Book Review: Home Workshop Explosives

I like to joke (not really a joke, but more of gallows humor) that I am on several “lists” due to my eclectic and controversial book purchases.*

However, as I used to tell my college kids (in intro to terrorism) if you don’t know the bad guy tactics then you can never hope to catch them. you will hear more about that when I get around to reviewing The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Mini-manual of the Urban Guerrilla, and Turner Diaries,

The author claims to be a chemical engineer, but I cannot verify that due to his use of an alias, I do know that the majority of his books are written toward clandestine drug labs, and are unofficial “required” reading within the DEA. I don’t know anything about drugs, but I can say that this book is a lot better than the majority of available explosive books.

In my experience, if someone mentions the “anarchist cookbook” in a discussion about energetic materials, you need to stop talking to that person because A. He is a moron, B. He doesn’t know anything, but thinks he does, C. Even the author of the “cookbook” admitted pretty much every thing in the book will get you killed (he wrote it in high school and later realized how stupid he was as).

As “Uncle Fester” admits in his book, making some explosive compounds is easy, it was “common” to make nitroglycerine on a kitchen stove in the late 1800’s, but if you don’t totally understand the chemistry, you can blow yourself up. What I like about this book is the “how not to blow yourself up” tips.

I do not have personal first hand knowledge from following the procedures in this book because without proper licensing it is highly illegal to do so. BUT, from my training and research I believe that the procedures would work, and that they are as safe as can be outside of a lab, using chemicals illicitly procured – which means – if you buy this book and try to make this stuff you will probably get arrested or blow yourself up (or both).

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