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"IRA: The Bombs and the Bullets," by A. R. Oppenheimer, is a history of the long war fought by Irish insurgent groups; it has some vital lessons for the current conflicts. In particular, it describes the bombing campaigns, from the first gunpowder blast at Clerkenwell in London in 1867 to the immense "city destroyers" of the 1990's. Subtitled "a history of deadly ingenuity," it gives and detailed insight into how the improvised explosive device was developed by the world's most proficient insurgent group. And it examines the deadly, technological game between the bomb-makers and the authorities who sought to stop them across the course of some 19,000 bombings.
Oppenheimer really did his homework for this book, interviewing not only former bomb disposal officers but also individuals associated with the Irish Republican Army. He visits the headquarters of the Irish police in Dublin to see their unique museum of IRA weapons. As well as mortars, AR-15 Armalites (the IRA's favorite), booby-traps and letter-bombs there is even a partially-completed torpedo, intended for use against patrol boats.
Oppenheimer repeatedly shows how the Irish were highly adept at picking up the latest technology. Within two years of the invention of dynamite, Clan na Gael were starting to use it, and the subsequent campaign against the British was known as the "dynamite war." The new explosive was powerful, portable and stable, making it ideal for terrorist bombings. Gelignite was also adopted as soon as it became available.
But the IRA also excelled at home-made explosives. They pioneered fertilizer bombs using ammonium nitrate and developed several recipes or their own such as 'Donegal Mix' or ANNIE – ammonium nitrate, nitrobenzene and diesel. (The book recounts how fertilizer had to be ground up using coffee grinders – a slow process when making a 3,500 lb bomb.) The IRA were also masters at the use of Semtex, an advanced plastic explosive known as 'the magic marble' for its destructive power; although they acquired several tons from Libya, they used Semtex very sparingly, often as a 'booster' to set off cruder explosives.
Oppenheimer gives a good account of the arms race between bomb-makers and bomb-disposal, and the "deadly ingenuity" is very much in evidence. Sometimes, the escalation is simple. In the early days, the IRA used to lob grenades into open-top army trucks. The army put chicken wire over the top of the trucks so grenades would bounce off –- so the IRA started using grenades covered in hooks to catch on the wire. The game of cat-and-mouse eventually became far more sophisticated, with multiple bombs being set to go off in sequence, and devices with dummy mechanisms set as traps to catch bomb squad officers.
In an echo of the current anti-IED effort, the security forces produced ever more sophisticated jammers to stop radio-detonated bombs, while the IRA used ever more sophisticated detonation techniques, moving "up the spectrum" to devices triggered by infra-red beams and photoflashes. They also had devices triggered by a sniper's bullet -–
line of sight, but hard to jam. One of the many incidental details is the use of a timing mechanism which employed a condom; this was something of a moral dilemma for the Catholic IRA, as supplies of condoms for bomb-making might be misused…
When it became difficult to plant an IED next to a target, the IRA
developed a range of improvised mortars -– at least seventeen different versions over the years. Some of these were mobile systems with multiple tubes on time delay, left in the back of a camouflaged van be parked near the target. One of these nearly killed Prime Minister John Major on Downing Street in 1991. The largest were "flying car bombs" throwing a charge of 150 pounds of explosives. There were also improvised rocket launchers, recoilless rifles (one using a reaction mass of digestive biscuits), and even prototype anti-helicopter weapons.
Oppenheimer is unsparing in the description of the carnage caused by the bombs, and has many first-person accounts of the aftermath of explosions ("all I could make out was the top of a torso"). While the stated target was usually the British forces or police, and while warnings were often given, frequently things did not go to plan. Many women and children were "accidentally" killed. This was not a clean war; booby traps were attached to dead bodies, and hostages were forced to drive bomb-laden vehicles towards Army buildings. The British were also capable of ruthlessness in their turn.
Unlike some writers on this topic, Oppenheimer gets a three-hundred-and-sixty degree panorama, including the bomb-makers'
point of view. You get a sense of the technical challenge, the exhilaration when a bomb goes off successfully. And the sense of complete justification: "I've never had a sleepless night over anything
I did as an IRA volunteer. Bombs are weapons of war," one bomb-maker says. "Western states have used them far more brutally than we ever did." Because they saw their struggle as legitimate, any civilian deaths were seen as "an unfortunate consequence of war." All this chimes rather closely with more recent terror groups.
The book also gives a good account of the politics involved, and how the conflict eventually came to an end. 9/11 turns out to be a key date: up until that point, the U.S. paid little attention to terrorism in Northern Ireland and the IRA could count on aid from supporters in
America. Afterwards, the situation changed completely, and this was a significant factor in the final negotiations.
This is a history book; the peace has been holding for years and the IRA has officially abandoned the armed struggle for good.
But the book is well worth reading by anyone interested in the current
"war on terror" to understand how a terror campaign works and how it can be tackled.
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