Liquid explosives or liquid lies?

[fingertrouble]

I have been telling anyone personally who will listen about the stupidness of the liquid explosives plot and how it wasn't possible because even my little-remembered rudimentary GCSE Chemistry (I had a very teenage practical interest in things that go bang, so I think I unusually took notice at that point) reminded me that liquids forms of things, especially explosive things, were usually extremely unstable. Hence why you have C4, semtex, dynamite, match heads, etc (I wonder how many more keywords I can put in to confuse the keyword searching CIA bots!?)

So I was pleased to see via nlotic that, in fact, I was right. An article from The Register shows exactly not only how unlikely it would be, but that it's actually impossible on a modern commercial airline flight.

I wonder how long before it gets pulled or criticised by idiots for 'telling the terrorists how to do it!', totally missing the point, or the fact that the Journal of the American Chemical Society had all this info anyway years ago...and that this whole panic seems to be a fraud, or intentional scare with no teeth, at best.

Stupid science, stupid panic - but that never stopped politicians and security wonks before, did it?

Comments

[tigerbeard.livejournal.com]

Just a thought - wouldn't they be better creating some sort of toxic gas instead. Given that the idea was to just blow a hole big enough to crash the plane why not just make some sort of deadly gas type concoction instead(you can tell I failed A level chemistry here). Planes tend not to fly too well if the pilots are all dead.

I seem to remember at school we were constantly being rushed out of the science lab for mixing two liquids together and making some sort of nasty gas - chlorine was one of them I think.

[timbearcub.livejournal.com]

bromine gas probably - nitric acid + copper coins, nearly killed me once...

[nlotic.livejournal.com]

I'm such a news whore.

[timbearcub.livejournal.com]

:-D

It's all on our minds, though