» External combustion

Following the failed car bomb attempt in Times Square late last week, Autocar investigates the history and terrorist 'appeal' of the car bomb

Since the advent of the Iraq ‘War on Terror’, the term ‘car bomb’ has become a part of everyday vocabulary. News reports from Iraq daily add yet another body count to the already indefensible number of civilian men, women and children who have died as a result of this tool of guerrilla warfare. But where did the notion of using our most common form of transport as a lethal weapon originate?

It is believed that the first ‘car bomb’ was actually a horse-drawn wagon owned by an Italian anarchist called Mario Buda. Following the arrest of two of his comrades, in September of 1920 he pulled up across the road from J.P. Morgan Company at the junction of Wall Street and Broad Street in the heart of New York’s financial district, and at 12 noon the wagon exploded in a fireball of dynamite and shrapnel killing the horse and 40 passers-by as well as injuring over 200. It was the first time that such an inconspicuous mode of transport had been used to such a horrific and murderous end.

Nearly 30 years were to pass before the next instance on January 12, 1947. The Stern Gang, a pro-fascist Mussolini-admiring splinter group who would accept nothing less than the restoration of a Biblical Israel, drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. Such methods of mobile massacre were to become their calling card, killing civilian Arabs, British soldiers and Palestinians alike.

The ‘50s and ‘60s saw the occasional car bomb in locations including Saigon, Algiers and Palermo. The Mafia – always keen to adopt no-nonsense, dramatic and devastating methods of keeping their opponents inline – seem to have been inspired by the bombings in Algiers. Angelo LaBarbera chose the home-grown Alfa Romeo Guilietta to blow up his rival ‘Little Bird’ Greco in February 1963 using a fused tank of butane across the rear seat and several kilos of TNT in the trunk. A few weeks later a second Guilietta also killed one of Greco’s close allies.

Fertile imaginations

But it wasn’t until 1972 when the IRA (Irish Republican Army) apparently stumbled upon the ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil) bomb – which it is also claimed was discovered by radical students at the University of Wisconsin around the same time – that the ‘trend’ really took off. The advantage of such bombs was the fact that they didn’t require any specialist ingredients that a) were difficult and expensive to get hold of, and b) could be easily traced. Simple fertilizer and a few industrial ingredients produced very powerful explosives that could fell skyscrapers and massacre thousands at a time with tactical positioning. As an example of the power of such ingredients, in Oppau, Germany in 1921 a fertilizer factory explosion produced shock waves which were felt 240 kilometres away.

At an industrial level of production the ANFO car bomb could be devastating, not only in terms of human life, but also in terms of strategic terrorization of whole cities.

For the IRA the car bomb became their tour de force, but it was not without the occasional accident. Jack McCabe, the army’s Quartermaster General blew himself up while mixing ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to make the “black stuff” with a shovel in his garage. But once the IRA had mastered how to make ANFO safely it was employed with ruthless tact.

On Friday 21^st July 1972 at various locations around Belfast city centre, 20 cars loaded with ANFO, concealed charges and timers were parked and then detonated. Although in the aftermath of Black Friday the death toll and casualty figures were not that high, it succeeded in making Belfast a no-go zone for important investment, and added fuel to the fire of the Republican cause.

The piece de resistence for the IRA was their partially successful attack on mainland Britain in the very heart of UK government. Only four of the planned ten cars intended for the mission managed to reach London on March 8^th 1973, but all exploded successfully, killing just one but injuring 180. This mission became the template for future IRA car bomb campaigns, not least the Canary Wharf explosion of 1993.

The power and the gory

The IRA had made use of two critical factors. As forensic psychologist, Dr. Raymond Hamdan, comments, “Nothing is as accessible a mode for transporting deadly explosives than a car. Nothing blends into a street full of traffic and pedestrians like a car. Nothing has the concentrative destructive potential and the ability to get close to critical urban targets like a car or van loaded full of high explosives.”

For this reason also, the car bomb in the hands of Hezbollah was able to counter the technological military machinery of the US, France and Israel in Lebanon in the ‘80s. Following President Reagan’s decision to ally the Multinational Force to Lebanon’s Maronite government, on April 18^th 1983 a Hezbollah pickup truck loaded with 2,000lbs of ANFO ploughed into the lobby of the US embassy in Beirut. The blast was felt on the USS Quadalcanal anchored 8 kilometres offshore. At the time, Robert Ames, the CIA’s Near East intelligence officer was visiting the embassy. His hand was found floating a mile out to sea.

This attack left the Americans blind in Beirut and resulted in them being caught unawares when a 5-ton Mercedes truck with a payload of 12,000lbs of high explosives hurtled into the ground floor of the “Beirut Hilton” – the US military barracks next to the international airport on October 23^rd. Believed to have been the largest deliberately detonated non-nuclear explosion in history, the blast apparently lifted the 4-storey building clean off the ground and killed 241 Marines.

Following this and two other truck bombs, Reagan took the decision to withdraw the Multinational Force in February 1984. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was quoted as saying that the power of the US in Lebanon was crippled by “just 12,000lbs of dynamite and a stolen truck.”

Spreading wildfire

In every theatre of war over the past 50 years the car bomb has featured prominently. Between 1992 and 1998 there were 16 major car bombs in 13 cities worldwide. 1,050 people were killed while around 12,000 have been injured. Between them, the IRA and Gama’a al-Islamiyya have caused billions of dollars of damage to the two prime global financial centres – London and New York.

Warfare has long been de-restricted from vast plains where regimented armies met each other face to face. The car bomb has allowed for warfare to creep into our towns and cities unnoticed like a leaking gas tap, until the flame is lit and all hell breaks loose.

Sri Lanka, Bogota, Turkey, Egypt, Chechnya, Kuwait, Bali, Indonesia: all have witnessed the car bomb phenomena first-hand. And of course Iraq, where in the autumn of 2005 alone there were 140 car bomb attacks – with 13 in Baghdad on New Year’s Day 2006. Unable to distinguish car from car bomb, the administrations have retreated behind ‘rings of steel’ and into ‘green zones’. However, for the soldier on the ground the danger is ever increasing, especially from the roadside car bomb which doesn’t even need to be roadworthy to cause mayhem and death.

SUVs stolen in Texas have also found their way to Iraq for use as car bombs. Being the transport of choice for US contractors, having blacked out windows and being capable of substantial loads lends them perfectly to the ‘insurgents’ as a means of mobile weaponry.

Flashpoints

Not only is the car bomb a character immediately associated with the theatre of war. On April 19^th 1995, Timothy McVeigh set off a 5,000lb ANFO bomb in the back of a Ryder rental truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah federal government building killing 167 and injuring 850. Over 300 buildings in the area were also damaged in an attack which McVeigh claimed was a justifiable response to the US government’s mishandling of the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas in February 1993.

The Basque Separatist group ETA have long exploited the car bomb to ‘express’ their grievance with the Spanish and French governments for refusing to allow an independent Basque country in the western Pyrenees. Their first car bomb attack was in September 1985 in Madrid, killing one and injuring 16. Another attack some 16 years later in the same city yielded a much higher casualty figure of 65. In all, ETA has committed 18 ‘successful’ car bomb attacks over the last 22 years – or at least that is how many they have claimed responsibility for.

RED alert

Unfortunately, the IED (improvised explosive device) and ANFO bomb could literally be child’s play compared to the new breed of mobile threat – the RED, or radiation explosive device.

This is one incarnation of the ‘dirty bomb’ and there are many sources to obtain the radioactive material needed to construct one. One good candidate is cesium-137, a highly radioactive substance commonly used in heavy industry. While uranium is at the top of the list of radioactive materials available in illicit trafficking, cesium-137 is the second-most common.

According to Jerome Corsi, author of Atomic Iran, the most dangerous threat to a western city would be the combined RED and suicide bomber. If strategic communication and transportation targets were chosen to cause physical structural damage as a result of the explosion followed by residual radiation damage, then “five terrorists driving automobiles with a RED in the trunk could effectively shut down an area as large as Manhattan, produce a number of deaths and induce fear that would be felt around the nation for weeks, if not months.”

However, he also believes that such a strategy would ultimately have a limited long-term effect and, because of the danger in handling and preparing the radioactive material, the suicide dirty bomb scenario is very unlikely to be a popular choice with organised terror networks.

So, it would seem then, that for the time being the car bomb will remain the hit and run ordnance or ANFO-based improvised weapon that Mario Buda first intended it to be. So, as long as cars remain opaque and there are individuals who have a determination towards their cause such that it necessitates violence and a disregard for the innocent civilian, the car bomb will be a vital tool in their arsenal.