Deliberate terrorist explosions

Explosions can be used for constructive purposes, such as mining and road building for entertainment, such as fireworks or for destructive purposes, such as military weapons and terrorist bombs. They may be either deliberate or accidental. Explosive materials must always be handled with extreme care to prevent accidents. Such caution must be exercised with not only industrial explosives, but also commonly encountered materials such as fireworks, laboratory and industrial chemicals, and flammable gases, see also Fire, Fuels, Power Plants Fireworks Kinetics Nuclear Fission Nuclear Fusion Thermodynamics. 

The terrorist CW threat differs fundamentally from the military CW threats of the past. Essentially, it is driven by accessibility of the material. On the one hand, there has to be concern about the security of existing CW stockpiles. But it is equally important to ensure that terrorist organizations cannot get access to relevant precursor materials or toxic industrial chemicals to produce their own make-shift chemical weapons. A related concern is the presence of toxic industrial chemicals in manufacturing, storage and transport, and the danger of deliberate releases of these chemicals by attacks with conventional explosives. 

Weapons-grade nuclear materials are usually kept in safe custody by all nations. Special nuclear materials (SNMs), which are fissionable radionuclides, are of special interest to the nations concerned. The advent of radiological dispersion devices (RDD), however, changed the entire scenario. An RDD is a weapon that might be deliberately employed by terrorist rmits to disturb the harmony in a corrrmrmity. The dirty bomb is an example of an RDD. The concept of a dirty bomb involves the packaging of explosives with radioactive material. The intention is to disperse the radioactive material when the bomb detorrates. However, an RDD can also be employed to distribute the radioactive material in... 

In the civil setting, the deliberate release of chemicals has also occurred. The series of deliberate chemical releases in Japan in the 1990s, most notably the sarin attacks in Matsumoto in 1994 and on the Tokyo subway network in 1995, showed that even relatively small terrorist groups have the capabiUly to produce and deploy chemical weapons. In addition, the targeting of a road chlorine tanker in Iraq in 2006 by terrorists has emphasised that improvised explosive devices may be used by terrorists to disseminate toxic agents explosively and thus create casualties with both physical and toxic traimia. 

The deliberate explosive dispersal of a radioactive isotope This is termed a radioactive dispersal device and consists of a conventional explosive device surrounded by a radioactive material. The device is a potential terrorist threat and is popularly known as a dirty bomb . 

---