The inverse problem of estimating dielectric constants of explosives using boundary measurements of one component of the scattered electric field is addressed. It is formulated as a coefficient inverse problem for a hyperbolic differential equation. After applying the Laplace transform, a new cost functional is constructed and a variational problem is formulated. The key feature of this functional is the presence of the Carleman weight function for the Laplacian. The strict convexity of this functional on a bounded set in a Hilbert space of an arbitrary size is proven. This allows for establishing the global convergence of the gradient descent method. Some results of numerical experiments are presented.