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Taggants in Explosives

Threads - Free Henny Penny, SpaceDaily Express Letter re Bali

On 16/10/2002, Toby Fiander wrote:

> Contributory manslaughter by littleJohnny...?


I think it remains to be seen with more distant hindsight whether JH's rhetoric had any involvement.  The Kuta Beach bomb seems to have more in common with the Egyptian anti-tourist incident than the NY anti-American one.  It appears to me to be just an attempt to punish westerners for being as they are and not specifically
anyone from Oz.

As to whether the CIA or someone else put the perpetrators up to it, so that there was more compliance with some anti-terrorist policy or some other gain... I think it is a long bow.  If the chemistry is up to it, it might be possible to show which batch it came from and what its history was.  It is all rather early to ascribe blame without this type of information.

It is still possible that the Bali bombing is to do with damaging the interests of Indonesian politicians who own things there.

So far, there are very few things that can be said for certain. There was a serious incident.  A lot of people got hurt by a bomb and quite a few died - most of them were quite young.  The people who constructed the bomb appear to have used something with military origins.  But beyond that it is hard to tell much yet and blaming anyone in particular any time soon is not productive.

When the information is available and the emotion has past to some extent, a considered policy response needs to be put in place for prevention of another incident.  This will necessarily involve changes to resources and priorities.  It might even involve the PM of the day saying and doing different things - one can only live in hope.  But there is as yet no real evidence that anything our own home- grown Francis Urquhart said or did
inspired the Kuta bomb.

Getting hold of the particular bastards who planned and assisted the latest act of murder and terror has some attraction, but ought to be seen principally as part of preventing another incident of this type.  Getting people "who we just know are like the people who did this" has some problems and ought to be examined only in the context of examining the process that generated people who want to murder and terrorise.

If it comes to comparisons, Bush and his various pull-along toys probably have more in common with those whom they seek to eradicate than they would care to admit, but merely pointing it out is probably not helpful.

It seems to me that the title of thread is still quite appropriate.

On 16/10/2002, Karyn posted:

When I first read this I thought "Isn't it nice that someone not in Australia takes this interest."

But now I'm reading it with scary thoughts, that this is the start of the vigilante mentality as expressed by Peter and Don.

-------------------------------------------
  SPACEDAILY EXPRESS  - Oct 16, 2002
-------------------------------------------

------------------
PUBLISHER'S LETTER

Today's issue is quite short on in-house news and instead just includes a round up of wire reports from our global news supplier AFP.

As an Australian the past few days have taken their toll and I spent most of the day feeling sad and despondent about our future.

The death toll in Bali is now 182 with over 100 Australians believed dead.

The relationship between Australia and Indonesia has effectively been blown to pieces and the future for our region is increasingly uncertain.

To give some perspective to the size of the impact of these attacks on Australia understand that on a percentage basis more Australian died in Bali than Americans in New York last year.

Australia is only a small country of 20 million people, and even at these numbers it doesn't take long to find connections between most people either through family or friends.

Meanwhile, the people of Bali have had their entire economy destroyed and their future is even more uncertain as the reality of the war, the world has been in the past year, finally hits home to Australia and the hundreds of thousands of Australians who regularly holiday in Bali each year cancel their holidays.

This was of course one of the specific intents of this attack and the days and months ahead for Indonesia are very uncertain.

After decades of a brutal dictatorship, that was directly supported by both Australia and America, the hatred that exists in Indonesia towards the Javanese elite that runs Indonesia with our support has only just begun to be unleashed.

The killing of innocent people can never be justified, but it is high time that our leadership in the West learns to understand that when we support thugs like Soeharto - the former leader of Indonesia - who treat their people like chattel there will eventually be a price to pay.

And as young men throughout history have learned it is rarely our leaders who pay the ultimate price for our mistakes and instead it is all too often the young and innocent who are slaughtered in the wars our political leaders lead us into to rectify their mistakes of the past.

To those who have lost family and friends in Bali this past week - be strong, be brave and know that your sadness is a sadness felt by us all, and try to find some solace in knowing that millions of people the world over are thinking of you.

Peace on Earth
Simon Mansfield
Publisher
SpaceDaily.com

Toby added :
Peter said:

>  Hate and blame are easy, compassion and understanding are not.

... and patience is almost unheard of, but absolutely essential. Why are they arresting people today?  After just  few days, it
does not seem possible that there is enough forensic information and general evidence from such a large site to background who is responsible for the Kuta bombings.

... which raises the possibility that the arrests are to placate impatient people wanting instant results for reasons of hate.

The whole job of a state justice system is to prevent victims' relatives from exacting what they see as justice.  While the whole concept of justice is necessarily flawed, having a quick result almost ensures that easy solutions are taken by investigators rather than systematic ones.  The safety of the rest of us could depend on there being more systematic investigations.

As serious, as shocking and as difficult as this is for relatives, there really should not be much visible action for quite a while.

There are of course things that might be done to good effect. For example, tomorrow is a Muslim day of prayer - a reasonable community approach could be for those who are not Muslims to turn up at the local Mosque to pray as well.  Since the vast majority of Australian say they believe in a God, there ought to be a lot of people whose belief system would accommodate it.

Contacting the Indonesian embassy with messages of support could be reasonable, too.  I think it might be rather difficult to be an Indonesian official in Australia just now.

I hope we hear a little of the chemistry of C4 and its traceable impurities soon.
Peter Macinnis replied:
> I hope we hear a little of the chemistry of C4 and its traceable
> impurities soon.
Picking up on that science aspect, while agreeing wholeheartedly agreeing with the rest (I recommend T-shirts reading "ARSE-KICKING CHRISTIANS WIV BIG STICKS WIV NAILS IN 'EM FOR RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE AND THE ELIMINATION WITH PREJUDICE OF THE INTOLERANT"), the problem is that there are not enough impurities to go around.

The answer is taggants.  here is something I put together earlier (in 1995 or 1996 -- nothing seems to have changed since).  I will let the "C-4" form that I used there stand, but I rather think it is now more common to write "C4".  The DMDNB would be useless as it stands to ID batches of C4.


On August 24, 1970, during the Vietnam war, a bomb was set off at the University of Wisconsin. It was made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, like the 1995 Oklahoma City bomb, placed by Timothy McVeigh. After that event, a 3M chemist called Richard Livesay began developing a taggant, an additive that could be added to batches of explosive material, an additive that would survive the blast, and pinpoint the source of the chemicals used, helping investigators to trace the bombers.

These taggants, small flakes of layered and colour coded plastic, have been available since 1978, but they are not used in the United States, due to pressure from the National Rifle Association, and the Institute of Makers of Explosives, both groups claiming to have concerns about the safety of the taggants. This is in spite of the fact that Swiss explosives have all been tagged since 1980. Over the period 1984 to 1994, 63 out of 254 bomb attacks in Switzerland used tagged explosives, and 44% of these cases were solved, against just a 16%
clear-up rate for the bombers using untagged explosive. There have been no cases of problems being caused by the Swiss taggants, which are added to the explosives at half the US recommended level.

After the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, President Clinton suggested adding taggants to explosives, but the only action from Congress so far has been to require the addition of ''smelly'' chemicals to plastic explosives, chemicals which will make it easier to detect bombs made of plastic explosive.

This action had originally been agreed to after terrorists blew up PAN AM Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, when forty nations agreed to develop a chemical marker that would enable airport electronic analytical equipment or ''sniffers'' to detect C-4 plastic explosive. The marker or ''taggant'' chosen was
2, 3-dimethyl-2, 3-dinitrobutane (DMDNB). The ten other nations manufacturing C-4 explosive are expected to adopt the U.S. marker in the future.

Taggants of another sort may be seen in common use even sooner. The addition of natural chemicals with unusual (and strictly non-radioactive!) isotopes such as deuterium (hydrogen 2), carbon 13, nitrogen 15 and oxygen 18, could allow manufacturers to ''tag'' their products in an unmistakable way. These tags can also be used in explosives, and have been shown to be detectable after a blast.
Karyn replied:

The taggarts were developed by the US and have a dosage recommended by the US but they aren't used in the US ? Switzerland uses the taggarts at half the dosage recommended and they work?

If that's correct, that really stinks that they aren't used.

What's the Australian position on taggarts? Or don't we manufacture explosives here?
Peter Macinnis responded:

Taggants with an n, not taggarts with an r (just in case you need to look them up on the Web).  Developed by an American with common-sense, rejected by the government at either a legislative or executive level -- but that does not mean that, within the government, there are not agencies of good sense, capable of making sensible recommendations.

The Swiss use half the US suggested (that may be a better word) level of taggants, and the explosives don't play up as a result of the addition, while many more crimes are solved.  There would appear to be a causal relationship there.

I have no idea what the "Australian position" is -- scientists would almost certainly recommend that they be used, and certainly law enforcement agencies would argue for it, but pollies get a say as well, and they may feel that people have a right to be blown up by anonymous explosives.  In America, this would be called the right to lose arms and other sticky-outy bits.

If taggants capable of identifying batches were in use, this would allow a quick test to see if the C4 came from, for example, the US military, the Indonesian military, or a geographical origin/source that might imply an Al Qaedah connection.  Instead, all we have is some smelly chemical that sets off alarms, and do no identification at all.  I don't think we need alarms to tell us what happened at Kuta, not now.

I cannot see what democratic principle is voided by leaving tell-tales that say where the material come from.

Toby Fiander added:

> What's the Australian position on taggarts? Or don't we manufacture
> explosives here?

BIG BANGS
Orica make explosives in Australia for industrial use.  I am not aware of them making plastic explosives for any purpose, although the mob that Forbzy works for might.  It is also possible that we would not know exactly what is made.  I do not know what taggands are used in any of it, although some of the few sticks of AN60 (?) I have used were bright and rather strange colours.

Stephen Berry has more than a little experience with explosives, I think... some of it is difficult circumstances.

Ray posted:

Is semtek (aka C4) impossible to manufacture DIY in someone's shed?  Your average explosive isn't as hard to make as an atom bomb.

If DIY is possible, then taggants might only be able to indicate where the C4 didn't come from, and other means would be required to discover where it did come from -like the existence of levels of impurity.

Stephen Berry replied:

To answer Ray,  Yes you can make any chemical explosive in small quantities in a back yard lab.  There are however problems when you start trying to scale that up to make 40 to 60Kgs which is the suggested quantity used in Bali. 

First you need to purchase the precursor chemicals and you will need some valid reason for this as some of them will be toxic/carcinogenic/highly flammable or all of these.  Then you have to dispose of the waste products of the processes involved including solvents and catalysts which may be toxic/etc. as above.  Last but by no means least why would a terrorist group bother? 

It is an unfortunate fact that if you have enough money explosive ordinance is very easy to procure.  The Australian military have had a number of scandals involving missng/stolen ordinance over the years, to believe that the Indonesian military is immune to such problems would be naive.  On the issue of taggants AFAIK Australia dose not require tagging of locally produced  explosives.
Gerald added:

I could make semtek which apart from the safety (stability) of handling the material is not difficult to make. That is about as much as I am prepared to say for obvious reasons although the details are available in other places. If you were to make it as a DIY process it would contain impurities which would provide a means of establishing a profile but that would only be of use if you could track down the source.

Peter Macinnis supplemented:

Unless Semtex is RDX and polyisobutylene (and I don't think it is), we are no further forward on the question of C4.  RDX appears to be both toxic and carcinogenic -- and is a common pollutant of soil and groundwater in military areas.
Gerald  replied:

I didn't want to expand this thread for fear of attracting unwanted attention from at least two opposing and equally unpleasant sources. While I have handled and synthesised some intermediates for reason totally unconnected with explosives, I haven't prepared the final stages - have no need for things that go "bang". One of the intermediates is a very effective pathogenic fungicide.

Like a lot of chemical pathways there is more than one approach and some are safer than others. You are right about the carcinogenicity etc. my comment was directed at the stability in handling only. Someone trying this in the back shed has a fair chance of staying one piece which is more than can be said for some other explosives, but they would almost certainly produce a "dirty" product unless they had very good equipment and technique. RDX is also an easy one to make from scratch.

The last time I got involved with explosives was at a certain well known manufacturing facility up this way where they discovered that dust fines of explosives had been accumulating in the air conditioning ducting and they had difficulty getting anyone prepared to help remove kilos of the stuff. They wouldn't give me a sample to lab test first so we did the job while crouching down behind the blast walls just in case. It all dissolved nicely and the system cleaned uneventfully. Don't want that job again though and I doubt they will allow such an oversight to reoccur, could have had disastrous consequences.

and

Hi Stephen,
Your observation of scaling up is dead right. It never ceases to surprise me the degree of error of scale which can be present in small scale bench formulations which seem to work fine BUT when you attempt to scale up the formulation can be way out of scale and it either goes badly wrong or simply does not work at all.

Of necessity all of my work begins on a semi micro scale, couldn't afford to do anything otherwise, but that's the easy bit scaling up can take more time than the original concept at the semi micro level. Despite the far greater potential for error in measurement in semi micro I seem to get fewer problems there and frequently you get the "Eureka" response only to find you have a whole new range of adjustments to make to get the "system" to work in full scale.