Liquid Explosive Mix Proves Latest Test for Anti-Gunners
September 1, 2006

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The professional anti-gun strategists have been playing the terror card ever since the problem of terrorist lunatics was brought to the forefront of public opinion by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Never mind that terrorism has been made threat to Western civilization since at least the 1970s. It wasn’t a big enough news platform on which the anti-gunners could erect their charades in the battle for public opinion.

But since Americans, who had ignored all sorts of warning signals from the Islamic extremists going back to the Munich Olympics, the high-jacking of planes and cruise ships, the constant attacks on Israeli civilians, the blowing of airliners from the sky and the earlier attacks on the World Trade Center weren’t paying attention yet, the anti-gunners tried other strategies.

Come 9-11, however, and they were off and running. After all, their real target isn’t making the public safe; it is getting the public disarmed. And if they can’t get a whole class of guns banned as they did in 1968 and 1994, they’ll settle for whatever they can get.

Thus we have the linking of various types of guns with terrorism and terrorists in an effort to frighten people into accepting gun bans. Of course, along the way, they would oppose the sensible arming of qualified airline pilots as a last line of defense for themselves and their passengers, just as they oppose every right-to-carry proposal.

Who Needs Guns?
But while every anti-gunner is yapping about guns, the terrorists are completely disinterested. Explosives of every kind are their stock and trade simply because explosives are more dramatic and kill a lot more people.

For the public, the recent arrests of would-be terrorists by the governments of Britain and Pakistan have driven home a new point, which sounds remarkably like the old “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

In the age of terrorism, the phrase should be “if guns are outlawed, terrorist will make explosives from water.” Well, maybe not water, but certainly common household liquids.

My point is that evil and terrorism are not linked to specific tools. They are the products of inventive criminal minds.

Here’s what The London Times reported after the arrests of suspected terrorists.

All the ingredients for a bomb could be smuggled on board an airplane and assembled after take-off.

The most effective way of smuggling explosive liquids on to an aircraft would be to use two stable fluids that could be mixed in the lavatory to make a bomb, experts have said.

While most conventional liquid explosives are too unstable or easily detected to be suitable, several fluids that are not explosive alone can be readily combined to trigger a blast.

A prime candidate for this would be triacetone triperoxide (TATP), the explosive used by the July 7 London subway bombers. Its two raw ingredients are liquids that could be carried on board in containers such as bottles of soft drink. A small detonator could be hidden in an iPod or mobile phone, drawing power from its battery.

The two chemicals would be mixed to make TATP, a crystalline white powder. Normally this has to be done at low temperatures to make the explosive more stable, but this would not necessarily be an issue if it were to be ignited immediately.

One problem for the bombers is that the solid has to be dried before it becomes a reliable explosive, and it can be difficult to detonate, as attested by the failure of the attempted suicide attacks on July 21 last year. Some formulations, however, would be relatively easy to ignite with a simple detonator, or even a match or lighter.

Andrea Sella, senior lecturer in chemistry at University College London, said: “It would be difficult, but I could certainly conceive of these people taking individual compounds, and mixing them together in the loos.

“TATP is something I imagine might be possible to make on an aircraft. You need two lots of liquid, and though these are pretty runny and you’d have to disguise them, it could be possible—contact lens solution is runny. You then get a solid material that is explosive.”

Ehud Keinan, of the Technion Institute in Israel, a leading authority on terrorist explosives, said: “There are a number of ways to make liquid explosives. My guess is that the terrorists have chosen the most dangerous one, the peroxide-based family of improvised explosive used in the London bombings last year.

Difficulties
“First, it is very easy to initiate such explosives—there is no need for a detonator and a booster; a burning cigarette or a match would be sufficient to set them off. Second, the raw materials needed for their preparation are readily available in unlimited quantities in hardware stores, pharmacies, agricultural suppliers and even supermarkets.

“Third, quite sadly, most airports are not yet equipped with the appropriate means to detect those explosives. Practically speaking, there is no efficient way to stop a suicide bomber who carries peroxide-based explosives on his body or in his carry-on luggage.”

The practical difficulty of assembling and detonating such a bomb on an aircraft means that many attempts would be likely to fail. Sella said: “I do wonder how easy it would be to do in practice. How someone gets up and goes to the (toilets), with other passengers banging on the door, and does everything right.”

This may explain why so many aircraft appear to have been targeted, to raise the odds of at least one or two attacks being successful.

Several commercially available explosives also work on the principle of combining two liquids to ignite a blast. Most liquid explosives, such as nitroglycerin, are nitrogen-based and relatively unstable. This makes their use difficult, as they are liable to explode prematurely. They are also reasonably easy to detect with a technique known as neutron activation analysis, though this is not generally used to screen hand luggage.

Nitroglycerin can be stabilized by combining it with other materials to make a gel, such as nitrocellulose. It would need a larger detonator, which would add to the risk of detection. There is a precedent for terrorist use of nitrocellulose: it was found in the possession of Ramzi Yousef, one of the masterminds of the 1995 Bojinka plot to blow up aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.

While it would be difficult to blow up an aircraft completely with a small, liquid-based bomb it could be done by concentrating on weak points, such as windows, or by combining several bombs on one aircraft.

More Experts
Peter Zimmerman, of King’s College London, said: “Many kinds of explosive can be used to destroy an airplane in flight, because the air pressure in the cabin will add to the destructive power of the explosive. If the cabin is ruptured and the fuselage skin torn by an explosion at cruising altitude, the aerodynamic force on the rip and the air trying to escape the cabin can greatly multiply the destructive power of a bomb.”

Sidney Alford, chairman of Alford Technologies, an explosives company, said other nitrogen-based explosives include nitromethane, which is often used as a propellant for model airplanes. It would first have to be combined with a sensitizing chemical. “Everyone in the business knows that nitromethane is an explosive, but many people, including some in the police and security services, haven’t cottoned on to nitroethane yet,” he said.

After reading what The Times reported, one has to wonder how anyone with sense would try to equate common firearms with terrorism.
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