el peregringo

Thomas Greene, at The Register, analyses what it would actually take to make a liquid bomb by mixing chemicals as suggested by the Bush administration. Among his sources: 2004 study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) entitled “Decomposition of Triacetone Triperoxide is an Entropic Explosion.”

Some highlights:

• actually mixing the chemicals has to be done in an ice bath over the course of hours drop by drop
• once mixed, the stuff has to dry for a couple of hours
• any deviation from precise temperatures will produce an explosive that might–maybe–kill the mixer in the lavatory, if the flight staff hasn’t wondered why you’ve been in the john for 2-4 hours.

His conclusions should bring tears to the eyes of anyone with more than a couple of firing neurons:

It should be small comfort that the security establishments of the UK and the USA - and the “terrorism experts” who inform them and wheedle billions of dollars out of them for bomb puffers and face recognition gizmos and remote gait analyzers and similar hi-tech phrenology gear - have bought the Hollywood binary liquid explosive myth, and have even acted upon it.

We’ve given extraordinary credit to a collection of jihadist wannabes with an exceptionally poor grasp of the mechanics of attacking a plane, whose only hope of success would have been a pure accident. They would have had to succeed in spite of their own ignorance and incompetence, and in spite of being under police surveillance for a year.

But the Hollywood myth of binary liquid explosives now moves governments and drives public policy. We have reacted to a movie plot. Liquids are now banned in aircraft cabins (while crystalline white powders should be banned instead, if anyone in charge were serious about security). Nearly everything must now go into the hold, where adequate amounts of explosives can easily be detonated from the cabin with cell phones, which are generally not banned.