Udhay Shankar N <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Rishab Aiyer Ghosh forwarded a note from Perry Metzger: [ on 09:33 PM > 8/11/2006 ] > >>So, I'm doing a bunch of reading, and I find the claimed method the >>"highly sophisticated" attackers came up with for bringing down >>airliners kind of implausible. I wonder if it could ever work in >>reality. > > Here's some more informed speculation from the SciAm blog. Perry and a > couple of other interested parties are copied on this note. Feel free > to copy silklist on your responses, if any.
Most of what I had to say I said in my note already, though I will note that a number of people who have replied to me about my note don't seem to have read it. For example, one person said to me "you're wrong, TATP has been used by terrorists!" -- which of course I never denied. I just claimed that it was impractical to make the stuff in an airplane w.c. without dying long before you would have enough to take down the plane. Another person, sadly a reporter for a major newspaper, told me that I was wrong, the terrorists were going to use TATP, not acetone peroxide -- this person was unaware that chemists often use a half dozen or more terms for a single chemical or group of chemicals. He, too, had clearly not read my article with any care. > http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=what_was_the_explosive&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&ref=rss > > August 10, 2006 > > What Was the Explosive? > > News reports [1] of the multi-plane bombing plan mention an explosive > that could have been smuggled as seemingly innocuous fluid and mixed > together on board. > > One possibility is triacetone triperoxide [2], or TATP, which may > have been used in the London Underground bombings and in the alleged > shoe bomb. Last month, a student in Texas City, just south of > Houston, died [3] when he created some in his apartment and it > literally blew up in his face. That's not surprising. Organic peroxides of this sort are astonishingly unstable. As I said in my article, you don't want to make them unless you have proper cooling, and if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to have them go off long before you have enough material to do more than spray yourself with enough toxic chemicals to kill yourself. > New Scientist [5] quoted experts saying it might have been > nitroglycerine, but that nitro would have quickly reacted to form > ammonia at easily detectable levels. I don't know about the ammonia issue, but note that, if the terrorists were going to bring pre-made explosives on board, the composition of those explosives is almost beside the point, and if they were planning on making the explosives on board, it would have been very difficult indeed. > Andrew Sullivan [8]suggested that the liquid may not have been an > explosive but a binary chemical weapon. It would be trivial to bring on board ingredients to release lots of toxic gas. See my original article for one such example. Perry
