Of Kids and Chemistry Sets
Back in a more innocent age, trying to blow things up or set them aflame was the normal province of young boys and somewhat less commonly--if only because they were usually smarter--young girls. Ah, those were the days! Chemistry sets (the pre-wimpified kind). Weird sulphurous smells wafting up from the basement. An inexplicable shortage of silverware, especially spoons.
With bravado and a false sense of invincibility in bountiful oversupply, and given sufficient lack of parental supervision (a crucial inhibitor), ingredients and know-how were invariably the limiting reagents. This put a premium on anything made with stuff that was easy to get your underage mitts on.
(Having once been one of the aforementioned boys, blessed with somewhat greater than average foolhardiness, and yet still feeling a certain nostalgia for the experience, I wonder how many other ex-teen pyros there are here at dKos. The confessional is now open below...)
Flash, Bang!
Acetone peroxide, (a.k.a. TATP or TCAP) is one of the more dangerous items in this category, and (for better or worse) it's ridiculously easy to make with common household ingredients. I won't give out details here (don't ask!), but a few moments of googling turns up many "recipes" (some of them suicidally dangerous). Even if you know what you're doing, it's alarmingly easy to maim or kill yourself with it in quantities much larger than a gram.
Most explosives involve highly exothermic oxidations of a suitable fuel (charcoal and potassium nitrate in gunpowder, e.g.). Acetone peroxide, in its various polymeric forms, combines an oxidizer and fuel in the same molecule (or at least, it appears to). As normally synthesized (white, snow-like microcrystalline solid), small amounts burn enthusiastically in air, generating a big fireball with no smoke and no residue. This exothermic combustion requires a good amount of oxygen:
2 C9H18O6 + 21 O2 → 18 H2O + 18 CO2
That was about 15 milligrams...
Things get dicier when you have a large amount of TATP in one place. Recent studies by a group of Israeli scientists (who are working on a practical detection method based on enzymes) strongly suggest that above a certain critical mass/packing density, the compound simply falls apart into acetone and ozone. Somewhat unusually for an explosive, the reaction is not particularly exothermic; instead, it is driven by the increase in entropy upon forming many molecules of disordered gas from relatively few molecules of well-ordered crystalline solid.
This so-called "entropic burst" generates a powerful, brisant explosion, on a par with TNT. This is no longer magician's flash-powder, it's a high explosive--just the right sort for blowing holes in fuselages and armored humvees. And unlike many other explosives, it's exquisitely sensitive, enough to be used as its own detonator. Even shattering a medium-to-large crystal can suffice. Or the slightest spark from an ordinary flashlight battery.
Nudist Camps in the Sky: Can We Really Prevent Terror Attacks?
So why the heck am I harping on how easy it is to blow up an airplane? The immediate political ramifications of the London Plot are--or should be--obvious. The sheer fecklessness of the Iraq Occupation, or of Spreading Democracy Through Civil War, for instance.
But there's a much more fundamental ideological bankruptcy in our current approach, which should've been apparent from the moment the first plane hit the WTC, and which derives from a simple, stark reality:
If someone wants to blow up an airplane, a bus, a market badly enough, we can't stop them.
The corollary, a lesson missed again and again by our leaders, is that trying to address a problem by controling the tools used to create it is pointless, whether it's cocaine from Colombia or toothpaste bombs from Walgreens. Our gov't has a hard time staying focused on such things, anyway--19 guys armed with freaking
box-cutters took down a bunch of our planes, and one of the next things we hear is how that proves we need a missile defense program. And...Iraq???
About the only thing dumber than the new War on Toiletries, or the perennial War on Drugs, is a military war conducted against an idea, abstraction, or method. Like the so-called War on Terror(ism). In sum, we've struck out to eradicate everything from nail clippers in carry-ons to angry brown people with turbans--and mainly, we've just plain struck out.
The current red-alert furor concerns "liquid explosives" because the plotters apparently planned to synthesize their TATP onboard the plane using liquid reagents. TATP can be dissolved in organic liquids and detonated in that form. But it's also quite effective as a solid; in fact, it's a common component of IEDs. Being an ordinary organic material with no heavy atoms to absorb x-rays and no requirement for metal components or conspicuous detonators, it could easily be concealed inside just about any item you might bring on a plane, or put in your luggage to be triggered in the cargo hold. A suicide bomber could even swallow balloons or condoms full of the stuff. Drug-runners do this all the time.
We simply don't have good detection methods for stuff like TATP. Even if better tools are developed, can we open every suitcase, every bottle or container, probe every body cavity? Unless we fly buck-naked (which would certainly make air travel more interesting) and ship our baggage by separate carrier, there will always be a way around the security for those who are determined to kill. Making people discard their hair gel and expensive wine is simply window-dressing, more effective at breeding fear in advance of a critical election than stopping attacks.
The "Liberal" Alternative - Can it Possibly Be Worse Than What We're Doing Now?
As Bob Dylan might say, you can't neutralize what you won't understand. There's just no way around addressing the sociopolitical, economic and religious causes that motivate terrorists to martyr themselves while whole nations applaud. If you can't "talk sense" into a Zarqawi, then you can at least win over his more reasonable neighbors and countrymen who tacitly support his extremism.
You do that by understanding and respecting their interests; by treating them like humans and equals rather than pawns on a geopolitical chessboard, to be first shuffled about and manipulated then cut off and ignored or even vilified and attacked as it suits your purposes. Unfortunately, the latter has been our basic approach to the Middle East for many decades.
Our current solution, much like Israel's with regard to Lebanon, is to bomb the cities and homes of our potential allies in places like Fallujah and Beirut while "taking the fight to the terrorists", and then apologize for any inadvertent 'collateral damage', as if a lack of specific malice made the death and destruction more palatable. Bombs are dramatic, dynamic, cathartic, and easy, especially when they are falling on someone you don't know or care about. But as Eugene Robinson puts it, this strategy is "like trying to smash mercury with a hammer". (If the Bush crew were doctors, I swear they'd go after pathogens by making a hit list of the top 100 "#2 bacilli" currently at large in the hospital, then proceed to attack the burn ward with a flamethrower.)
For the refractory true believers that lead these movements, the McVeighs and Kaczinskys and bin Ladens, we have to rely on competent intelligence, smart police work, civic goodwill, and a certain amount of serendipity (like Presidential Daily Briefings that fall into one's lap, for instance). In the end, we may well need to use military force (in which case it would be good to actually finish the job before getting distracted). But the Britsh plotters were nabbed not because we caught them making bombs, but because nervous acquaintances tipped off the police regarding their suspicious behavior. It worked well in London, but how would it work in Baghdad, Cairo, Mogadishu, or Riyadh, given the cynicism and hatred we've engendered?
"Root causes" may not be an especially convenient campaign slogan, opening one as it inevitably does to Republican charges of sympathizing, condoning, and self-hatred. In the conservative mind, enemies and all who resemble them must remain two-dimensional constructs, feared, unknown and unknowable, inhuman and inscrutably, irredeemably evil. They are the barbarian rabble encircling our great gated community, filled with "hatred of our freedoms" and desirous only of our deaths. To even begin to attempt to understand them as persons and to ask what drives them is to excuse them, to sympathize with them; just as to criticize any of our own actions or motivations is to "delight" and "embolden" them.
But eventually someone (preferably an adult whose concept of 'renovation' doesn't include demolishing the entire house and mooning the neighborhood as a first step) is going to have to address it head-on--not with bombs, but with brains and compassion, if anything is to change for the better.
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