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Binary weapons The Telegraph reports how enemy saboteurs could have made a ‘liquid bomb’. According to Andy Oppenheimer, editor of Jane’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence Directory:
“We are talking about common, everyday chemicals that are used in perfumes, cosmetics, drain cleaner, batteries, or could for example be stolen from school labs.
“These materials are easy to obtain and hard to detect, and could be smuggled in small amounts in small containers because it doesn’t take much to blow an aircraft up.”
I will be keeping my eyes open for further information.
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Thee are some really easy ways to make improvised explosives.
Fortunately, most of those easy methods are also very prone to Things Going Wrong. Premature detonation, incomplete reactions, or just plain failure are all in the equation.
The thing you have to remember is that, in order to make something that can release a lot of energy, you have to have starter chemicals with a lot of potential energy between them and you very seldom find those in pure forms that can be handled with impunity.
To knock out a large airliner, you’re going to need a couple of pounds (at least) of most chemical explosives, and high explosives at that. Producing that at will on a jetliner is going to be a horrible pain in the ass, and will more likely end up with the bomber accidentally dumping the results down the toilet…
Not necessarily a lot. The airpressure differential and the slip stream work for you. Breach the hull and you are going to get at least part of the cabin peeling away like the 747 which popped a cargo door at altitude near Hawaii.
You simply have no idea how fragile aircraft are. They are built strong enough (plus a little bit) to operate over just the range they are expected to operate over. Go outside of that and things start breaking.
A 747 is not a Pitts Special.
You probably do not need a whole lot to start the process.
As to the stability of the precurors… the first ones that came to mind can be made with things you probably have sitting in your house right now. It’s not quite potent enough but is an example. In most cases you want a precursor with a Nitrogen in it.
Nitroglycerine is mentioned in the article as a nonbinary one. There are other ways it could be used. Gun cotten is easily made.
Dynamite is basically Nitro in sawdust. Anyone who knows anything about it knows that is why dynamite had to be rotated… otherwise the nitro eventually pooled.
Nitro in liquid form is not something I’d want to carry around on a hot day… but on a cool day like today it would probably be fairly stable against minor shocks.
Love it. Should any of “probably”, “fairly” or “minor” prove to be – er – misplaced, the result would be refreshingly free of caveats.
Dale:
“You simply have no idea how fragile aircraft are.”
Actually, I really do. I used to work on them in the Air Force, and have been studying aviation disasters for going on thirty years now.
While you can find examples of planes that were torn to shreds by minor damage, most of the big disasters were caused by relatively large amounts of damage, and that doesn’t even always do the trick. Look up some of these accidents (which didn’t result in the loss of the planes):
United Airlines Flight 811
Philippine Airlines Flight 434
Aloha Airlines Flight 243
The Aloha flight is the most dramatic. That’s the one that lost about 1/3 of its roof in midflight at about 19,000 feet, yet managed to land safely (while only losing one flight attendant during the incident).
Just knocking a hole in a modern plane isn’t a particularly reliable way to knock it down. You have to either make a really big hole, a moderate-sized hole in the right place, or a small hole in a very lucky place, taking advantage of some freak weakness in the design.
Sure, you can find examples like Lockerbie (only about a half-pound of the most powerful form of plastique in the right spot), but most of the big plane bombing disasters were from fairly large amounts of high explosives, not a few ounces of some lower-powered improvised substance.
Oh, yeah, forgot to address this:
Nitroglycerine is also one of the explosives that gets caught very easily in screening. It’s volatile enough that, unless the bottle it’s in is sealed very tightly and coated in something to hold in vapor, bomb-sniffing dogs will be following you around the terminal, and the various high-tech machines will light up like a Christmas tree if you’ve even got it in pill form for heart problems.
They won’t be making it on the planes out of ingredients, either, unless they can smuggle an ice bath and some lab glassware with them, as well as a gas mask for handling the acids in the plane’s bathrooms (most of the “easy” binary explosives are right out for this, too – too many nasty chemicals that would alert everyone on the plane before you were even ready to get started).
The sort of improvised, “stealth” liquid explosives you’re looking at are much harder to make than nitro, and have a tendency to go sour when mixing under less-auspicious conditions. You won’t be seeing nitroglycerine in the list of explosives from this incident. It’ll be something more exotic and less powerful. Nothing like nitro or Astrolite.
…and you’ll need pounds of the stuff, not ounces.
cirby,
What concerns me is that this whole “liquid explosives” thing is just shock-of-the-new smoke-and-mirrors.
That is to say, that we non scientists don’t know what to make of it, and are being drawn into panic. The fact that there’s no specifics about which “liquid explosives” makes me very suspicious of the government.
If such potent explosives exist, then presumably they’ve existed for a long time? So how come they’ve never been viewed as an issue before today (and also won’t be within a few days either).
For general info:
“Yousef, Murad confessed, had indeed been responsible for the blast aboard the Philippine airliner, which was actually a dry run to test the terrorists’ new generation of nitroglycerin explosive, known as a “Mark II” bomb. Yousef had deposited his device — lethal liquid concealed in a contact lens solution bottle with cotton-ball stabilizing agents and a harmless-looking wristwatch wrapped around it — under seat 27F on the Manila-to-Cebu leg of the flight to Tokyo.”
Some details may be read here: Operation Bojinka
Cheers
J.M. Heinrichs
Of course, Operation Bojinka would be a lot harder to plan nowadays, since it relied on a nitroglycerin-based explosive, which is easily detected by every modern bomb scanner and sniffer dog in the world.
Ditto for most real explosives, since sniffers look for certain types of compounds which happen to be explosive, not just particular molecules.
PLX is nitromethane and 5% of, well, something else. Quite lively, but a vodka bottle of nitromethane alone, sealed and then washed, might very well get past the dogs.
If the dogs happened to actually inspect that bag.
And the sealed and stamped bottle of vodka wasn’t counted as a false positive.
And all of that happened on every plane.
If such potent explosives exist, then presumably they’ve existed for a long time? So how come they’ve never been viewed as an issue before today (and also won’t be within a few days either).
Well there, though I’m usually cynical, I depart from you. Of course the security services (and more to the point, ministers) are given to sudden enthusiasms. But it is perfectly possible they have this time uncovered a scheme to use liquid explosives. It’s also possible, perhaps more likely, that just inflammable liquids – easy, cheap – were involved. In the latter case “liquid explosives” is a much better story, while giving few hints to those who are not evil masterminds but very naughty boys about just how easy and cheap mayhem can be.
Why not before? Not easy or cheap. Recall the anthrax panic? Anthrax bad. Spreading it around bad. Unfortunately for would be bioterrorists, getting and handling anthrax is troublesome, and making it into a weapon is so tough the US government hasn’t done it very well. Which is a good thing, given that the ‘terrorist plot’ in that case turned out to have been a piece of unorthodox industrial action by someone in the bioweapons program.
Military aircraft are built a lot tougher than civilian ones, although there is a US subsidy for strengthening the floors so they can be used as part of a reserve cargo fleet in time of war.
Yes, it depends where the damage occurs. The Aloha flight was probably lucky. The damage was caused by a cargo door coming off and peeling back a large chunk of skin… but the door almost by definition sat between two frames.
So, yes, if all you do is punch a small hole in the skin, you are probably not going to cause structural failure. But what if it had cut a structural frame as well? I think they’d have come down in bits.
You can cause structural failure with a small amount of damage in the right place… remember the small stress cracks that brought down the Comet’s? (sorry Perry!)
Personally I’d think the best shot is back in the tail galley. Best chance of causing compounding structural damage and flight controls damage.
For those less afficionada of aircraft: the repeated presurrization cycles on the Comet jet airliners led to fatigue in locations where the stress was concentrated. I believe that was around the windows but I would have to go look it up. After a certain number of cycles… the cracks propagated and the plane came apart at altitude for no apparent reason.
Dale:
No, the Aloha one was from the entire top of the fuselage coming off due to metal fatigue. A huge chunk of the plane just came right off, leaving not much above floor level.
Here’s a link
It was UA 811 that had the door come off and rip up the fuselage.
Note also that a liquid explosive attack was tried once before, with nitroglycerine in the bathroom of a big jet, and while it damaged the plane, it didn’t bring it down.
What they’re hinting about is hydrogen peroxide and acetone. If you mix them together (say, in the sink in the plane’s bathroom) with a catalyst you can form TATP(Link), which is quite a high explosive.
Ah… an antiseptic and a wart remover…
I had not seen those photos. I almost wonder if what saved them was the beefing up of the deck for reserve fleet use… They had to be on the ragged edge of structural failure.
I bring your attention to the binary explosive FIXOR(Link), produced by two non-explosive precursors specifically designed to be easily transportable by airliner….. and not detected by anti-bomb scanners….. developed for the global anti-mine movement.
Given the number of muslim countries involved in de-mining efforts, it seems rather probable that terrorists would become very familiar with this particular binary, which can be disguised as a jug of Gatorade and a packet of powdered drink mix.
I would suggest that FIXOR as a good candidate for the particular binary explosives used in this plot.
one problem with the acetone peroxide theory (it was also proposed without evidence for the 7/7 bombers explosive of choice) is the amount of peroxide that would be needed. Consumer peroxide is 3%. It is possible to produce higher concentrations, however in closed containers high power peroxide is inherently unstable, as warming causes decomposition, and more decomposition causes more warming.
Another possibility is panclastite(Link): dinitrogen tetroxide and carbon disulfide mixed.
Here is the patent for FIXOR(Link)
Liquid Bomb: sounds like a mixed drink. OK Samizdatistas, what would you mix up to make a boozy liquid bomb?
The Mark II is a local nightclub, too.
Terrorists in Pikeville, Kentucky?!
Acetone is also in nail polish remover.
What if they targeted the emergency exit door?
What would happen if someone just opened the emergency exit door at altitude? They get sucked out and everyone else gets a refreshing breeze and a break from the heat wave?!
I don’t see nitroparaffins easily getting through any sniffers, but there’s a ton of opportunity for use of hair gel, mousse, etc as a vehicle for sensitizers like aluminum powder, resin balls and the like.
Presumably an explosion in the correct place next to the wiring loom that controls the control surfaces in the tail would be sufficient to bring the aircraft down within 10 minutes maximum?
And regarding fatigue, many WW2 fighters in museums are not airworthy today (despite their robust design and construction) because the rivets holding the panels and frames together are subject to long-term electrolytic decay – so that the shock of a heavy landing could cause the whole thing to sequentially unravel like a zipper.
So, given that many civilian airliners are at least half as old as that, you may find that a small explosion in the correct place may cause a far more catastrophic failure than the original design would suggest.
kentuckyliz, I like your ideas. Here’s my suggestion:
Pre-chilled Dry Vodka on the rocks. In this case, the rocks are internally composed of frozen 90% peroxide, with an outer coat of normal water for a delayed reaction.
Thats pretty straight up: a russian rocket ride.
Now, another idea is to take something like Rumple Minze: 100 proof with a goodly amount of sugar in the other 50% of the solution. Take a nitic or picric acid to radicalize the sugar into a nitrate or picrate. Haven’t tried the chemistry yet, so I’m shooting in the dark here.
Better yet, a solution that will definitely work: a high fiber high proof drink: take fiber supplement tablets, and pre-treat them with nitric acid to create a nitro-cellulose compound, then mix them with everclear, and cut with extracts of espresso (to fool the bomb sniffing dogs).
One problem with using consumable bar items is that so many contain so much water.
But surely the whole point is, as Steven Den Beste states above with TATP, that the explosive must be non-detectable, easily detontated and have the required cubic metres per second impact to be able to take out the sides of an aircraft – not the easiest thing to do if you have been stuck in the middle rows of a 747 with a small bottle of Acetate Peroxide. Despite TATP being the ‘bombe du jour’ of the police and Blair’s government rather than of the terrorists (any peroxide-based bomb is considerably more unstable than equivalents such as nitro-glycerine and also stinks to high hell)
I really can’t see our wannabe martyr standing in queue sweating profusely at the point where an 18 year security guard on work experience placement at Thiefrow, Looton or Gatnick chucks his handbaggage into the xray machine, knowing that one small knock means instant martyrdom.
What we need in the UK is a sensible analysis of potential bomb threats by a level-headed security service, without the overbearing demands of their political masters for sensational arrest statements and press conferences. Such measures could easily include the brilliant US/Israeli invented Luminol Chemiluminescence
detectors which retail at anything from $2500 to $25000 and are now in full use at Houston International – they can apparently detect any form of explosive material including Semtex (odourless) and TATP regardless of how meticulous the terrorist has been in his or her preparations. What we really do not need in the UK is the ridiculous shrill spin attempts of the Blairites levelling accusations of being ‘anti-British’ or ‘pro-Islamofascism’ against anyone who dares to query the veracity of the last few days events.
Perhaps the police will change the planned attack method to Red Mercury – heavens knows they tried it before.
Julian, you seem to have missed something important: according to authorities, the perpetrators were going to mix their acetone and peroxide on the aircraft, in the loo. This is why it is stealthy: peroxide doesn’t smell like anything other than water, and acetone smells like the nail polish remover that it is. Both items are things that some women carry in bulk, though I’d look suspiciously if a muslim woman with black hair and unpolished nails carried it on a plane… Really, they’d have to do themselves up like raver hair stylists to play that part believably.
One reason I’m liking the FIXOR link is that the sort of people who would transport it on a plane would be people actively involved in UN sanctioned de-mining programs, and could flash appropriately counterfieted UN IDs that few airport screeners would be qualified to second-guess, and would justify even having faked up, or not so fake, diplomatic seals, on their baggage.
Not missing the point at all I think. Quote:
How far would our little wannabe martyrs get in mixing this up in a aircraft loo – not exactly the most rock solid location for mixing up highly unstable explosive compounds I might hazard to guess?