Liquid explosives are liquid BS

[Liberal Gun Nut]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/print.html

Binary liquid explosives are a sexy staple of Hollywood thrillers. It would be tedious to enumerate the movie terrorists who've employed relatively harmless liquids that, when mixed, immediately rain destruction upon an innocent populace, like the seven angels of God's wrath pouring out their bowls full of pestilence and pain.

The funny thing about these movies is, we never learn just which two chemicals can be handled safely when separate, yet instantly blow us all to kingdom come when combined. Nevertheless, we maintain a great eagerness to believe in these substances, chiefly because action movies wouldn't be as much fun if we didn't.
Now we have news of the recent, supposedly real-world, terrorist plot to destroy commercial airplanes by smuggling onboard the benign precursors to a deadly explosive, and mixing up a batch of liquid death in the lavatories. So, The Register has got to ask, were these guys for real, or have they, and the counterterrorist officials supposedly protecting us, been watching too many action movies?
We're told that the suspects were planning to use TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, a high explosive that supposedly can be made from common household chemicals unlikely to be caught by airport screeners. A little hair dye, drain cleaner, and paint thinner - all easily concealed in drinks bottles - and the forces of evil have effectively smuggled a deadly bomb onboard your plane.
Or at least that's what we're hearing, and loudly, through the mainstream media and its legions of so-called "terrorism experts." But what do these experts know about chemistry? Less than they know about lobbying for Homeland Security pork, which is what most of them do for a living. But they've seen the same movies that you and I have seen, and so the myth of binary liquid explosives dies hard.

I read the entire article and it is correct. There are no liquid explosives terrorists could use on a plane. TATP is a solid, not a liquid, and it would be impossible to make a useful quantity of it in the lav.

 

[Monkeyleg]

What about Tannerite?

 

[orangelo]

Yup, Tannerite you have to mix yourself.

You'd have to hit it with something with as much energy as a 5.56mm to make it go off however.

I got no doubt a thermos or gatorade bottle of the stuff could take down a plane. We used a small bottle on a junk car and it blew the rear half of the car up and the trunk door got stuck in a tree about 20 feet over our heads.

 

[Liberal Gun Nut]

Tannerite is a solid. And yes you do need to shoot it with a rifle for it to go off. Maybe a blasting cap would work. Banning Calistoga water on planes has nothing to do with Tannerite. Getting Tannerite on a plane is no easier than getting, say, TNT on a plane. Nothing new.

This current hysteria is all over LIQUID explosives. The only liquid explosives I could find are blasting slurries, which look nothing like water, are very difficult to discharge, and really no different from TNT or any other explosive that has been around for a long time.

 

[MrTuffPaws]

WHAT!!??!!?? Another case of BS in the WoT???? I am shocked, shocked I tell you. How do you expect us to keep scared and willing to put our trust in our governments as they take away our freedoms if we keep finding out their victories are nothing but made up BS?

 

[ilbob]

I am a bit suspicious of the whole story as stated. I think it is quite possible some kind of liquid was involved in some kind of nefarious plot. The specific prohibition on having a contact lens case full of liquid anything made me wonder what liquid or gel could be stored in a contact lens case and be worrisome enough in such small amounts? The extremely small quantities involved would tend to narrow down the possibilities. I could only think of a couple of things.

I am sort of amazed it took them this long to ban take on bottles of water. Think of what a couple of liters of gasoline could do inside an aircraft. I would not be surprised to see this prohibition permanent.

 

[Liberal Gun Nut]

This liquid explosive BS is another piece of BS designed to make it easy for someone to sell the taxpayers on $1bil worth of equipment that's unable to detect explosives which don't exist.

I think we should declare victory in the WoT and then quit it. The WoT is a lot more dangerous than terrorism itself.

 

[geekWithA.45]

Sigh.

If we assume the article is right and that TATP isn't feasible for building on an airplane, we cannot conclude that no liquid explosives exist.


Google is your friend.

http://www.google.com/search?client...d+explosives&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

 

[Chawbaccer]

I never handled it, but I would think that nitro glycerin is a liquid. I know that is not what they were planning on making.

 

[Art Eatman]

I'm not even a chemist, but I do recall what a match-head-sized bit of (bleep) would do when dry, back in my high school daze. A container's worth, the size of many shaving cream spray-cans, would definitely do Bad Things when dried out.

Now, if I can recall that little tidbit from 55 years ago, I have no doubt that a real chemist could come up with True Goody.

Art

 

[Eightball]

Even if they did manage to concoct some form of semi-explosive liquid (or explosive, as the case may be), it would seem that all they would realistically need to do is blow out a critical point on the fuselage, resulting in a loss of cabin pressure, and other unpleasant things would happen. I don't think they would plan on blowing up the plane, just blowing it apart enough to where it would crash.

Just because we don't know of any "useful" liquid explosive doesn't mean we shouldn't keep our eyes open for it. Besides.....who thought of using planes as missiles before it actually happened?

 

[DoubleTapDrew]

My BS alarm went off when I heard about the liquid explosives plot.
I understand banning water though...they could bring along some sort of device that extracts the hydrogen from it and create a Hindenburg effect!
I don't have a problem taking a swig of my water bottle to prove it's water. I do have a problem paying $5 for the same bottle of water once I've gone through security and trying to finish it before you get on the plane.

 

[justashooter]

lots of liquids out there to mix. nitro is very unstable in certain liquid forms during manufacture, after combining inoccuous solutions.

 

[ilbob]

All kinds of very nasty things can be done with stuff that would not be all that hard to smuggle on board an aircraft.

I have no doubt that terrorists have a much longer list than we do of these things.

We tend to not think of things that would get us killed, but they want to die while taking as many Americans with them as they can.

 

[oops!]

I'm a licensed blaster, I use binaries, I use multi- component liquids.
What I know about explosives is from almost 30 years of using many types.
I carried a class 40 license for years(license to manufacture).

Now, you guys better believe it is possible to do.

The only way to stop it would to be to put all passengers in paper suits with absolutely no carry on items. You would probably need to sedate everyone as well.

 

[Snake Eyes]

I'm a licensed blaster, I use binaries, I use multi- component liquids.
What I know about explosives is from almost 30 years of using many types.

And your user name is "oops!". That's funny.

How many fingers do you have left?

 

[ilbob]

Does anyone believe the story as stated?

My guess is some time in the not too distant future we will find out just what the real scoop is.

I suspect a chemical agent.

 

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, I'd guess they're a bit more worried about toxins than explosives, actually. Specifically binary nerve gases. You could do a neat job of clearing a plane of all potential opposition in the passenger compartment with just a couple water bottles full of some of the precursors. And only one of the terrorists would have to die to accomplish it, if the rest arranged to be in the "facilities" at the time it was released.

 

[AJAX22]

What about amonium tri-iodide, that mixes from a liquid state doesn't it?

edit --

According to USNews.com they were jplaning on pre-mixing explosive slurries and puting them in soft drink bottles through a hole in the bottom then re-sealing them without tampering with the saftey seals.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060810/10london_2.htm

 

[Shweboner]

".....who thought of using planes as missiles before it actually happened?"



Well, Tom Clancy wrote a very similar scenario in "Debt of Honor" about 10 years ago. (A fully fueled passenger jet crashes into the capitol bldg. in DC)

Oh yeah, I think the Japanese called it "Kamikaze"


not a new concept.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

LGN, apparently you will believe just about anything you read. Consider putting less trust into articles from online political articles, or just political rags that open with citing the Bible.

I liked this quote from the article,

Or at least that's what we're hearing, and loudly, through the mainstream media and its legions of so-called "terrorism experts." But what do these experts know about chemistry?

Who is Thomas C Greene? Is he a terrorism expert? Is he an explosives expert? He is part of the media about which he is critical and he cites his own "experts" on the matter at hand.

From http://www.apress.com/author/authorDisplay.html?aID=254

Thomas C. Greene is associate editor of The Register, the leading independent IT news daily, where he has been a senior editor and columnist for 5 years. Tom covers cybercrime, computer and network security, and Washington politics and legislation related to information technology.

The guy is an editor and columnist for an online information technology rag that has been around since 1998 according to their archives. He doesn't pass his own scrutiny for writing on the topic.

 

[rbernie]

He doesn't pass his own scrutiny for writing on the topic.

That's probably true, but it doesn't answer the only relevant question on the table - is he wrong in his assessment?

 

[Liberal Gun Nut]

My point on this is not that there is no threat, but rather, the threat isn't from some mysterious liquid explosives. Taking away water bottles is almost irrelevant. I agree with Oops! on this. The only way to prevent people from getting explosives on a plane is to strip them, give them paper clothes, and sedate them for the trip. Hysteria over water bottles is as stupid as the previous hysteria over nail clippers. There's nothing you can do, folks! But in this case, they will use the current hysteria to sell a billion dollars worth of unnecessary equipment, and airlines will complain about how many passengers they have lost so they'll get another billion dollar check from the taxpayers who are so fed up they don't want to fly anymore.

The idea of people getting on a plane and synthesizing TATP is absurd. It is impossible. It is as stupid as the idea of people getting on a plane and setting up a machine shop and manufacturing an Uzi. It can't happen.

There are plenty of stable and undetectable SOLID explosives that they can get onto planes, and now we have a hysteria over non-existant liquid explosives. I guess it's easier for them to claim victory over something which doesn't exist.

Btw, there are liquid explosives. Nitroglycerin being the most obvious one. It looks nothing like water. A small container of it could blow a big hole in a plane. A big hole in a plane will not necessarily bring it down, but it might.

There are solid explosives which will not trigger the standard nitrate detectors. The most obvious is potassium perchlorate based explosives. A terrorist could conceal this in his shoes, on his body, internally, etc, and could get enough onto a plane to rip a big hole in it.

My point is, there is a real danger, and the current hysteria over water bottles is distracting us from it.

 

[mete]

Hollywood likes binaries because the can't count higher tha TWO !! ... If you want to blow up a plan just take a DELL laptop computer on board ....Do they still sell alcohol on board ? that's flammable !

 

[ilbob]

That's probably true, but it doesn't answer the only relevant question on the table - is he wrong in his assessment?

Which assessment? He made a bunch of off base assertions, and downright deceptive statements. he also brings up a couple very good points.

First, you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water.

It is not all that hard to get it already in a much more concentrated form. Why waste time distilling H2O2 when you can get it already in a more convenient form?

So the fabled binary liquid explosive - that is, the sudden mixing of hydrogen peroxide and acetone with sulfuric acid to create a plane-killing explosion, is out of the question. Meanwhile, making TATP ahead of time carries a risk that the mission will fail due to premature detonation, although it is the only plausible approach.

I think this particular scenario is probably not realistic. that does not mean all others are not. Its not as if this is the only potential explosive that is liquid.

while crystalline white powders would be banned instead, if anyone in charge were serious about security

A good point. I might add that any fine powder is a good candidate for banning on a flight.

For some real terror, picture twenty guys who understand op-sec, who are patient, realistic, clever, and willing to die, and who know what can be accomplished with a modest stash of dimethylmercury.

One guy with a soda can of this stuff could really ruin your day.