Methods of suicide bombing
Up throughout history, people have been known of performing suicide missions
in many different ways. I have been doing this research as part of a novel
I am working on, and decided I might as well node it
Grenades
A popular way (I can't believe I'm using that phrase about suicide bombers,
but there you go) to perform suicide bombing missions is to use regular handgrenades.
Although I don't know a lot about these kinds of explosives, I would think
that hand grenades are made to devastate and rip apart people. One grenade
in every hand (or possibly even three or four, if you can find a way to pull
the pins) would have nasty effects in a crowd
Dynamite
A particularily nasty way of suicide bombing involves fixing as much dynamite
to your body (traditionally under a robe, trench coat or whatever), walking
into a large mass of people, and pressing the button that sets off the charges.
An even more sinister version of this one works basically the same way, but
instead of pressing the buttons to set off the charge, it works the other
way - The charges go off when the button is released. This way, a suicide
bomber can stroll around casually, holding the button pressed. The psychological
effect of this is tremendous - the bomber can walk around with all the explosives
visible, scaring the hell out of people. Police know that if they shoot the
bomber, he (or she) lets go of the button, and the charges go off.
Plastics
Same as above, but using Semtex, C-4, PETN or something else equally
nasty.
Shatterbombs
I don't know the technical term for this (if you do, please tell me). A shatterbomb
is a mix between dynamite and a handgrenade. The idea is to kill a large number
of people, not by the blast itself, but by killing them with shrapnel. Imagine
what happens if you take a huge hitching backpack, add 3 pounds of high
explosives, and fill the rest of the bag with nails, pieces of metal, broken
glass etc? Yes indeed- things get very nasty. This has actually been used
several times.
According to CNN, plans for making these kinds of nasty suicide bombs were
found in the garage of the kids guilty of the Columbine nastiness (plans?
For a shatterbomb? sorry, but to me that makes me doubt CNN's reliability.
Why suicide bombers are unstoppable
Unfortunately (as the world noticed in particular September 11, 2001) people
who are willing to die for their cause are extremely hard to stop. I mean, what are you going to threaten them with? "Don't set off that bomb, or I'm going to kill you!" ?
There are
ways to make a bomb virtually undetectable - take C-4, for example. The
stuff explodes when a certain current runs through it. This current, you could
get from a battery (nobody would question anybody carrying a battery). C-4
by itself is very hard to detect. The result is that basically anybody can
smuggle a fairly massive bomb in anywhere. An old-style (i.e big and chunky)
laptop with all it's content ripped out, filled with C-4 and with the on/off
switch coupled to the explosives and a battery makes a horrible bomb.
All of this adds up to making the world disgustinly unsafe. Come to think
of it, it makes me rather worried. I think I'll just go to bed now.