Homegrown Terror: Grow Your Own!
*NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This post keeps getting edited without my consent, and I can't seem to get it to stop. I'm going to try and fix it; in the meantime, please be patient with the somewhat limited content. ~3:00pm, Sat. 1/26*
Seems like lately, everybody's afraid. I get the feeling that these days, there's good money in fear. America's terrified not to tune into the six o'clock news for fear that they may miss the newest threat lurking just around the corner, waiting to rape their babies or, worse yet, insult the United States. FYI - it's now a federal crime to insult America, whether it's verbally, in print, or even in your thoughts.
Back in October, the House passed HR1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. It's still awaiting approval from the Senate, who referred the bill to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Among other things, the bill is designed to prevent violent radicalization. The definition used in the bill defines this term as promoting any belief system that the government considers to be an extremist agenda. However, the bill doesn't specifically define what constitutes an extremist belief system. This implies that they just kind of get to make it up as they go. I suppose "extremist" could be classified as anything that goes against the government's agenda, for better or worse. Scary, huh? Kind of makes you want to radicalize violently, doesn't it?
Now look, I'm not advocating that you go out and do anything drastic like protest in public, hang up signs, or read the Constitution in public. I'm not even suggesting that you think about doing any of these things, as it's illegal to think about them. And I'm certainly not saying that anybody should go out blowing stuff up.
But sometimes I get a little antsy, you know? I read an article this morning on a group of hackers who had infiltrated electrical utilities in multiple cities and were demanding extortion payments while disrupting the power. The attack was rather poorly described by the CIA, who said that they believed that some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages, but did not specify what countries or cities were affected, or how long the outages lasted.
Make no mistake, this is a criminal act, and its perpetrators should probably be punished. But man, sometimes I get inspired by this type of stuff. Come on, who hasn't secretly dreamed of creating this type of mass chaos, ala Dr. Evil or some James Bond supervillain? Then I get depressed. I'm no hacker. I don't work for a utility company. How could a guy like me possibly do anything like this? I'll never get to sow the seeds of my discontent, never!
And then it came to me. I may not be a hacker, but I do have an advanced degree in chemistry. I've studied the way that viruses and infectious diseases of all kinds operate on a molecular level. I know enough about toxicology to design some really elegant poisons that could potentially mess up the water supply. But I'd never fool around with that stuff. I don't even like to joke about it. It's just too scary - and too indiscriminate. Also, for some reason, it just seems wrong.
One other thing I know about is explosives. Yeah, I like to blow stuff up. Big surprise? A chemist who enjoys blowing stuff up. Don't see that every day. Now, my opinion on blowing stuff up is a little different than my opinion on genetically modified biological agents. I feel like the gun nuts out there get a lot of leeway with what they're allowed to do. I was camping in central Arizona a couple of summers ago and at like 3 in the morning, the cool desert silence was ripped apart by automatic weapons fire. Sounded like a Schwarzenegger movie happening out there. We called the cops, and they told us that a group of pro-gun vets won their court case and were exercising their rights under the Second Amendment.
Anyway, my point is, if these guys can have a 50mm machine gun in their basement, I should get to have some thermite. That's all I'm saying. It is my right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms - it doesn't state what kind of arms I can bear. And besides, not all of us can afford a bunch of giant guns. Hell, some of us may even be...er...*cough*...convicted criminals, unable to procure arms through legal channels.
So here's the deal I'm making with you right now. The day may come when we need to defend ourselves. Maybe from foreign invaders, maybe from Xenu and the space aliens, maybe from our own government. I'm going to suggest ways in which you may be able to produce your own arms and/or explosives. I am in no way advocating that you attempt to actually do anything that I suggest below. If you hurt yourself or someone else using knowledge you've gained here, you're a damn idiot, and I do not support you. Further, I am not suggesting that acts of homegrown terrorism are cool. They are not cool. Do not engage in homegrown terrorism. Or radical violentization...or was that violent radicalization...I'm pretty sure I've heard Bush talk about both. It may be illegal to make the things described below. It's probably even illegal to write about how to make them. That's why I'm including the following disclaimer before we move on: ALL information contained in the remainder of this article is a work of fiction(wink, wink), in no way intended to represent reality. Any resemblance to actual people, places, things, processes, ideas, or events is purely coincidental. Proceed with caution.
Well, let's get started. Something small is probably good to begin with. A simple pressure-based explosion makes for a good scare without the destructive power of pyrotechnics. A great way to generate pressure on the go is through generation of a gas from a solid or a liquid. Boil some water, and the steam generated has a much higher volume than the water. Anyone who's ever tossed a can of soup or something into a fire without venting the can learned that one the hard way. But heat can be hard to come by. This brings us to the dry ice bomb. As you probably know, dry ice is solid carbon dioxide. It doesn't like to be solid for long - it sublimes directly to its gaseous form at room temperature.
Toss some dry ice in a balloon, tie it off, and the balloon will self-inflate. Pretty neat. Toss some dry ice in a slightly more solid, sealed container, and things get neater. As pressure increases, assuming you used enough dry ice, the container will fail, resulting in an explosion. It's loud, but not really dangerous. Unless you used a glass container. Then somebody's going to get hurt. Additionally, carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant. If you accidentally placed a bunch of these all around a populated area, you could potentially overwhelm a crowd with the gas, resulting in maybe mass passing-out and possibly death. So there you go. Dry ice is cool, if you're a second grader. Let's move on.
I've been reading quite a bit about people trying to produce hydrogen gas lately, so let's start with generation of hydrogen. One of the easiest ways to do this is to react a strong aqueous base with aluminum. Sodium hydroxide works well. Aluminum and water alone will serve to generate small amounts of hydrogen. However, a layer of aluminum oxide is usually present on the surface of the metal, necessitating the use of the base. Sodium hydroxide ensures that a clean metal surface is always available, thus allowing the reaction to reach completion. What happens when you mix the metal and base together is that you generate aluminum hydroxide salts, heat, and hydrogen. The generation of heat and hydrogen makes this a potentially dangerous reaction. However, generation of a gas without heat can be useful as well.
So how do we use this in practice? Well, you've got aluminum foil or soda cans readily available. You've got sodium hydroxide readily available too, in the form of liquid drain cleaner (Drano). Mix the two together, and you get an interesting, albeit fairly useless, chemical reaction. Make that reaction happen in a closed container and things get a bit more interesting. As gas is produced, pressure in your container will increase. Assuming you chose a crappy container, it will eventually fail, making a small explosion and possibly spraying Drano everywhere. If you place your pressurized container in a small, enclosed space like a mailbox, things get even better. At least, that's what I hear. I neved did it, though, no sir.
But we're making hydrogen. It's the stuff that brought down the Hindenburg, for crying out loud! It'd be a shame not to blow it up. So we've got a pressure-generating reaction in a soon-to-fail container. All we need now is a heat source. A candle would probably work well, or even a lit cigarette. Let's just say you taped a lit cigarette to the side of a 2-liter soda bottle and filled that bottle with liquid Drano, a little bit of water, and some foil or a cut-up soda can. Pressure would slowly increase, the bottle would burst, the cigarette would ignite the escaping hydrogen, and chaos would ensue. Also, face-melting sodium hydroxide gets sprayed everywhere, maybe, if it happens just right. Not bad, eh? A bit better than dry ice, but still, many people have done this one to death. Cool for high school kids, maybe.
I thought about talking about high-test peroxide explosives here. These are pretty cool - they explosively decompose into water and oxygen. Originally used in German rocketry during WWII, peroxides are now found in a variety of interesting applications - for example, the reaction control thrusters on the X-15. But then I thought about a bunch of people building peroxide stills to convert their 3% household hydrogen peroxide into the high-test stuff. This small, stupid bunch of people would most likely blow themselves up. So I'm not going to talk about high-test peroxide explosives. If you're interested, look it up.
Ok, moving on. Let's talk about nitrogen triiodide. I first learned about this stuff in my inorganic chemistry lab during undergrad. The professor was kind of a drunk, and he didn't really like teaching traditional material. There were only like six of us in the lab, and we all promised we wouldn't tell, so the lab turned into a kind of controlled demolitions class. One of the more fun things we made was this nitrogen compound. He called it thunder mud, and for good reason.
Nitrogen triiodide is a fairly powerful contact explosive when it's dry. It's made by combining iodine and ammonia. What you do if you're at home is, first, get your hands on some iodine crystals. Not sure how you'd go about it, but it certainly can be done. The internet is your friend - use it. Or, make friends with a chemist, you know, whichever. Once you've got some solid iodine, you want to crush it into a powder. Then, mix it with just enough concentrated liquid ammonia to cover it. Stir for about 20 minutes, and filter off the liquid. Make sure that the remaining solids stay somewhat damp, though!
The solids should have a consistency sort of like mud. If it's wet enough, you can paint it onto surfaces. When it dries completely, it becomes explosive - it spontaneously decomposes into iodine and nitrogen gas. We know now that generating gas makes good things happen. This stuff is great for practical jokes, but it could also potentially be used to wreak havoc. Just imagine the possibilities associated with large amounts of contact explosives. And when I say contact, I don't mean that you have to drop a freaking rock on the stuff. If a fly lands on it, it's going to blow. A strong breeze set off a rather large chain reaction in our lab one time. Make no mistake, this stuff will kill you if you mishandle it. But it makes for a lot of fun if you do it right. Painting it on doorkobs and toilet seats, in particular, makes for a good laugh. I can only imagine what would happen if you were to, say, fill a pothole with some. Hmmm...
This brings us to one of my favorite classes of reactions: oxidation using chlorates and perchlorates. Perchlorates are salts derived from perchloric acid. They're commonly used to treat thyroid disorders. Additionally, they can be found in airbags, fertilizers, and...um...rocket fuel. My favorite is potassium perchlorate, simply because large amounts are readily available to me. Ammonium perchlorate may be harder to come by, but it makes for some good solid rocket fuel. I should say at this point that while they're pretty good oxidizers, perchlorates aren't as strong as chlorates. They are, however, much more stable and thus more pleasant to work with.
The way this reaction works is actually pretty cool - you generate intense flames and a lot of heat without actually needing a flame or spark or even heat for ignition. You start off by mixing roughly equal parts perchlorate and sugar. Yeah, just regular old household sugar. Not Equal, not Sweet 'n' Low, not Splenda - that crap doesn't work in the kitchen, and it won't work here. So anyway, you take your mixture of perchlorate and sugar and you put it someplace cool. I recommend not doing it on the deck of your apartment - I learned the hard way that people tend to freak out and call the fire department when they see four-foot-high fireballs and thick black smoke. Once you're in an appropriate location, you whip out your vial of concentrated sulfuric acid. Come on, you're resourceful, you can get your hands on some of this stuff. If it comes down to it, just crack open your car battery. Put a few drops of acid on your powder mixture, and run away.
Now, let's say you didn't want to set this stuff aflame while you were standing there. What could you do? Perhaps you could devise some sort of chambered container, with a divider that could be corroded by something like sulfuric acid. You would have, in effect, put a timer on your giant fireball. Not sure how you would go about doing this, but I'm sure it could be done. You know, for safety purposes, allowing you to be a safe distance away when the reaction starts. This really does make for a nice bit of fire - really bright, very hot and intense. For you pyromaniacs out there, it's quite beautiful.
This brings us to our last reaction for today. There are plenty more, I'm just getting tired of writing. The final reaction is kind of a classic, and like the perchlorate stuff, it's really more of a fireball than an explosion. Thermite is a combination of aluminum powder and a metal oxide that creates short bursts of extremely high temperatures and intense flames. Yeah, we're going to set metal on fire. Thermite hand grenades are used as incendiary devices to quickly destroy equipment. It's also used to melt artillery pieces and train tracks. Additionally, thermite was used in incendiary bombs during WWII to destroy entire cities.
Sounds cool, huh? It's actually really easy to make, too. First, you need some powdered aluminum. It's easier to come by than you may think. Machine shops have tons of the stuff sitting around. Or, you can buy an Etch-a-Sketch - the dark powder inside is the stuff we're looking for. Next, you need some iron oxide. That's just a fancy term for rust. If you can't find rust, just throw yourself off a bridge - there's some down there, I promise! Mix roughly equal parts iron oxide and aluminum for the first stage of this reaction.
You're going to need a fairly intense heat source to set this whole thing off. A small perchlorate reaction on top of a pile of thermite makes for a great fuse. If you can't get any perchlorate, set a strip of magnesium aflame. Or light a sparkler and stick it in there. Or drip some glycerin onto a bit of potassium permanganate. When it ignites, you'll know it. Man, will you know it. The reaction generates intense UV light, so it's not safe to look at. You can't put it out with water, and it will melt through metal, so maybe do it over concrete or stone or something like that. The possibilities with thermite are endless. You can melt through your buddy's engine block as a practical joke. There's even speculation that thermite was used to bring down the World Trade Center.
So there you go. Use this information wisely. You now have great power, and with great power comes...blah blah blah. Have fun out there, and try not to get arrested. Really. If I find out that any of you out there used any of this information to do anything bad, I'm coming after you. But really, if you ever find yourself needing a bit of large-scale self-defense from whomever, keep this stuff in mind.
by The JavaScript Source
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