You’re observing a bomb. In 1986, Discover magazine reported on the hypothetical risks of PETN, an explosive that may be used as a covert bomb. Now, explosives are stuffed in dogs. Below, a history of improvised destruction.

The Warning

Twenty four years ago, my father, a technology reporter, wrote that article for Discover highlighting a nascent technological trend that has continued, with billowing fear and media hype, to threaten. Bombs should be would becould very well be anywhere. The Hollywood archetype of the large shiny cylinder with the LED countdown timer is an absurdity-bombers of today are clever, crude, and increasingly low tech. Easily procured, untraceable, moldable explosives, and an adamantly determined adversary mean a new era of explosive mobility.

And even over twenty years ago, this was a threat we knew was coming: ” The number of things a terrorist can do is much greater than can ever be defended against,” said Paul Robinson of Los Alamos National Laboratory. ” We’ll always be within the position where deterrence presupposes a rational adversary.” But what we must always be presupposing instead, we’re only slowly realizing now, are terrorists who are willing (and capable) of trying anything. Within the 80s we knew, the object states, that terrorists had ” fairly limited technical competence” -but that ” whatever high tech things are used by terrorists are off the shelf.” As an example, the Discover article highlights the danger of easy circuitry like that found in a pinball machine, capable of detonating massive amounts of plastic explosives. Or, more presciently (and hauntingly), an illustrated hypothetical of running shoes laced with explosive PETN laces-easily detonated with a match.

Explosive shoes-sound familiar? Fast forward 24 years, and we’ve yet find a method of shielding ourselves against the formidable intersection of the ridiculous and the devastating. What have we found ourselves up against inside the years since this warning? And more importantly-what’s next?

What They’ve Tried

The Discover article’s underlying dictum was that, for a would-be bomber, a sneaky explosive ” Have to be Simple and Reliable.” Recent history has shown an emphasis on the former, with the latter for probably the most part, fortuitously untested attributable to intervention or ineptitude on the section of the bomber. But despite continuous failure, terrorists had been slipping simple explosives into even simpler objects.

The Shoe Bomber

Sixteen years after my father speculated in regards to the possibility of a man blowing up his shoe, Richard Reid tried it. With the exact same explosive. As opposed to the laces, however, Reid’s failed bomb (possibly too damp to ignite using sweat) stuffed undetectable PETN into his shoe’s sole.

Had just a few minute factors been only slightly different, he would have taken down a plane. Anyone who has flown since 2002 is reminded of this risk as they stand in line, shoeless and annoyed.

The Energy Drink Bombers

You can thank a canny group of 2006 Al-Qaeda bombers for the effort you face together with your shampoo anytime you are trying to fly. The plot-which never actually made it into the sky-called for using peroxide-based liquid explosives carried openly in sports drink bottles. The precise explosive variety-triacetone triperoxide (TATP)-is straightforward to make, and intensely unstable. That’s bad news for those making the bomb-watch your hands!-and worse news for anyone who might need been onboard one of several plot’s targeted planes. All it can have taken to turn a bottle of innocuous looking liquid into a plane-downing explosion was heat, or perhaps simple friction. Experts believe that, after mixing the TATP with Tang (!), the mix was to be detonated with the batteries from a disposable camera. Again, low tech, high casualty.

The Dog Bombs

Our newest and carefully upsetting reminder of improvisational ingenuity was last week’s report that, in 2008, Al Qaeda attempted to stuff two canines with explosives-a low tech move that ended up killing the animals before they even made it onboard their flights. If simplicity and reliability is the thinking terrorist’s credo, it’s clear this effort strayed away from the latter.

The Underwear Bomber

On Christmas Eve 2009, 23 year old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253, his underwear full of a cocktail of undetectable powder explosives-most notably PETN. All it took to detonate his package-possibly stuffed inside a concealed condom-was a small syringe of reactive liquid, also easily concealed. Luckily, while Umar kept it simple, he didn’t keep it reliable-all he managed to break was himself below the belt, and the wall of the plane. The premise was deviously clever, but the execution was off. Had it worked, it might have blown a hole inside the plane’s fuselage, likely killing all aboard.

The Ass Bomber

Nothing says dedication to a cause, regardless of how dubious, like inserting a pound of PETN and cellular detonator into your rectum. Al Qaeda operative Abdullah Asieri did just that in 2009, hoping to assassinate Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief. Again-an explosive that defies detection, though this time owing more to its location than its chemical properties. The attack failed-leaving Asieri, somehow, alive-but highlighted a bomber’s ability to conceal simple explosives within the unlikeliest (and least searchable) of areas. All it took to detonate the human bomb was a phone call. What wouldn’t it take to forestall an analogous attack? ” Absolutely nothing apart from to require people to strip naked at the airport,” says Chris Yates , an airline security expert.

The Printer Bomb

The most modern bizarre bomb to make headlines again starred our dear friend PETN, this time hidden inside a client laser printer’s toner cartridge. Again-dead simple. PETN, cartridge, SIM card detonator. Nothing else was required beyond an amateurish knowledge of wiring. It was a crude package, and a detonation was never attempted, however it was simple, clever, and punctiliously strange.

IEDs

An acronym that’s drilled itself into the top of the full news-watching world, IEDs have caused horrendous casualties-both civilian and not-and revolutionized warfare. On battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is virtually no piece of terrain safe from a jury rigged explosive weapon-within the latter campaign, the Washington Post reports that over 60% of US deaths were as a result of IEDs. Insurgents stick them wherever they are able to, using whatever they are able to-dead animals on the side of the road, soda bottles, trees, piles of trash-anything with the slightest room for an inexpensive chemical and a SIM card can blow off a limb. The IED of the fashionable battlefield is the shoe bomb taken to its logical extreme. The area is the weapon.

Where Can we Go From Here?

It appears that with the nearly quarter of a century (not less than) between experts worrying about explosives in unlikely places and now, little has been done. Or no less than not enough to keep bombs out of goddamn pants. So, I turned to my father, who within the time since then has followed the subject with a wearily shaking head, and asked what the upshot is. Or is there an upshot? Please tell us there’s an upshot.

” There’s one basic thing that hasn’t changed,” he informed me. ” Terrorism offense is usually easier than defense.” That, and the indisputable fact that ” a highly technological society is usually vulnerable on the low end. It’d need to devote mountainous parts of its treasury to defend against even rudimentary attacks.”

That’s our society, if you were wondering.

And we’ve got devoted some hefty change toward counterterrorism-efforts against explosives specifically. So has anything changed in the mean time? Not likely-the low tech of yesterday follow’s a similar fanatical DIY homicide ethos of the 80s. ” Technically there’s no difference between using a digital watch as a timer and a cell. Cellular phone circuitry is obviously everywhere, identical to digital watches was.” Obviously, a phone enables remote detonation, but the point stands-improvisation persists through generations of tech.

So what can we do, in need of starting off our shoes, then our shirts, then our underwear, and then eventually finishing up in some near-future version of air travel wherein we’re all strapped naked to the walls doped up on liquid morphine? Psychology, and the purely deterrent value of tech. ” If it becomes widely recognized that suspicious behavior could be picked out,a nd the tech is there, that’ll have value. It’s variety of like the lie detector. The lie detector is an old carnival stunt that any one can discover ways to foil, but nevertheless it has deterrent value, that’s why cops still desire to use them.” So when terror goes low tech, you’ll be able to’t out tech it.

The killer mechanism in bombs in dogs and printers isn’t the dog or the printer, but the mind that devised it. If we’re going to forestall terrorists from turning anything into a bomb, we’ll must psych them out of thinking they may be able to pull it off. And just lookup-in every case above, they didn’t pull it off. Despite brilliantly simple design, pure human carelessness or idiocy spoiled the plot. If we’re going to prevent the following wacky plan, it will possibly not be during the function of big scanning puffer boxes at security screening sites-but their mere form. The arrival, the appearance even, of being singled out or flagged, ” has deterrent value against the sloppy and undisciplined guys.” And those style of guys appear as if the ones being tapped, for now.

The question remains, however, what we do when PETN starts getting pressed deeper and deeper. A printer, fine. A dog-cruel, but from a biological standpoint that was doomed to start with. But what happens when-and we mean this with all seriousness-the first penis bomb shows up? As scared as the public may be of being blown up, it sure as hell won’t tolerate getting jerked off by an anonymous TSA guard within the name of safety. And beyond that point, the point at which we will tolerate being checked, or expect human nature to foil its own intentions, what happens? ” You’ll get blown up. You’ll get hurt.”

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This post is tagged: alamos national laboratory, los alamos national laboratory, technical competence, technological trend, technology reporter