is, after all: "on paper") - the analogy to consider would be nano-thermite, where a strongly bound molecule like iron-oxide, with little apparent oxidizing potential on its own- becomes an ultra-high explosive, due to circumstance which are similar, in more than one way. Imagine liquid CO, in a nanocavity matrix of magnesium, for instance .
