The argument being...

You can clearly see a brick orange column tending to bright red, typical of lithium participation. Which in the form of lithium-metal is the propellant for military missiles. I think there were armaments there,' he said.

I did wonder about the colour of the smoke.

Lithium burns with a strongly red-tinged flame if heated in air. It reacts with oxygen in the air to give white lithium oxide. With pure oxygen, the flame would simply be more intense. For the record, it also reacts with the nitrogen in the air to give lithium nitride.

Be easy enough to prove by sampling residue at the site.