Talk:Improvised explosive device

Improvised nbuclear weapon

A recent addition, suggests a terrorist-built nuclear weapon could be a WMD and an IED. True, although I think that needs more context. "If an IED uses nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological weapons technology to produce its effects, it is also a WMD, as a start."

The Edit Note -- I try to avoid putting serious comments in them because they are not easily accessible -- mentions North Korea, but I don't understand the context. If North Korea sold a complete nuclear weapon to terrorists, it wouldn't be improvised, but purpose-built. If NK sold them plutonium from which they built a nuclear device, it probably would be considered an IED -- one of the characteristics of IEDs is they undergo little or no testing, and, when triggered, often have unpredictable effects. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:09, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Not an addition, a change - the article previously stated that a terrorist-built nuclear weapon would be both an IED and and WMD, but that is incorrect. With the definition of terrorist being stretched these days to include sovereign states, it is possible for a terrorist-built nuclear weapon to be WMD but not an IED, for example if built by North Korea (part of the axis of evil as I recall). The other example was of a home-grown terrorist with lab access - again not an IED but WMD. So the problem is the wording of the existing paragraph - it starts with a terrorist-built nuclear weapon but perhaps you actually meant a terrorist built nuclear IED, because the phrase terrorist-built nuclear weapon does not imply that it must be an IED.

As to the use of the edit summary, I am not sure what you mean as an alternative to using it. Do you mean not using it at all, or do you mean instead posting the summary here? I don't think this a controversial change - I could have marked it 'minor' - and the edit summary seemed adequate, which in my mind meant that talkpage-posting was not needed. David Finn 19:37, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

While some politicians and journalists do speak of state terrorism, it's sufficiently different from terrorism in UN and other definitions that I consider them two different issues. There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, but I would observe that if everything can be called terrorism, the concept is meaningless. I regard it as the actions of non-state actors to affect a political process, or civilian behavior, through the threat or actuality of violent means.

If I may, let me put aside nuclear WMD, and use the example of chemical and biological terrorism, as conducted by Aum Shinryo in Japan. They had nontrivial amounts of laboratory and professional resources, but their weapons either didn't work at all, or had effects far less than a weapon developed with state resources. It is far, far more difficult than most people realize to get a chem-bio weapon to work at all reliably. Aum variously didn't check if their anthrax strain was pathogenic to humans -- it would have been devastating to any cattle in Tokyo -- and their dispersing system for Sarin didn't aerosolize at all. In my opinion, the most plausible terrorist WMD threat is radiological, and will still have only a local effect. There's a difference between a lab, as with the US mailed anthrax, and an area-effect weapon, which needs extensive testing facilities.

With the possible exception of North Korea, every state-built nuclear weapon worked the first time. That being said, states will have such things as hydrodynamic and hydronuclear test facilities. The scale of such facilities is probably beyond the capabilities of non-state actors.

For a loose operational definition, it's an IED if I really don't know if anything will go BOOM when I twist the handle of the blasting machine.

As far as the edit summary, remember that if I'm tracking the article through a watchlist, I will never see anything except the last edit summary. Putting the comment on the talk page gives a better chance that it will be seen. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:23, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I suppose that definition works up to a point, but if this was the tenth IED you had made from identical artillery rounds and household parts then you might be surer of success than the first. Is that any less an IED? Does experience at making IEDs make them non-IEDs?

I do agree that the term terrorist doesn't stand for as much as it used to - a sign of our times I guess. David Finn 20:44, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

(undent) You are getting closer to why an IED is improvised, if it's being made from artillery shells that haven't been kept in proper storage. If I picked up, very carefully, ten U.S. M109 155mm howitzer rounds cached all over Iraq, I have no idea of how hot they have gotten and the state of the filler. Artillery shells also are designed to go off only under the circumstances of being shot from a cannon, so there's been no industrial-level testing of the detonation mechanism.

A harder question would be if I were on a Special Forces operation, took several pounds of Composition C-4 out of the factory wrapper, attached a factory-built tripwire to an assembly of a blasting cap and other things about which I shall be vague, and emplaced it along a trail, in absolute accordance with the approved doctrine. In other words, I am using things designed to be improvised. By most definitions, that would be an IED, but I would have far more confidence that it would go off than the same initiation device connected to a booster charge on an artillery shell of questionable provenance, and a booster that is not tested to have the same effect as a standard shell fuze. 155mm shells usually have one or more threaded wells, into which the selected fuze is inserted and set before firing. Howard C. Berkowitz 00:11, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

By the way, you can alter your watchlist parameters in your preferences - mine is set to show all recent edits, up to 500, and displays all edits to a watchlisted article, not just the most recent, using the Expand watchlist to show all applicable changes parameter. David Finn 08:01, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I didn't know that. I'm going back to bed for a while -- cat nursing for much of the night (and some writing), very little sleep, but some strikingly positive results this morning. He's now in other capable hands. Howard C. Berkowitz 13:55, 18 September 2010 (UTC)