The Pentagon's bomb squad has a new idea to thwart Afghan insurgents' weapon of choice: by adding chemicals that'd render its main ingredient non-explosive or even make it lethal to the bomb builders themselves.
The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, wants to tamper with the supplies of fertilizer, the primary component in the bombs that have killed 719 American soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001. One small problem: Most of the 480,000 pounds of fertilizer used in Afghanistan's bombs is smuggled out of Pakistan, and U.S. officials have hardly convinced that country to clamp down.
"We're not going to solve the IED problem inside Afghanistan," a senior U.S. military official told ABC News last week. "If we don't go after the supply, we're playing defense."
That's exactly what JIEDDO's looking to do. The agency's new call for research, first spotted by InsideDefense.com, asks for "additives and methods to disrupt or discourage [bomb] manufacturing from fertilizer."
A fertilizer bomb is little more than ammonium nitrate, fuel and a simple detonator, and it can be assembled in one of two ways: For the most potent explosives, bomb makers can boil the fertilizer to separate its constituent parts and score a supply of ammonium nitrate -- the chemical they're actually after. Or, they can crush up the fertilizer's granules and use 'em as a quick-and-dirty bomb-building base.
JIEDDO is hoping to mess with that process. They're interested in compounds that'd make the fertilizer turn to foam or gel when mixed with water -- rendering the boiling process futile (and rather messy). Or, JIEDDO wants some kind of "grinding inhibitor" that would keep the fertilizer granules in one piece, making them entirely useless to terrorists trying to dissolve or grind them.
But one of the most promising possibilities, floated during JIEDDO chief Lt. Gen. Michael D. Barbero's recent trip to Pakistan: "adding coated urea fertilizer granules to the bags of ammonium nitrate. The combination of urea and ammonium nitrate has a strong affinity for water and would be very difficult for insurgents to dry into an explosive powder," the Washington Post reported. "The urea additives would not stop the insurgents from processing the fertilizer into bombs, but it would complicate their task and potentially make the blast less potent."
The agency's also got more malevolent ideas. They're open to additives that would actually make bomb-building a lethal endeavor for insurgents, by "increasing the inherent risk when processing materials."
Of course, enhancing the safety of ammonium nitrate fertilizers is already a priority -- largely a futile one -- in military and law enforcement circles. Last year, U.S. manufacturer Honeywell debuted a new fertilizer meant to be less explosive by combining ammonium sulfate -- a fertilizer and fire retardant -- with ammonium nitrate. Company execs even pitched the U.S. government on the product, but tests concluded that the fertilizer's constituents could easily be pulled apart and the ammonium nitrate used in bombs.
Since 1995 -- when a fertilizer bomb leveled the federal building in Oklahoma City -- the American government has been partnering with The Fertilizer Institute, a U.S. trade organization, to study whether ammonium nitrate fertilizers could be rendered non-explosive. Sixteen years later, the answer remains a resounding "no" -- study after study has concluded that the fertilizer is essentially impossible to neutralize.
Those studies are hampered by an inevitable challenge: The fertilizer needs to be neutralized, but it's still gotta *work *for farmers. Particularly those in Pakistan, where more than half the economy relies on agriculture and whose climate and soil conditions are ideally suited to ammonium nitrate fertilizer. "A variety of requirements must be met to preserve the safety and effectiveness for agricultural use," the solicitation notes. "New formulations must [also] provide nearly the same value...".
JIEDDO also wants new compounds that could make fertilizer bombs easier to detect. Despite some progress -- most notably the top secret Project Ursus -- there's no reliable way to detect a fertilizer bomb. The agency suggests that a few extra ingredients could "alter the physical or chemical properties of [fertilizer bombs]" in such a way as to increase a signature that can be exploited."
At least in that case, the agency might not have to sneak the chemicals into the fertilizer: Pakarab, the main supplier of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Pakistan, has already indicated a willingness to add such chemicals to their product. Last year, the company tested pink dye that'd distinguish their fertilizer from non-explosive varieties at the nation's border.
It'll likely take years for JIEDDO to come up with an additive that can keep fertilizer out of a terrorist's bomb-making arsenal. When they do, it'll certainly be a boon for plenty of countries, many of which are already banning or tightly regulating ammonium nitrate fertilizers to prevent bomb attacks.
But tampering with a fertilizer supply that's often stolen or smuggled -- from a country that's hardly offering much help -- is hardly a trivial undertaking. Whatever wizardry the military's bomb-stopping sleuths are able to muster, stopping Afghanistan's bomb-makers (and saving American lives) will no doubt require plenty of political alchemy as well.
Photo: Flickr/JIEDDO
