AbstractComposite explosives contain pores that collapse under shock wave interaction generating localized regions of heat known to be important in the initiation of high explosives. Understanding pore collapse under shock loading is essential to create predictive reactive flow models to simulate the initiation process. While spherical pore collapse has been thoroughly simulated, other geometries have been relatively neglected. Simulating microoscale hot spot nucleation, we analyze the effect of pore morphology on the post‐shock hot spot temperature. Several pore morphologies that yield higher temperatures than the spherical case are revealed and discussed. This work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE‐AC52‐07NA27344.