“Thermobaric Urban Destruction” is the title of the “users manual” for the latest weapon being deployed by US Marines against “urban targets”.  Basically it is a cheap, highly portable building leveler that mixes “fuel” with air and then sparks it.  This could backfire.  Seriously backfire.  As in “Burning Down the Civilization” backfire.  Thermobarics, as a kind of fuel-air explosive technology, use air for the oxydizer, into which a fuel is sprayed—sort of the way coal mine dust, grain elevator dust and natural gas leak explosions do.  Unlike Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO), you can’t lock onto a substance like ammonium nitrate for detection and control, anymore than you can control access to, uhm, air.  That means you can’t use a substance-control strategy against them without getting rid of gasoline, diesel, natural gas—you know—fuel.  Since everyone drives around in vehicles with tanks filled with the chemical energy equivalent of 500lbs of explosives just waiting for a technology to disperse it efficiently into an aerosol near an enemy’s real estate assets (and/or the enemy himself), it is rather easy to imagine things getting out of hand if the right aerosol technology gets developed.  And with the critical materials so redily available, experimentation with techniques for dispersal—techniques that don’t require a lot in the way of special equipment or materials—will evolve Improvised Explosive Devices terribly rapidly.

To sum up, with the US deploying thermobarics in Iraq for demolishing buildings and killing their occupants, I can easily imagine two things happening:

1. The Iraqi resistance will start to use it in an “open source” developed Improvised Explosive Device.
2. US Hispanic soldiers will acquire this “open source” technology while in Iraq and do a “technology transfer” to US gangs as they have already done with other technology acquired during military service in Iraq.

Once that happends the days of Timothy McVeigh will seem like “the good old days”.