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Real threat or bad movie plot?
August 17, 2006

Was last week’s airline terror threat real? Did the alleged perpetrators have any realistic capability to bring down an airliner by creating the peroxide explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP) onboard? Most mainstream media have afforded unquestioned credence to British and US government officials’ claims.

But there is some skepticism. The Register, for example, takes a look at the alleged would-be terrorists’ prospects in “Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?”

The Register notes that “Binary liquid explosives are a sexy staple of Hollywood thrillers,” but it concludes that “making a quantity of TATP sufficient to bring down an airplane is not quite as simple as ducking into the toilet and mixing two harmless liquids together.”

It would require bringing aboard hydrogen peroxide in sufficient concentrations (the 3% concentration sold in pharmacies won’t do) along with acetone and sulfuric acid. To make TATP on the plane, you would need to obtain ice water (the Register suggests flying first class and using the ice bucket supplied with the Champagne); then decamp to the lavatory with the ingredients to spend a few hours in your efforts--“assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities.”

Now the Register, an irreverent publication for information technology managers (its tagline is “Biting the hand that feeds IT”), could hardly be considered the ultimate authority in household chemistry. But it does cite a peer-reviewed paper that concludes that “the explosion of TATP is not a thermochemically highly favored event,” and it quotes a chemistry professor as saying that combining the precursors of TATP would create “a violent reaction,” but not a detonation.

The Register returns to its opening movie theme in its conclusion, taking British and US security officials to task: “Based on their behavior, it's reasonable to suspect that everything John Reid and Michael Chertoff know about counterterrorism, they learned watching the likes of Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Vin Diesel, and The Rock.”

Posted by Rick Nelson on August 17, 2006 | Comments (0)