Re: Exploding pagers

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 16:57:47 -0000 (UTC), Cursitor Doom
<cd999666@notformail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:57:27 +0100, Liz Tuddenham wrote:
>

Cursitor Doom <cd999666@notformail.com> wrote:
 

On Wed, 18 Sep 2024 06:37:13 GMT, Jan Panteltje wrote:
 

On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Sep 2024 15:39:17 -0700) it happened john
larkin <jl@650pot.com> wrote in
<rv0kejddm69cioik17oeujstlfig16jn4o@4ax.com>:
 

On Tue, 17 Sep 2024 13:18:26 -0500, Crash Gordon <uucp@crashelex.com>
wrote:
>

Pagers, even with a cheap LiPo battery that fails, do not explode.
Somebody built hundreds, maybe thousands, of intentionally
booby-trapped pagers and then managed to distribute them to a large
group of targeted individuals.
>
This absolutely screams "state actor" but all of the states that
would be capable of pulling it off have disavowed any connection, as
would be expected.
>
Posting is on-topic for s.e.d because these things had to be
*designed*.
 Targets can be expected to cross security boundaries so these
 pagers
had to look like normal pagers under X-ray, and had to not "smell"
like explosives.  Putting aside, for sake of discussion, the horror
of the device itself and the evil necessary to conceive and deploy
it, one has to on some level, admire the skill required to manage
it.

>
It's assumed that the Israelis booby-trapped the batch of pagers that
were bought by Hezbollah. Fiendishly clever.
>
I'm surprised that anybody still makes or uses pagers.

 
They used batteries filled with an explosive that would trigger when
temperature rised above some point They could heat your smartphone
battery by hacking or even some sucking website or email.
So be carefull what batteries you use, same for the equipment you
make. Simple heat up test in safety chamber would be a good idea?

 
Is there such an explosive? High explosives - as it appears were used
here - generally need a significant *shock* to set them off. Heat alone
isn't normally enough and even if it were, the temp required would have
necessitated the rapid discarding of the pager before it got
sufficiently hot.

 
They aren't restricted to just a single type of explosive.  There are
detonators that can be set off by a very small increase in temperature
and a few microgrammes of those would set off a bigger charge of
something more powerful.

>
Well, maybe. But no one has yet *named* a practical explosive such as
could be used in a pager which explodes when heated. I would like a
specific named substance I can verify does that, because I simply cannot
think of one and am consequently questioning whether one actually exists.

PETN heated by a laser.

.<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010218019304948>

Laser pulse initiation of RDX-Al and PETN-Al composites explosion

Joe Gwinn

 

Other interesting information in the book "Winston Churchill's Toyshop"
and that was the technology of 80 years ago.