Terrorists are running out of place to put their bombs — even shoes are off limit now . So where do you stick explosives these days ? Here ’s a tone inside the deviously clever plan of printer bombs that made late headline .
Officials are n’t sure what group is behind the improvise bomb calorimeter that find their way onto cargo plane this past hebdomad — but they demonstrate an ingenius and sophisticated excogitation with basic electronics you probably have sit around your home or office .
The idea was childlike . Pentaerythritol tetranitrate , more normally known as PETN , is a comparatively stable explosive . To detonate it , you fundamentally postulate to shove off it up with something else — or impinge on it really hard . But unlike other volatile compound , the risk of a PETN - base bomb destroy itself accidentally is low . And a petty act go a long agency — a fifth of an apothecaries' ounce of the stuffwill tout a hole in metal twice the thickness of an airplane fuselage .
So these as - for - now anonymous dud makers claim around 7 pounds of PETN and stuffed it — rather crudely — inside a printing machine magazine , along with some equally crude electrical wiring . All of this was linked up with a SIM card just like the one you have inside your telephone . The occupation was n’t just spotless , dud experts note , but it was clever enough to keep it hidden for a disconcerting length of clip . The supposal is that the SIM card would have been used to detonate the explosive printing machine remotely , via a phone call . But so far , there ’s no signaling any antenna was present — so where would the turkey have received a signaling ? And what was going to be used to detonate this hard - to - detonate PETN ? Nobody really knows yet . But the pattern bewray an eye for technical foxiness that ’s at once amateur and , morbidly , brilliant . [ Danger Room ]
bombExplosives
Daily Newsletter
Get the in effect tech , science , and culture news in your inbox daily .
word from the futurity , delivered to your nowadays .
You May Also Like
