User:Exxa~enwiki/bombs and manuals

A "Bomb-Making Manual" is a guide about how to make bombs. These guides vary from simple drawings to specifically detailed manuals which are broadened secretly or publicly. This page describes the term “Bomb-Making Manual” corresponding to terrorism rather than to military or official, technical bomb-making manuals. Bomb-making manuals have and are still stimulating terrorism acts all over the world.

Origin
The origin of bomb-making manuals respective terrorism can not be dated exactly. Early occurrences can be found in connection to the Anarchist's movements and their leading characters like the insurrectionary anarchists Johann Most and Luigi Galleani.

Johann Most published manuals for preparing dynamite and other explosives. Summarizing articles of his own magazine “Die Freiheit” resulted in the brochure “Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft” (engl.: “Science of Revolutionary Warfare”, New York, 1885), describing the production of nitroglycerin, dynamite, gunpowder, bombs and many more. His knowledge about explosives was gained by working some weeks under a wrong name at a dynamite factory. In the year 1886, a bomb was thrown into the crowd at the worker unrests on the 4th May (Haymarket Riot) shattering the U.S. with one of the first terrorist acts using handcrafted bombs. The occurence of that event was also enforced to happen by the help of Most, he held a speech in front of about 6000 immigrant workers in October 1882 and called for direct militant action .That fact and Mosts “The Beast of Property” injected violent anarchistic ideas into the anarchism followers. Chicago anarchists believed in the strong power of explosives like stated in the newspaper The Alarm: “One man armed with a dynamite bomb is equal to one regiment of militia…The whole method of warfare has been revolutionized by the latter day discoveries of science and the American people will avail themselves of its advantages…”.

Some fruits of Galleani's labor were written down in a 46 pages long explicit bomb-making manual called "La Salute è in voi!" (engl.:“Health is in You!”, 19xx) which was spread to anarchism followers by the Italian anarchist newsletter “Cronaca Sovversiva” (engl.: Subversive Chronicle, which he found on June 6, 1903). This manual was an error-prone adaption of a guide to explosives which Galleani got from his friend, Professor Ettore Molinari. How many victims were injured by trying to produce the nitroglycerin, which had serious errors in the chemical formula, is unknown. The first use of Galleani's manual is dated around 1914 where "three anarchists were blown up while creating a bomb meant to destroy John D. Rockefeller's home.". In the same year several bombings took place in several areas in New York, accomplished by Galleanists. Galleanists were also main suspects of the Wall Street Bombing (Sept. 16, 1920), where 38 people were killed - who were the offenders has not been proven yet.

Availability and Accessibility
Information about constructing explosives is mainly available in two different ways: printed in books, papers, journals etc. or in digital form on the Internet.

Before the 19th Century printing was still quite expensive, but with the early nineteenth century improvements in printing and publishing technology were achieved that made the printing of books cheaper. Because of this the availability of technical manuals increased, including chemistry manuals. Authors at that time were writing in the context of an educational and training system which assumed direct instructions. The readers were expected to already have some basic skills gained by their profession and just want to have supplemental material.

These circumstances had impact on the bomb-making manuals made at that time – Luigi Galleani's manual for nitroglycerin production was an adaption of a professors' chemical manual. His lack of knowledge about chemistry could not cover some gaps in the original manual which lead to errors. Other cases like Johann Most's manuals and William Powell's "The Anarchist Cookbook” suffered similarly. All of those “Do-It-Yourself” manuals were at least partially inherited of a professional manual without proper “craft knowledge - the ability to recognize the correct progress of the work by observation of the work piece".

Over time books were reviewed and rewritten, errors corrected and republished. The legendary Anarchist Cookbook, originally written by William Powell, is updated and adapted continuously by other authors and free available on the Internet, the second main way of broadening bomb-making manuals. Making “Plastic Explosives”, “Napalm” and “Pipe Bombs” are described in detail in the “Anarchist Cookbook IV”. The Anarchist Cookbook has been cited in other books about lethal weapons like "Beyond Pepper Spray: The Complete Guide to Chemical Agents, Delivery Systems, and Protective Masks" which holds information about development, and use of modern chemical agents and inspired many web pages.

Using the Internet, experts and non-experts all over the world focus and merge the knowledge about explosives, ingredients lists and instructions on how to make incendiary devices more accurate over time. Authors like David Richards are calling for case studies to verify and improve the manuals. Bomb-making manuals are not legal in some countries – the barrier of book-access is removed by the existence of the Internet and the digital versions of the books. In 1997, a bill to prohibit the distribution of bomb-making instructions in the United States was created. The penalty for violating this law leads up to a fine of 250.000 US-$ and 20 years in jail.

Authors and their intentions
Many authors of bomb-making manuals try to stay with their “ingredients lists” as close as possible to household products. Persons writing such manuals can be classified from quite harmless explosion devices enthusiasts to real terrorists and members of official governments.

Johann Most wrote his manual cause of his discontentment with the trend of the former social democratic party and the suppression of worker groups by the regime's police.

Kurt Saxon, author of the "The Poor Man's JAMES BOND" book series about weapons and explosives, allegedly wrote them to supply officials like police and fire chiefs with information about lethal devices to make their lives easier.

The motivation of William Powell for writing the Anarchist Cookbook were discussed by himself about thirty years after finishing it: "The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in.". Further on, he claims to never been part of a left or right wing radical group, but involved in the anti-war movement in times of the Counterculture movement - "the central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this". Powell put the book in print, but lost the copyright to the publisher which made his attempts to take the book out of print futile.

Accidentally, a step-by-step atomic bomb-making guide produced by the UK Ministry of Defense was for a while publicly available in the British National Archieves (Public Records Office) before it was removed after recognizing the mistake. The plans referred to the first British atomic bomb, the “Blue Danube Bomb”, which was build around the 1950's.

The Internet as a source of lethal weapons
For terrorists it is more effort to purchase a book for their purpose than gathering information using the Internet: A bookstore or publisher that wants to sell that information must be located and the wares must be paid. Furthermore they must be willing to bear the social consequences that others frown upon. Nowadays requiring lethal information requires only a few clicks - a list of examples as following:


 * “The Anarchist Cookbook”, adaption of William Powells' original from the year 1971
 * “The Terrorist's Handbook”
 * "The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives”, Tenney L. Davis
 * DeltaPress bookstore, lots of information about lethal devices
 * Skynet-Userpage, includes a list of books about making explosives
 * Disease.net, download manuals on explosives
 * United States Department of Justice, Report on the availability of bombmaking information, the extent to which its dissemination is controlled by federal law, and the extent to which such dissemination may be subject to regulation consistent with the first amendment to the United States Constitution

Other manifestations about constructing lethal devices are bomb-making videos spread around the world like a Al-Qaeda videotape, as part of a 64 videos training series, found in a house where their leader Osama Bin Laden had stayed. The video shows how to make TNT and bomb components using easy-to-obtain materials to make powerful explosives from scratch. Safety tips and detailed how-to was explained by the instructor.

Bomb-making manuals and acts of terrorism
Referring to the four waves of terror defined by David Rapaport, bomb-making manuals had their first occurrences during the first wave of terrorism, the “Anarchist Wave”, and were broadened to political party members, especially anarchists like Most and Galleani. Passing the second, the “Anti-Colonial Wave” when no famous bomb-making manuals were written, and third wave, the “New Left Wave” when William Powell wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1968 and 1969, bomb-making manuals are produced up to now and ongoing in the fourth wave, the “Religious Wave” of terrorism.

Serving religious warfare, members of Al-Qaeda have produced a comprehensive training manual and religious/political manifest for the worldwide Al-Qaeda terrorist network which includes manuals about bomb-making. The first book of the eleven volumes long "Encyclopedia of the Afghani Jihad" holds information about crafting explosives. Abu Hamza al-Masri, a Muslim cleric in the United Kingdom, pronounced guilty in several cases of soliciting to murder, was in possession of that training manual.

January 2002, Afghan police found evidence that Al-Qaeda is building a serious weapons program and is interested in creating nuclear weapons. Several documents about construction of bombs and a list of 64 chemicals used to make explosives like RDX and C-4 including the recipes for constructing those were found. Two month before that, the 11th book of the Al-Qaeda collection was found. 500 pages full of bomb-making manuals were ??broadened?? on Compact-Discs with the purpose of “destroying America”, as Taliban leader Mullah Mohamed Omar said.

In October 2005 terrorists involved in the bombing of Bali, Indonesia where 3 suicide bombers and 20 people died, had used a 17 minute long bomb-making video in Arabic language to construct their explosive devices which hardened the belief that the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah group is responsible for the bombing. The video “shows viewers how to assemble the explosive components and then slot the bomb into a body vest, which is tightened like a corset and is barely noticeable when worn under a shirt. It also demonstrates the impact of the human bomb -- the ball bearings penetrated steel plates within a 10m radius of a mannequin they had put the vest on.”

9th of November, 2005, raids on suspicious persons in Sydney, Australia, "turned up hundreds of liters of chemicals, laboratory equipment, 165 detonators, 132 digital timers, batteries, firearms and ammunition. The suspects' home also contained Al-Qaeda literature and bomb-making manuals... It appears they were turning the Sidney house into a bomb-making factory." .

On the 31st July, 2006 Lebanese terrorists placed suitcase-bombs in two trains in Germany. Due to construction mistakes only the ignition-part of the bomb was executed without detonating the whole packages. The construction manual for the bombs, which were made of 1,5 liters of car-fuel and 11 liters of propane-gas with an ignition-device made of an alarm-clock, batteries and some wires, was found on a deleted hard-disk in the computer of one of the terrorists.