President Clinton recently sent a letter of thanks to a team of bomb-defusing specialists at the Sandia National Laboratories for their work during the Unabomber investigation. The team played a behind-the-scenes role until Theodore Kaczynski's cabin was discovered, and then they spent three days dismantling the bomb that was found inside.
During the investigation, the team was under 24-hour alert in case one of the Unabomber's devices was found intact.
At the same time, the group was also devoted to developing new defusing technologies. New kinds of remote control and robotic devices, X-rays, and electronic circuits were developed, and advances in kinetics and "shock physics," a subfield of chemistry and physics, were also involved.
"If you saw the movie Speed, that's the kind of stuff the National Labs are using. It's pretty space-age stuff - what [Sandia Labs] does definitely defines the state of the art," said Kevin Lothridge, past president of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors.
Ironically, considering Kaczynski's professed anti-technology agenda, the 17-year spate of Unabomber explosions gave the Sandia team the mandate to advance the science of bomb defusing as far as possible.
Chris Cherry, a principal member of the Sandia team, designed a suite of tools that was completed in the fall of 1995, with help from experts at the FBI Laboratory Division and Rod Owenby, another Sandia scientist. The set of tools and safe procedures were designed to be rapidly deployable in the event that the authorities intercepted one of the Unabomber's bombs. While refinements continued, the team was on 24-hour alert.
Then came the call.
"I was sitting around one night when the FBI called and said they had a live bomb in the Unabomber's cabin," remembered Cherry. "They asked how soon I could get to Montana. I said, 'Probably tomorrow,' but they said that wasn't soon enough, and they flew in an FBI plane to pick me up that night."
While Cherry would not talk about the specifics of the Kaczynski's bomb, he did say it was fairly complex. The former math professor's work ran against the trend, said Cherry: Over time, the sophistication of explosive devices encountered in the field has been decreasing, though explosive power has been increasing.
The most sophisticated bombs were deployed in Miami "during the Castro days," said Cherry, referring to a period leading up to the Bay of Pigs.
Those bombs were more sophisticated, said Lothridge of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, because "the CIA was training those people and providing them with plastic explosives." Cherry cites a bomb planted in Harvey's Casino at Lake Tahoe in 1980 as the last time he faced a truly complex device. Experts were neither able to defuse the huge device nor move it; when it exploded, it caused heavy dma
Defusing bombs has become increasingly challenging because bomb technicians have the complex assignment of preserving the explosive device as legal evidence in the event of a trial.
"Destroying [the Unabomber's bomb] would've been easy, but our job was to make it so that the bomb doesn't explode on anybody and it's safe to transport the subcomponents. To do it we have to work in a series of tiers," said Cherry. "It's binary: If it goes off, it's all ruined."
One concrete new technology developed by Sandia to come out of the Unabomber investigation was the Pan Destructor, which is a remote tool that bomb technicians use to actually kill the fuse of the bomb - one of the bomb defuser's most difficult and dangerous tasks.
"I guess if you saw what we do, experimenting with large explosives, you would think it's a pretty funny way of working for a living," said Cherry.
