Hysterical tales of terrorism and impending doom unsettle me. Not because I’m worried about being blown up or burnt down, but because news anchors performing like Jehova’s Witnesses trying to warn me that Jesus is coming simply convinces me that someone is trying too hard to sell me something I don’t need.
To start with, we have to keep in mind that the real purpose of terrorism isn’t to kill people. Terrorists need to spread terror, to destabilize and inconvenience, to turn the system upside down and disrupt the normal flow of society and commerce. Sometimes they kill people to achieve this, sometimes they don’t, but a civilian death toll is irrelevant to the main goals of terrorism.
So, without a single fatality, terrorists succeeded in achieving these goals last week. Airports were shut down, flights cancelled, travellers turned away. The costs are astronomical, and still adding up. Where terrorists can only hope to down a small number of aircraft, government hysteria succeeded in downing hundreds.
Was this reaction overblown? Was the drastic action the authorities undertook in balance with the real threat a small group of amateurs posed? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies say yes; I suspect not. Of course, it’s difficult to ever know the truth.
The chemical most often mentioned as being at the core of the terrorist plot is triacetone triperoxide (TATP). It’s true, this can be used as an explosive, probably powerful enough to rip the hull of an aircraft. And true, this does mainly consist of two separate liquids which need to be combined. But creatig TATP powerful enough to blow up an aircraft (without blowing off your fingers while standing in line at the check-in counter) requires skill and a very specific environment.
TATP needs to be prepared at very low temperatures, and even then it’s a highly unstable process. Wikibooks warns: “TATP is widely considered to be too unstable to synthesize safely in standard laboratory facilities”.
Even if a skilled chemist or lab assistant found a way to achieve the stable conditions and cold temperatures needed to prepare TATP, the liquid would need a strong casing to build up enough pressure for a proper explosion. The glass bottles or shaving cream cannisters mentioned by the press are too weak to cause major damage. It’s a “you’ll put somebody’s eye out” scenario, rather than the serious threat the media frenzy has made it out to be.
It’s pure coincidence, of course, but there’s an American election coming up, and the Republicans are slipping in the ratings. And it was the American Government which pushed the British to act. Fresh proof of the clear and present danger they like so much can’t hurt. But pure coincidence, as I said. To believe otherwise would be to believe in conspiracy theories, and we don’t do that, do we?
