This is the kind of work I did on my most recent deployment.
Also, keep in mind, that Johnny Talibanner doesn’t have the biggest warehouse from which to scrounge materials. It’s not like he can go to McMasters’ in Kabul to order colored wire. Nine times out of ten, he’s making IEDs with what he’s got on hand.
Johnny Taliban doesn’t need/can’t afford to color code his wires. He’s well versed enough in construction of them to follow leads from item to item. IEDs do not need to be electrically complicated devices.
Tripler
All the inexperienced or ‘amateur’ bomb makers tend to self eliminate themselves within the first three to six months.
I’m more conversant with the situation in Northern Ireland where although not nearly on the same scale as before people are still out there merrily building IED’s and attempting to kill people, and occassionally succeeding unfortunately.
At least we don’t have suicide bombers over here, I imagine they’re particularly difficult to deal with.
You have my respect for conducting a difficult job, I’m no coward but I wouldn’t do it!
What gets me in Hollywood bomb portrayals is he “If you disturb it, it will go off” - the bomb is on a city bus, or a high-speed train. If it had motion sensors, that last pothole or rail switch would have been turned into a crater.
My very very limited experience with explosives - most commercial explosives are incredibly safe - it takes a small explosion to set them off. Hence the blasting cap, the little cylinder half the size of your pinkie with two wires coming out of it, stuck into the grey play-doh. pull it out of the playdoh, C4, whatever and you might lose a few fingers or an eye if it goes off prematurely, but not the building. Unless the bomber WANTS to add movement switches, or fake a blasting cap so when that circuit is cut - boom… But the moment you see two blasting caps in the explosive, one might be a decoy… If you were going to do that, why not set it with a contact switch so when the lid is taken off the bomb it goes off? After all, if they can take the lid off and look, they can figure out how to disarm it. If the point is to not allow the good guys time to disarm it, why give them a sporting chance. Doesn’t that go against #15?
(One technique I heard was to build a clay dam around the mechanism and flood it with liquid nitrogen - thus killing the battery so there’s no juice for the timer or the blasting cap)
It was easier for most home-grown terrorists, at least before 9/11, to break into a quarry or mine and steal the necessary pieces than to concoct a blasting cap and explosive in the bathtub. Unabomber was a do-it-yourselfer with above average technical abilities. I wonder how many things he set off, how close he came to oops, to ensure his devices worked.
(The guys at the Glasgow airport tried all-homemade, all they did was set themselves and the car on fire while hung up on a roadblock. Ditto the second round of London Tube bombers.)
Supposedly I read somewhere they have a nice thumbprint left in the plastique explosive, courtesy of Richard Reid, just waiting for a captive or corpse to match it up with.
I also find it amusing when cutting the wire somehow stops the timer it is connected to. It must be really sophisticated in order for the timer to require a feedback loop in order to run.
Screw that. If ever faced with one of these, I’m grabbing as many wires as I can and pulling them all. All I need to do is get the one that supplies the explosive ignition charge-- any extras are just gravy.
I admit I’d start with the ones not directly connected to batteries (in fact, if I could identify the explosives, I’d yank the ones attached to those), since the easiest “booby trap” would be a relay held open by power, but I’d be surprised if even that simple a “trap” were common. Most bombers hide their bombs – there’s not much point in doing that if they can’t be safely disarmed anyway.
If you’ve narrowmindedly put yourself into the position of handjamming a device, you’re already dead. There are better ways, or at least ways to get it out of the White House/orphanage/nunnery/critical cultural UNESCO site/etc. to that open ballfield or blocked off intersection to let it go do its thing and minimize collateral damage.
That’s Hollywood, man.
See my above point.
Much obliged. I continue to find it interesting and worthwhile.
Tripler
NO I’m not gonna tell you how to make it survive potholes.
Maybe. It depends on how complicated the bomb is. If it’s two wires connection a battery to a timer and two wires connecting the timer to the blasting cap (or whatever the trigger is), then no, no one would bother color-coding the wires. If it’s a giant mess of decoys, dummy circuits, and tripwires, then you might begin to color-code. Personally, I wire things for a living (though if mine explode, I’ve done my job gravely wrong) and I color-code wires for two reasons-- to make it easier for the next guy to understand, and to enable myself to keep my giant spaghetti plate of wires properly sorted. A terrorist might easily skip color-coding the wires.
How would that work, electrically? Why would that kill a battery?
Oh, so the point is that the nitrogen lowers the temperature. I thought there was something chemically specific to the nitrogen, and I couldn’t figure out what that would be.
IRL, instead of trying to figure out whether to cut the red or blue wire, don’t they destroy the device with a robot armed with a shotgun or water cannon or just take it some place safe and blow it up there?
Liquid nitrogen is one of the most commonly used cryogenics (very cold materials). Liquid oxygen is also common, but I don’t think you would want to soak a bomb in it.
But as beowulff pointed out, the cold stifles the reaction. Much in the same way the cold stifles your car battery.
I burst out laughing only to find the lecturer and other students staring at me, “Do you mind telling us whats so funny?”
I began to explain but gave it up as it became clear they didn’t understand what I was getting at. It was one of those times where I wondered if the rest of the world is insane or it really is just me.
I’ve already talked to the wife about parodying this picture for our 2014 Christmas cards.
I’ve considered starting a thread, but thought it would become too time consuming, and kind of boring. I won’t go into specific details on a public message board, simply because I can’t verify who’s reading it. That, and while my experiences may be one way, BomTek, who has more years than I do under his belt, may have it another. Truth: put three bomb technicians in a room, and you’ll have four opinions.
