by CKR
It’s not often that an international crisis uncovers new scientific understanding, but we may be witnessing just that in the unfolding story of the plot to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic.
The evidence is in the form of newsquotes from British explosives experts.
"You could carry an inert liquid that if you mix with another one could become explosive," said David Hill, a former counter-terrorism expert at the National Crime Squad and a security consultant at Red24."You could get the materials to make a bomb from a garden centre. Or it could be something as simple as taking on board paraffin and attempting to start a fire."
Andy Oppenheimer, the editor of Jane's Nuclear Biological Chemical Defence, said a lot of "home brews" were difficult to detect."A lot of these components are clear and have no smell and you could mix them on board. You do not need much explosive to bring down an aircraft," he said.
Several different kinds of explosive may have been involved in the making of a liquid bomb and they are not difficult to obtain or make from raw ingredients, said Dr Alford, who is the chairman of the explosives company Alford Technologies. Some need to be combined with another sensitising substance and detonated, but others explode as soon as they are combined with another substance.
Dr Clifford Jones, an explosives expert from the University of Aberdeen, says even a small amount of liquid explosives carried on to an aircraft would result in a catastrophic explosion.
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One liquid explosive is a general use explosive that is used in quarries.
However, I would not be surprised if it is possible to produce solid explosives in liquid form.
….
How are they made?
There are such things as liquid explosives that are high explosives and they behave in exactly the same way as solid explosives, such as TNT.But there are also explosives that are made by mixing a solid and a liquid - one being the oxidant and the other being the fuel. Unlike most high explosives, they do not contain the fuel and oxidant in the same molecule but they do contain them in sufficiently close contact to cause a blast.
Are the components difficult to get hold of?
No, it is very easy. Ordinary household substances could be used.
There are many, many things wrong with all of these quotes. I wonder whether the experts were being so careful, like Dr. Jones, who has eliminated all specifics from his comments, that they no longer make sense, or whether the reporters were in panic mode and unable to transcribe the words correctly.
I don’t know of any liquids like the magic ones referred to: no smell, no taste, and when you mix them together, they explode. It’s a nice touch, like a video game, but all of the chemicals I know of that might be useful in these applications have peculiar smells.
I’m also wondering just what they sell in British stores. “I’d like a six-pack of acetone.” “Coming right up, sir.” Or concentrated hydrogen peroxide, which is available only from chemical supply houses, in the US anyway. That’s hard to handle, having a propensity to give up its extra oxygen rapidly by reacting with other materials and producing a lot of heat. It doesn’t explode much, but it’s not something to keep around the house. Medical hydrogen peroxide, the kind you wash your mouth with when you have canker sores, is a 3% solution. The other 97% is water. It won’t do much with acetone to form the dreaded TATP.
When I think of liquid explosives, the first one that comes to mind is nitroglycerine. Dr. Jones is probably being coy by referring both to dynamite and “a general use explosive that is used in quarries.” Dynamite is nitroglycerine that has been stabilized by soaking it into a solid, like diatomaceous earth. It’s a general use explosive that is used in quarries, so this may be what he’s talking about. But the terrorists, and Wikipedia, know that.
I have those reservations about saying too much, too. But this is elementary stuff, available forever, and anyone who is serious about blowing something up knows it. What is likely to stop them is the availability of the ingredients and blowing themselves up in the process.
I’ve worked with explosives experts, and there were some things that even they wouldn’t touch. That’s why my knowledge of triacetone triperoxide (TATP) is recent. It’s a primary explosive, the most sensitive kind, the kind that goes off if you drop it. But explosives are finicky things, and sometimes, as shoebomber Robert Reed learned to his dismay, they don't go off. That may have been because it decomposed to harmless compounds.
When I took organic chemistry, one of the things perpetrated by the jokers in the class was nitrogen triiodide (NI3). Nice purple crystals, stable enough in water, filter and then scatter them around the lab. As they dried, they would snap, crackle, and pop. Some crystals wound up on a stool, and as one of my colleagues sat down in her lovely white skirt, she was quite surprised. The skirt was stained purple with the iodine resulting from the explosion. I don’t know if the stain came out. She wasn’t hurt, just surprised.
It seems to be TATP that people are talking about forming by “just mixing two liquids together.”
"All I have to do is take them in the restroom with a standard water bottle," said Neal Langerman, president of Advanced Chemical Safety, a San Diego consulting firm. "I empty the water out, I mix them in the bottle, and before I'm done mixing them, the reaction has already occurred and the plane is in serious trouble."On the other hand, a British source says that the acetone and hydrogen peroxide must be heated, and then the crystals begin to come out of solution. Not a liquid. Crystals. And they must be collected and dried. Apparently they can also quietly decompose to non-explosive components.
Going back to the remarkable laws of chemistry and physics in Britain, there was some concern about what it takes to cause a problem in an airplane. There’s confusion over here too.
Jimmie C. Oxley, a University of Rhode Island chemistry professor and explosives expert, said she doubted TATP was strong enough to bring down a plane without added strength from a detonator. "It will go bang, but it won't be the kind of explosion that would punch a hole in the side of the plane," she said.Jimmie has worked on terrorism issues, and I’ve worked with her. I’ll believe her on this.
A fire on a plane would be a bad thing. But an alert passenger caught Robert Reed trying to light off his shoes. Or a misinformed bunch might even get some concentrated hydrogen peroxide and mix it with acetone in the restroom. And wait. And wait. Or, if separate people were carrying separate components, might not the cabin attendents question this knot of people handing around bottles of stuff and digital watches in the aisle? It’s hard to be surreptitious on an airplane.
It boils down to capabilities, which are not so much in vogue these days for threat assessments. Did the plotters know what they were doing? Did they have the components? Did they have them packed correctly and the detonation mechanism set up right? How were they going to bring all this together? Would it take time to hook everything up?
According to Michael Chertoff, the US’s Secretary of Homeland Security, devices may or may not be in hand. [Emphasis mine in the following.]
Well, of course, we haven't completed studying of the devices that were designed, and I don't want to offer opinions in public about how much explosive is sufficient to take down a jet. This whole issue, for obvious reasons, is very highly classified…..Is the design of the device like those “designs” for nuclear weapons picked up in Afghanistan after the invasion that showed one blob and another blob with labels like “U” and Pu?”Well, of course, when we get access to the design of the device, and we reverse-engineer it, and we examine the way in which they thought they could get by our security, we'll have an opportunity to determine what countermeasures we can take to make sure that our screening devices will pick up any effort to conceal these kinds of explosives, in ordinary looking things like beverage containers or a Walkman or other kinds of radios.
If no devices or credible designs show up, an awful lot of people will have been inconvenienced for nothing. The airlines have lost a lot of money. And the governments of the US and Britain will lose yet more credibility.
Update (8/13/06): Kudos to CBS's Scott Pelley on Face the Nation for asking Michael Chertoff specific questions on devices. Chertoff was just as evasive as he was on the News Hour, talking about "designs" and "concepts."
Rotten tomatoes to David Gregory on Meet the Press for softballing his questions to Chertoff on devices.
Apparently the Brits asked the US to hold off on the announcement. More important, in terms of capabilities, apparently some of the alleged plotters didn't even have passports yet. H/t to emptywheel for pointing this out.
Further Update: Brian Ross reports on ABC Evening News that no materials have been recovered.
And yet a further update can be found here.