In response to the rising concern of the American public over illegal bombings, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms asked the National Research Council to examine possible mechanisms for reducing this threat. The committee examined four approaches to reducing the bombing threat: addition of detection markers to explosives for pre-blast detection, addition of identification taggants to explosives for post-blast identification of bombers, possible means to render common explosive materials inert, and placing controls on explosives and their precursors. The book makes several recommendations to reduce the number of criminal bombings in this country.

Excerpt from Investigation of Detonators and Electric Detonators The indirect method of determining the mechanical effects of ex plosives, or the energy developed by them, approximates practical conditions and offers an accurate means for determining the relative efficiency of detonators and electric detonators in bringing about complete detonation of commercial high explosives. As all direct methods of testing detonators are therefore dependent on the indirect method for verification, the first experiments under taken were to determine the relative strength of electric detonators indirectly by comparing the energy developed by different commercial explosives when fired with different grades of electric detonators. Afterwards tests were made by determining the relative strength of electric detonators by direct means, and a test was devised that, although not entirely satisfactory, gave results that approximated more closely those established by the indirect tests. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.