Black and Smokeless Powders Technologies for Finding Bombs and the Bomb Makers (1998) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-13
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In addition, smokeless powder is used in ammunition manufactured for civilian use, and moderate amounts of black powder are used for blasting in the mining industry. Besides serving these legitimate purposes, black and smokeless powders can also be used to manufacture improvised explosive devices.
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The NRC Committee on Smokeless and Black Powder responded by examining the relevant issues, with the goal of analyzing whether markers and taggants could be added to black and smokeless powders, while considering whether such additions would pose a risk to human life or safety; substantially assist law enforcement officers in their investigative efforts; substantially impair the quality and performance of the powders for their intended lawful use; have a substantial adverse effect on the environment; have costs that outweigh the benefits of their inclusion; and be susceptible to countermeasures.2 From 1979 to 1992 in the United States, the number of reported bombings involving black and smokeless powders approximately doubled (Hoover, 1995~. However, between 1992 and 1996 (the most recent year for which data were available to the committee)
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Because the powder containers in black and smokeless powder explosive devices must be thick enough to provide the substantial confinement of powder required to produce an effective explosion, they are likely to be visible on standard x-ray images. In addition, metal pipe bombs are readily detected by metal detectors, and dogs can detect a wide range of smokeless powders, black powders, and black powder substitutes and currently can be trained to detect devices containing any type of powder.
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Although wider deployment of routine screening technologies is unlikely to affect significantly the number of victims of black and smokeless powder bombings, improving the capability of law enforcement personnel to deploy bomb detection technologies in response to an identified threat at a given site may still help to prevent casualties among bystanders and bomb squad personnel. Identification After a bombing takes place, information about improvised explosive devices must be obtained from material recovered at the scene.
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The ideal taggant would have the following characteristics, which are not necessarily of equal importance: no real or perceived health or safety risks, forensic applicability and utility for law enforcement, chemical and physical compatibility with black and smokeless powders, no adverse effect on powder or ballistic performance, no adverse environmental impact or contamination, low cost to various links in the chain of commerce, no viable countermeasures, and unique information that is easy to read. A large number of companies and other organizations proposed taggant concepts that were considered by this committee.
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FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Information and Statistics Finding: Bombs that use black or smokeless powder cause a relatively small number of deaths and injuries, but their potential for use in terrorist activity is important. Typically over the past 5 years, about 300 "significant"5 bombing incidents each year have involved black or smokeless powder, and these bombings caused on the order of 10 deaths, 100 injuries, and $1 million in property damage annually.6 Although the number of incidents attributable to terrorism is currently very low in the range of one or two incidents per year the committee notes that when bombing incidents are acts of terrorism, the target is larger than the physical location of the explosion, since a goal is to induce panic or fear among the general population.
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Finding: Current x-ray systems are capable of detecting explosive devices containing black and smokeless powders and are effective when placed at a portal or when used in portable equipment to examine a suspicious package. Current x-ray technologies are not suitable for quickly screening large numbers of packages or for performing large-area searches.
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X-ray systems and dogs currently provide a strong capability for detecting bomb containers and unmarked black and smokeless powders in the scenarios considered by the committee, and most powder bombings currently take place at locations in which deployment of bomb detection systems is not practicable (see Table 1.4 in chapter 1~. Therefore, the committee believes that the effectiveness of a marking program would be limited at the present time.
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RECOMMENDED ACTION: A comprehensive national powder database containing information about the physical characteristics and chemical composition of commercially available black and smokeless powders should be developed and maintained. Such a database would assist investigators in identifying the manufacturer and product line of these powders used in improvised explosive devices.
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Finding: No tagging system has been fully tested to demonstrate its technical feasibility for use in all types of black and smokeless powders, although in some cases taggants have been added to powders for specific applications. The use of taggants in Switzerland for black powders intended for blasting, and the use of dyed powder grains in some smokeless powder products in the United States, indicate that some forms of taggants are technically feasible for some powder products.
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Research needs to focus on discovering and testing taggant concepts in the context of the ideal taggant criteria described by the committee in Chapter 3 and in the context of the capabilities of the forensic community to identify untagged powders. RECOMMENDATION: If the type or number of bombing incidents involving black and smokeless powders increases in a way that leads policymakers to believe that current investigatory and prosecutorial capabilities must be supplemented, the committee recommends that use of taggants, additional record keeping, or a combination of both actions be considered, provided that the chosen taggant technology has satisfactorily met all of the appropri
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The response to an increased bombing threat would depend on the nature of these bombings and the state of the technologies available when the decisions are being made. The type of taggant program and/or level of record keeping could be chosen to reflect the threat that these measures are meant to counteract.
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