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The project focuses on understanding the initial steps of energetic material ignition at the molecular level, with the long range goal of understanding the fundamental mechanisms of the sensitivity of energetic materials. The effort involves three distinct, but ultimately related projects: (1) understanding the detailed behavior of solid-state molecules immediately behind a shock front; (2) developing new diagnostic techniques and using them to investigate the picosecond time scale behavior of insensitive energetic materials under shock loading conditions; and (3) studying molecular mechanical energy transfer in condensed energetic materials. In the past three years, new methods were developed for reproducibly shocking energetic materials and probing the result using vibrational spectroscopy with extremely high time resolution. A new vibrational spectroscopy technique was developed and used to study vibrational energy transfer in a condensed high explosive, nitromethane. Besides providing the first ever view into vibrational energy transfer in a condensed high explosive, some intriguing results were obtained involving the channeling of vibrational energy into the ubiquitous nitro group.