Re: Exploding pagers

On 21/09/2024 00:04, Cursitor Doom wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:16:28 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
 

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.

Tetrazene meets your requirements at below the boiling point of water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrazene_explosive
That would be well within the range that a phone battery might reach if it was deliberately shorted out. I doubt if that was how they did it though. Nothing like enough black smoke in the videos.
A military grade high explosive seems far more likely for a state actor. Weight really matters in a portable device.

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

 But that's not what has been claimed. The MSM gave us to understand
that the explosive involved could be triggered by a the kind of
temperature increase we would expect from an overheating lithium
battery. No one has yet specifically named a practical explosive which
does this. You say PETN can be triggered by heating from a laser which
is not the same thing at all. I like questioning official narratives,
but am getting rather tired of this one. I'm not *that* interested to
pursue the matter ad infinitum.

Given the low internal resistance of a Lithium battery there is no problem in using a detonator that is in essence a nichrome filament coated in the right primer and RDX or HMX as the main charge. This was almost certainly done as a modification of the battery itself and was cunning enough to have defeated visual inspection by Hamas operatives.
There are plenty of explosives that will detonate at red heat.
I wonder if a tiny fraction of them did not detonate when instructed to do so or if there are any of them still out in the wild and not in Hamas hands. They will be interesting if a bit risky to dismantle.
--
Martin Brown