Explosive threats: feds begin to tackle the vexing problem of how to defeat homemade bombs.

AuthorMagnuson, Stew

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A troubled University of Oklahoma mechanical engineering student named Joel Henry Hinrichs III sat down on a park bench on his campus in the early evening of Oct. 1, 2005. A few hundred yards away, a stadium packed with some 83,000 fans cheered as their team took on their rival Kansas State.

Inside Hinrichs' bag was about three pounds of a highly unstable explosive made from common household chemicals, according to press reports. Collectively called triacetone triperoxide, they were concocted from a similar recipe bombers used in a deadly attack on the London transit system three months earlier.

And then the fans inside the stadium heard the explosion.

Hinrichs had blown himself up. There were no other victims. Police later ruled the incident "an accidental suicide."

There was never any hard evidence that the student intended to enter the stadium and his true intentions remain conjecture. But the ease with which the chemicals were obtained and the bomb was constructed has not been lost on counterterrorism experts.

While the public, Congress and the media's attention remains focused on preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil, the fight against improvised explosive devices--or homemade bombs continues mostly out of view, and does not receive the same attention as the chemical, biological or nuclear threats.

Despite this, bomb scares in the United States are an almost daily occurrence

"We're not even looking at roadside bombs. We're more worried about a mass transit event like London or Madrid," said David Tuttle, director of the Department of Homeland Security's explosives division in the science and technology directorate.

"How do we develop technology that prevents that kind of thing from happening?" he asked at a National Defense Industrial Association DHS science and technology stakeholder's conference.

History shows that terrorists, both domestic and foreign, may desire weapons of mass destruction, but building or obtaining them is extremely hard. However, there have been hundreds of terrorist attacks in the United States using homemade bombs during the last 50 years, said Ruth Doherty, program executive officer for counter-IED in the explosives division.

Finding the materials to make them is relatively easy. Downloading how-to instructions from the Internet is easier still.

"We're addressing the entire threat cycle from the beginning of the formation of someone to be a bomber, all the way through to helping a community to recover both physically and socially from the event of a bombing," she said.

The explosives division's budget in 2009 is $96 million, which is less than half of the chemical-biological division's allocation. Most of this $96 million is directed toward protecting airliners. The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office has a budget of $514 million.

Meanwhile, a small outfit in DHS' national protection and programs directorate, the office of bombing prevention, has a $10 million budget and gets by with about 10 staff members and a handful of contractors.

William Flynn, who oversees the office as the director of the protective security division, said it will double its staff numbers next fiscal year and has received an additional $4 million in funding.

"It's a very positive signal of the support we are receiving from our administration and...

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