The Boston Marathon Bombing

View 770 Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Last night late before bed I put up a scrambled notion about dark matter and gravity and got some of it backwards as one does when in a hurry. I’ve fixed it, and thanks to the readers who pointed it out. I have found in recent months that it takes a while to focus on a new subject. I can think about what I’m focused on, but it takes a while to get that focus: if I quickly think about something I may know quite well, and I don’t take time to focus in, so to speak, I am capable of making some pretty silly errors. I suppose it’s a price of being able to function despite age, and it’s a pretty low one compared to some that people are paying.

We have a lot of mail about the Boston Marathon bombing. I’ve selected some.

Marathon Bombs

The ghost white smoke speaks for itself. With nary a tract of carbon black in the air, these were not oxygen deficient explosives, military or otherwise The third IED , which failed to detonate, was reportedly smoking when a water cannon disrupted it .

My bet is triacetone peroxide, freshly made and perhaps still damp- and used in miserly quantities- the stained glass is still in the windows of the Raquet & Tennis Club on Boylston Street.

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

I’ve known Russell for about fifty years now, and if I had to bet without any other input I’d bet with Russell on something like this. This stuff has been around at least since The Anarchist Cookbook, and in one false flag edition it was featured with cookbook instructions on making it from easily available starting materials; interestingly the instructions omitted some needed precautions. The stuff is notoriously unstable if precautions are not taken (so is any really high concentration peroxide, which can but should not be used as a monopropellant rocket fuel.) Triacetone peroxide is known to have been used by a number of terrorist groups including al Queda, which published an article on making bombs using pressure cookers in the English language on-line magazine Inspire. Peroxide based bombs were also used in some Weather Underground bombs in the 1960’s.

I note that some of the simpler cook book recipes for triacetone peroxide have been taken down from the Web this morning.

As I was posting this I thought about an implication of the glass remaining at the Raquet Club. That might be thought of as indicating a desire to limit the damage; but then one remembers the ball bearings, indicating a desire for maximum human casualties. The lesser quantities of explosive must be due to other limitations.

1545 PDT: Russell has just called to tell me it appears that the explosive was smokeless powder. His call came during my afternoon nap, so I didn’t focus in fast enough to think to ask which smokeless powder. The term smokeless powder is an old military history term to designate ammunition that was not black powder. In general it meant something made from nitrocellulose or guncotton. It is a generic term in the US; in Britain they tend to say Cordite. I have no notion of which form of ‘smokeless powder” these bombs were made from, but it’s not likely to have been home made.

Digging about a bit I find that instructions for making guncotton still abound on the net. Stage magicians used to make it all the time for illusion effects since it burns extremely fast and in small quantities unconfined is not explosive. Obtaining nitric and sulfuric acids is not so easy now, and I don’t suppose many performers make their own, but I can recall knowing a couple of guys who made their own for their acts.

1630:

An addenum- I failed to follow the white smoke trail to its most mundane extreme- smokeless powder . One Mass Genreral surgeon who extracted shrapnel from the victims report heavy gauge aluminum fragments , clipped nails, and small metal spheres, and thinks the IED’s may have been oversized grenades based on pressure cookers packed with shrapnel and smokeless powder.

Russell

The Boston Bombing

Dear Jerry:

You said "no one saw it coming" . I have to respectfully disagree. The security people saw it coming. They always see it coming since they are the first line of defense against terrorism. The Boston Marathon is a "soft" target. No matter how many people you have standing guard you can’t have absolute, perfect security. I suspect that a much greater tragedy was prevented because that rental truck didn’t get through the lines and that one individual did not get into a restricted area. A large part of my consulting practice before I gave it up to write fiction and drama full time was doing security surveys and threat assessments. Terrorism was always an issue near the top of the priority list. It was not until after 9/11 that civilians took it seriously. No one outside the Security Industry paid much attention until then. But there is no such thing as absolute perfect security. That’s a fantasy.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

As I said yesterday, most of the security professionals saw something coming, but the authorities didn’t. And eternal vigilance has always been the price of liberty. That includes citizen awareness, not just turning it over to professionals. Machiavelli told us what that generally costs a republic.

Hi Jerry,

Charles Pierce, a sports columnist for Grantland (an ESPN page) wrote a paragraph about the likely impact of yesterday’s attack that I thought you might find interesting as a cultural waypoint on our journey as a free people.

–Mike

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9176985/boston-marathon-explosion

The Marathon was the old, drunk uncle of Boston sports, the last of the true festival events. Every other one of our major sporting rodeos is locked down, and tightened up, and Fail-Safed until the Super Bowl now is little more than NORAD with bad rock music and offensive tackles. You can’t do that to the Marathon. There was no way to do it. There was no way to lock down, or tighten up, or Fail-Safe into Security Theater a race that covers 26.2 miles, a race that travels from town to town, a race that travels past people’s houses. There was no way to garrison the Boston Marathon. Now there will be. Someone will find a way to do it. And I do not know what the race will be now. I literally haven’t the vaguest clue.

Interesting. I am not at all sure how one can make a Marathon race safe. There are risks in life. Not all can be eliminated. And of course some risk factors simply cannot officially be taken into account.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. There was a time when that was taught in the public schools.  I think it no longer is. There may be a reason for that.

Speculation about who placed the Boston Marathon bombs continues. ranging from one or another derivative of al Qaeda to speculations about “militia’s”. The only militia people I know would rather have been persuaded to do some amateur patrolling with the objective of preventing the placement of a bomb than to take any chance of killing citizens particularly women and children, but I don’t travel in those circles any longer. I am reminded that this might have been an anniversary of the Waco Massacre, but that seems unlikely since the siege began in February and ended on April 19. If anyone was “sending a message” it was a fairly obscure one, with no one eager to take credit for it. The use of pressure cookers as containers for the bombs was shown in an al Qaeda video, but al Qaeda hardly has a monopoly on the practice. The bombs were designed for maximum anti-personnel damage rather than property damage, but most such devices are.

The local shock jock talk show is encouraging callers to speculate on who would have done this, and trying to draw inferences from obscure observations which may or may not be true. It is apparently still unsettled whether an unexploded bomb was found and recovered; indeed it isn’t clear what the detonating mechanism was. Cell phone, garage door opener, any number of remote control toy controllers, as well as various timing devices would have done the trick. Every tinkerer’s junk drawer contains stuff that would work.

Speculations tend toward the bizarre, but then shock jock’s choose the bizarre callers. I haven’t yet heard that this was the work of Old Tories trying to get revenge for the Battle of Bunker Hill, but I haven’t been listening very closely.

 

Niven, Pournelle and Benford on Star Ship Sofa next Sunday morning.

http://www.starshipsofa.com/  When I agreed to do this I didn’t realize it would be at 0900 on a Sunday morning.