Re: Exploding pagers

On 10/3/24 11:05, Martin Brown wrote:

On 03/10/2024 06:31, Chris Jones wrote:

On 3/10/2024 5:56 am, Martin Brown wrote:

This was
almost certainly done as a modification of the battery itself and was cunning enough to have defeated visual inspection...

>
Apart from x-ray examination, it would also be sensible to measure the electrical capacity of the battery and its weight, for any suspect device. As far as I know, there isn't another rechargeable battery chemistry with vastly higher Wh/kg than commercial LiPo cells, so it would be difficult to make a fake battery with the correct capacity and weight, if it also contained a significant mass of other things.

 Capacity would probably not be quite as high as you might hope for a new battery but if ~10% of its mass was HMX that would probably be enough.
 I suspect that in future terrorist groups will attempt to detonate any such handheld devices that they buy in. This was a one time pony trick.
 My guess is that it looked OK on dentists X-ray and that terrorists would not have access to multiband X-ray or terahertz imaging which could determine the unexpectedly high nitrogen content of an explosive.
 It is in essence a variant on the bottles of liquid explosive and fake toner cartridges that terrorists have tried to use against airlines.
 And the reason why we still can't take more than 100ml of anything on a plane. Oddly my local airport is fully equipped with the right gear at great expense but the rules were relaxed only for a few weeks and then re-imposed. I have no idea why that happened it cost a hell of a lot to do and now the regional airports get no benefit from having done it!
 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clmm97x3yvmo
 I suspect it was the laggard major UK hub airports lobbying (they have been very slow to adopt it) rather than any good scientific reason.
 

Not all high-explosives are nitrates. I suppose even recent imagers
can't be relied upon to distinguish all possible explosive chemistries.
Jeroen Belleman