Pipe Bombs Simple Form Of Destruction It Doesn’t Take A Chemist To Make One, Professor Says

Teenagers have built them for kicks. Spurned lovers have sent them to their former partners. Foreign terrorists have planted them aboard buses.

Saturday someone detonated one at the Olympics.

Pipe bombs like the device that exploded in Atlanta are among the most democratic instruments of destruction: They can be obtained by just about anyone. Easily constructed from household materials and capable of doing great damage, sophisticated and amateur pipe bombs have exploded with increasing frequency across the country in recent decades.

“They can be as small or as large as the imagination of the manufacturer,” said Sgt. John Moir of the Suffolk County (N.Y.) Police Emergency Services Section.

In annals of explosives, most pipe bombs are at the simpler end of the spectrum from the sophisticated bombs that have been used to destroy jumbo jetliners, as investigators suspect may have happened in the downing of TWA Flight 800 on July 17.

Bombs directed at jetliners must be designed to avoid airline detection systems, and be able to pack enough power to bring down an airplane.

The simplest pipe bomb, by contrast, consists of a metal water pipe stuffed with common explosive materials. The ends are capped, and a fuse - often similar to the type used to detonate a firecracker - is attached to one end.

When the fuse lights the explosive, it shatters the pipe, hurling shards of metal in every direction at a great velocity.

A pipe bomb can be ignited by a simple wick or a computerized timer.

Brent Smith, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said pipe bombs have been popular with right-wing militias and other domestic terrorist groups who lack training. “You don’t have to be a chemist or a whiz at all to figure out what you need to make one,” he said.

In April, federal authorities arrested members of a Georgia militia group who had manufactured more than a dozen homemade pipe bombs. Media reports initially said the bombs were intended for the Olympics, although it turned out one of the group’s members had merely said that they might be blamed if a pipe bomb went off at the Games.

There are hundreds of reports of pipe bombs in the United States each year. A pipe bomb packed with 3-inch nails exploded in the doorway of the City Hall building in Spokane in April - just a few weeks after another pipe bomb blew up outside The Spokesman-Review’s Valley office. A pipe bomb also damaged the Spokane Valley’s Planned Parenthood office on July 12.