A history of the car bomb

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb is a grimly fascinating little book about a terrorist device pioneered by the Italian anarchist Mario Buda, who blew up a horse-drawn wagon (and the horse) near the Manhattan offices of J.P. Morgan in September 1920. Despite this early debut, the car bomb really came into its own after World War II.

Written by Mike Davis, the MacArthur-winning author of cheerful volumes like Dead Cities and Planet of Slums, this is more than a laundry list of who blew up what and where. It is a well-informed (though sloppily edited) survey of the activities and motivations of a dizzying array of terrorists.

In contrast to the old, unitary menace of the Soviet Union and its allies, Washington [by the mid-1990s] now faced a chaotic spectrum of enemies, spontaneously generated by the contradictions of globalization as well as by the blowback of past policies: rogue assets like Sheik Rahman, megalomaniac militiamen like McVeigh, self-organized Islamists like the Riyadh bombers, super-Capones like Escobar, and remnant Maoists like Sendero Luminoso—and then there was the enduring spectre of Hezbollah’s Imad Magniyah, the General Giap of urban guerrilla warfare.... What they had in common was access to vast reservoirs of anti-Americanism (incubated by cluster bombs, refugee camps, and oil corporations) and the brutal skills diffused by the CIA’s and [Pakistan] ISI’s car-bomb academies (although correspondence courses were increasingly available via the Internet).

This paragraph underlines a couple of the book’s key points: First, that many of the terrorists that trouble us today were spawned by misguided US policies, or were actually trained by the US. Second, that the variety of terrorists is such that taking out a leader like Bin Laden—however satisfying that may feel—will not solve the problem.

The discovery by terrorists that fertilizer and fuel oil can be used to create extraordinarily powerful car bombs also makes it clear that no amount of bomb-sniffing technology or safeguards on C-4 and Semtex will prevent future car bombs.

How powerful is an ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil) bomb?

Timothy McVeigh ... spent less than $5000 on fertilizer, racing fuel, and van rental fees to blast the front wall off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995.... Experts were flabbergasted at the radius of destruction: “equivalent to 4100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building up to a half-mile away.” Distant seismographs recorded it as a 6.0 earthquake on the Richter scale.

Davis’s conclusion: Barring “socio-economic reforms or concessions to self-determination,” which he considers unlikely, “the car bomb probably has a brilliant future.”