View 427 August 14 - 20, 2006 (original) (raw)

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Regarding the terrorist shampoo:

Subject: Finally...

...somebody who's actually studying this sort of thing weighs in with at least the start of an analysis:

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html

(via BoingBoing)

Dean Riddlebarger

Which comes pretty close to my conclusions on first hearing of this.

[Let me break here on Thursday, August 17, to say that you will want to read all of this including Carmack down below before forming conclusions. Please.]

My recollections of liquid monopropellant and miscible two part liquid explosives are from long ago. I recall in High School discussing this stuff with Allan Cleveland, my partner in the founding of the Science Club; we made a number of evil and forbidden chemicals -- I had made nitroglycerine a couple of years before and survived so I was an expert --but we concluded that acetone peroxides were unstable and dangerous and we'd be better off playing with other horrors that would, I make no doubt, have got us locked up forever as Ultramontane terrorists under present regulations and the Patriot Act.

If this be the best that a bunch of England-born Muslim terrorists can come up with even after training in terrorist camps and schools, we can all relax. I make no doubt whatever that 90% of the readers of this web site know how to bring down an airplane provided that we don't plan on living through the event. Whether we would be good enough actors to bring it off given observation of the incoming passengers by competently trained security agents is another matter; but I don't know anyone silly enough to believe he could mix enough acetone peroxide to do real damage to the airplane. It's not that you can't make enough to do it, it's that it wants to explode, and keeping it from going off before you have made enough to do real damage is extremely difficult. It's not just pouring two agents together and shaking...

We seem to have opted for Security Theater, not for real security. I am not sure why. But the Brits are finally beginning to consider some realities, in the face of the enormous blow to the economy that the Great Acetone Peroxide Scare has wreaked.

Next month it will be another rumor, and another, until we shut down our economy.

** I will let the above stand, but it's wrong.

FOR ACCOUNTS ON PEROXIDES based on experience see John Carmak below. The stuff can be more stable and thus more dangerous than I supposed.

It doesn't change my opinion that we are doing far more damage to ourselves than the terrorists are capable of, and that we'll continue to do that.

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Byte Refugees take note:

Subject: David Em In Nepal (on TechRevu)

Jerry, et al,

I'm sure you know David Em took off for Nepal with Michele and Griffin, a few weeks back. I got him some gear via TechRevu, and he's writing up the trip for me in return. I just put up his first piece and thought you might like to see it. Pretty interesting trip so far, and its just getting started.

Ernest Lilley

TechRevu (www.techrevu.com)

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Regarding your laptop battery: don't panic. The chances that your battery will catch fire are small. If it really worries you, don't recharge your laptop. Use a luggable. Or don't leave home, because acetone peroxide is out there waiting for you. Stay home and use a desktop tower, and be sure the sprinkler system is on in your office.

http://news.com.com/Dell+to+recall+4+million
+batteries/2100-1044_3-6105486.html?tag=nl.e404

Subject: C/Net "Security" Article

I too read the article and didn�t notice any actual information. This comment would explain it, though:

http://news.com.com/5208-7355-0.html?forumID
=1&threadID=20201&messageID=174427&start=-1

Gene Horr

Aha, but why did they publish it?

================================

More on Peroxide and explosives:

Subject: peroxide explosives

>but I don't know anyone silly enough to believe he could
>mix enough acetone peroxide to do real
>damage to the airplane

I can't say for sure about acetone peroxides, but I can say for sure about some other organic peroxide mixtures. When we started out working with high concentration peroxide as a rocket fuel, we conducted a number of tests to determine how dangerous it really was, because most accounts that you hear aren't from first hand experience, but instead are a collection of exaggerations of rumors from uncontrolled circumstances.

One of the tests we did involved detonation of 98% peroxide / methanol mixtures. There is no reaction at all to the mixing, and it most certainly is a powerful high explosive. We detonated it with a blasting cap, but we have some reports from the 50's that graph the sensitivity of a few different organic peroxide mixtures that show the experimentally derived breaks between can't-be-detonated, detonated-with-blasting-cap, detonated-with-impact, and detonated-with-spark. Peroxide-acetone was reported as touchier than any of the other mixtures, but you could certainly pour the two chemicals together with the expectation of mixing them before blowing yourself up. Adding sulfuric acid would be pointless.

We made dozens of rocket flights and hundreds of engine tests with a mixed-monopropellant consisting of 50% concentration peroxide and methanol, which many people thought was suicide based on misinformed lore. That particular mixture was just past the can't-detonate-even-with-a-blasting-cap line.

John Carmack

Which is definitive. I didn't comment on all this earlier because my experiences were fifty years old and memories fade. John has done far more recent work on this. And I did wonder a bit about the sulfuric acid, which I hadn't remembered as being needed.

As I have said many times: just about every reader of this site will know of a way to bring down an airplane provided that he doesn't mind going down with it. If one mechanism doesn't do it, another will. And I would think that this knowledge can't be confined; if anyone knows, then potentially every terrorist knows. Security by censorship doesn't generally work for long.

I have never worked with highly concentrated peroxides, so I have no direct knowledge of how easy they are to mix with other liquids; but Carmack has done this. See also MAIL.

And understand that this stuff is dangerous.

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