Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Technology rushing to catch up with liquid bomb threat

By ALISA ULFERTS
Published August 11, 2006

Americans surrendering their sunscreen, hair gel and bottled water at airports across the nation surely have thought there must be a better way to keep liquid explosives off planes.

There is. But don’t look for it at airports anytime soon.

Experts say the technology exists that will, one day, be able to detect the presence of liquid explosives without asking passengers to dump their carry-on bottles or even remove them from their bags.

Developing the technology is one thing; getting the money and the coordinated effort to bring it to the nation’s airports is another.

“This is going to take funding,” said Sean Moore, vice president for sales and marketing at Irvine, Calif.-based HiEnergy Technologies, Inc. Moore’s company has developed a scanner that bombards packages with neutrons to determine the molecular structure of the contents within. It reportedly can locate explosives in both solid and liquid form, but so far hasn’t been sold to any airports.

Other companies are working on similar devices, but it could be several years before they are in widespread use.

“We already have the capabilities. It’s just a matter of getting aligned with the right partners,” Moore said.

How much alignment companies like Moore’s can expect from the federal government is unclear. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been criticized in the past few years for diverting millions of dollars intended for research and development of new technologies — including liquid explosives scanners — for other uses, such as airport security personnel.

The department failed to spend $200-million in research and development money from past years, prompting lawmakers to rescind the money this summer. Some newer scanning machines cost more than $250,000.

The agency also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided to the United States earlier this year.

So when faced with what they called a credible threat to blow up U.S.-bound airliners using liquid explosives — and lacking scanners or swipes capable of detecting whether a bottled substance is the cosmetic on the label or a sinister replacement — everything got tossed in the trash.

“I don’t think they’re worried about your mouthwash —  they’re worried about you putting another green liquid into your mouthwash bottle,” said Jimmie Carol Oxley, an expert on the chemistry of explosives at the University of Rhode Island.

That “other” liquid would be a peroxide based explosive called triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, which the terrorist ring in Britain is reported to have been planning to use, and which shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to use.

Experts say its household cousins, nail polish remover and hydrogen peroxide, commonly found in drugstores, are too weak to create an explosion that could bring a plane down.

But there are industrial strength versions, especially of peroxide, that could do the job if they were smuggled aboard.

They aren’t easy to come by, said Neal Langerman, president of Advanced Chemical Safety, a consulting company in San Diego. Concentrated peroxide is sold by the tanker, and only with a chain of custody trail.

“You couldn’t purchase a gallon of it,” Langerman said. “Even though I know who to call, I couldn’t get it.”
Langerman said detecting the presence of peroxide explosives isn’t difficult to do—  except on a large scale.

“What we don’t yet have is a method for mass screening for the likely components of an explosive,” Langerman said.

Ehud Keinan has come about as close as anyone to developing such a tool. Keinan, a chemistry professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, has spent the last 20 years studying peroxide explosives.

He’s developed a disposable Peroxide Explosive Tester, a device the size of a pen with multi-colored ink.

The device goes on the market next month, and can detect the minutest quantities of peroxide explosives. And he’s already at work developing a non-disposable model that could test for substances 1,000 times.

But even Keinan says his invention is best used if a person is already suspected of carrying an explosive.

“It’s a tester,” Keinan said. “You need to touch the suspected surface or the compound itself.”

Homeland Security officials have said such individual tests, even if efficient, are unsuitable for wide deployment because they’d bring security lines to a crawl.

Experts say that could mean, for now, a continued reliance on systems not designed to stop liquid explosives, such as metal detectors and “puffer” technology that blows air on people and sniffs the particles that emerge.

And that could mean passengers will have to keep pouring out their liquids, said Vilem Petr, a explosives expert with the Colorado School of Mines.

Because those conventional screening machines “don’t have the technology to say this is a liquid explosive or Coca-Cola.”

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report, which contains material from the Associated Press.

[Last modified August 11, 2006, 22:39:58]