Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

88 • BOMBINGS, BOMBERSWhile there are a great variety of bombs for specialized purposes,a few types are favored by terrorists, namely, vehicle bombs, letter/parcel bombs, and small bombs designed to destroy airplanes in flight, which have been infrequently used but always with great lethalitywhen successful. Bombs are attractive to terrorists for a numberof reasons. First, they cause high loss of life and casualties, creatingterror when civilians are being randomly targeted, which gets thedesired media coverage and attention to the terrorists and their demands.Second, they usually can be deployed in such a way that theterrorist planting the device can escape injury or arrest. Finally, theyare relatively easy and inexpensive to prepare. Suicide bombings area special case and generally more lethal because the suicide bombercan deploy the bomb to achieve maximum lethality and usually candetonate it before others have a chance to evacuate or to disarm thebomb. Moreover, the willingness of bombers to kill themselves alongwith a large number of victims is itself especially dramatic, shocking,and frightening to the general public, and especially problematic forlaw enforcement and security forces, who ordinarily can count onthe terrorists’ will to live to deter them from attacking or else as abargaining chip in, for example, hostage-barricade situations.It is believed the Narodnaya Volya group in Tsarist Russia wasthe first terrorist group to employ bombing in a systematic terroristcampaign. Oddly enough, although the members of this group franklyadmitted to being “terrorists,” they wanted to bomb only those peoplewhom they viewed as major political or police functionaries of theTsarist regime, and they took great pains to avoid killing or injuringbystanders. By contrast, the terrorists of the late 20th century, such asin the World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing,wanted to maximize the killing of innocent people at the scene.Bombs typically consist of an initiator, a primary charge, and amain charge. The initiator consists of some sort of percussion or electronicdevice, set off either manually, by remote control, or by a timeror some sort of motion-sensitive or barometric device. The primarycharge usually consists of a low-grade explosive that is unstable butof relatively low yield, such as black powder, smokeless gunpowder,nitro starch, or nitrocellulose, while the main charge is a high-qualityexplosive such as nitroglycerin, ammonium nitrate, CompoundB, C-3, C-4, TNT, or Semtex. There is also an intermediate class ofhigh-yield initiators such as lead styphnate and lead azide. The high-