Acetone Peroxide

[tongodeon]

I'm starting to understand why airport security are asking passengers to discard certain cosmetics and household items. Acetone Peroxide is easy to make and does not require any chemistry skills. It's made from nail polish remover, hydrogen peroxide disinfectant, and uses "any kind of acid" - including citric acid - as a catalyst. It's suspected

Comments

[erikred]

"and although Mentadent contains peroxide I'm dubious that a whole tube - or several tubes - could be used to synthesize enough Acetone Peroxide to blow up a plane."

True, and since they're already screening for explosive residue on carry-ons, it's unlikely that you could get away with packing a toothpaste tube with some Alias-esque water gel explosive anyway. Or perhaps I'm just giving people ideas.

[tongodeon]

They don't tell you exactly what they're scanning for, but I'm guessing that peroxide isn't one of those things. I wouldn't think they'd be looking for acetone either. Certainly not lemons. The idea is that the items look totally innocuous until you put them together.

[hwrnmnbsol]

The problem is, the next step from here is a fairly trivial one for the bad guys to take

[madbodger]

The whole "triggering mechanism" is ridiculous anyway. Most of these syntheses are quite unstable
with inpure reagents and at room temperature. In other words, they're effectively hypergolic. Just
mix up the stuff and boom. No trigger necessary.

[palecur]

My understanding from here is that commonly available peroxide 3% is wholly insufficient for this reaction, or even the 25% stuff you can get from a chem supply house. You'd need higher-end H2O2, and that's nontrivial to acquire.

[tongodeon]

It's already nontrivial to blow up an airplane - getting a few extra chemicals is not a big impediment. (Those civilians with jet packs can get ahold of 90% peroxide without problems.) What's important is that it's trivial to transport - you don't want the bag blowing up prematurely when they drop it into the bin at the x-ray scanner.

Re: TATP

[eejitalmuppet]

In terms of taking down a plane, if it's at cruising altitude and you can blow out a window or two, you've got a fair chance. At the very least, you can probably kill off a lot of the passengers by decompression. In addition to decompression, the hole will lead to increased air-resistance, and said air will tend to tear off more of the fuselage from around the damage, maybe enough to drop it...

tongodeon: I don't want to comment in detail on the chemistry until I'm more awake and I've had time to think about it (no promises that I'll post anything then, either), but the basics seem about right. In principle, people aren't supposed to take acetone on board, as it's a highly-flammable liquid, but the airlines don't normally bother to police it. That seems to be changing, and could conceivably mean the end of duty-free perfumes (mostly over 50% ABV ethanol) and other cosmetics on international flights (unless they make arrangements to have purchases delivered directly to the baggage hold

[aramis307]

I had a patient not long ago who was trying to make this stuff in his buddy's apartment. It blew, killing his buddy and severely injuring him. He survived, and is now awaiting trial on charges stemming from the incident.

The points:

1) An idiot can make it.

2) If it didn't bring down the plane, it would at least kill a few people, which is a good second option as far as these types of folks are concerned.

[cdk]

The problem I have is that I'm not convinced that the (apparent) policy of keeping the public in the dark about what chemicals can be used to make a bomb or incendiary device actually has a beneficial effect. We are long past the point where it's possible to make it non-trivial for an interested person to acquire that information. I'm not saying the New York Times needs to include excerpts from the Anarchist's Cookbook, but I don't see that vague statements like "What makes it frightening is the sophistication to turn relatively common materials into a dangerous bomb," without specifying what explosive the terrorists were planning to make, does anyone any good. The people who are capable of finding out how to make acetone peroxide will find out anyway, and the people who aren't capable of finding that out are going to be going around looking for people who buy lots of orange juice and gasoline.