I used this to make NI3 (feather explosive) in high school as part of my senior project. It was somehow blessed by the teacher.
The book very specifically says to not make this due to how volatile it is.
We made it in the morning and put it in the undisturbed back room to dry for the afternoon.
We got news of it exploding during a silent study hall and scaring the crap outta everyone there, especially since it was a different teacher in the room. The air current from the AC set it off.
We were again (somehow) given permission to remake it since it went off.
I decided that I could make the fulminate recipe, and asked my grandfather —- who had taught me to make cap gun material —- to get the stuff I would need. He asked me again, to make sure he heard me right, and then flatly told me no. He said he loaded shells for WWII, and that’s what they put in the detonating tip. He said it was so sensitive, they tested it by shooting shells through PAPER. I gave up on my dreams of making anything from the book after that.
I suspect it’s that the tips of the shell are intended to be pressure sensitive and trigger an explosion that then detonated the main payload. The explosive in the tip was so sensitive that tearing through paper was enough to detonate it.
Yeah, and foam at several hundred kph was also enough the damage the wing of a space shuttle. Not sure the paper thing is terribly relevant. The shells were fired after all.
Assuming you did this in the past 30 years, it’s doubly worrisome that you got this blessed, because the book is absolutely notorious for being dangerously inaccurate.
Supposedly the “The Terrorist Handbook” series of filez from Usenet corrected the errors, but I’m not a chemist, so I can’t judge either’s reputation.
> the book is absolutely notorious for being dangerously inaccurate
I always wondered if that was propaganda in order to discourage people from trying things out in it. I've also wondered if the corrections were also propaganda in a malicious way.
I wouldn't touch any of that stuff without being a trained chemist.
A friend of a friend blew his guts out with a homemade pipe bomb. My friend had the dubious pleasure of driving him to the hospital with him bleeding out all over the car.
A few years ahead of me in high school, the wrestling team had a one-handed wrestler. A friend of mine on the wrestling team told me it was because the guy was helping a guy make a pipe bomb, using a hammer and a wooden dowel to pack match heads in a pipe. One guy was holding the pipe, and the other was swinging the hammer.
it depends if they're strike anywhere or safety matches. making them with strike anywhere will probably just blow up while you're making it. safety matches can be compressed like crazy, I heard.
They can be compressed like crazy, but that sensitivises them for strikes. My father told me about this method - get some match heads into a nut, screw it tightly with two screws, tie a string and use that string to accelerate into some hard object. Luckily, no one got hit by exploding screws.
Supposedly a wild strike caused the steel hammer to strike the steel pipe and spark, and there was a narrow flammable channel next to the dowel leading to the main charge.
The reliable counterpart to the Anarchist Cookbook is TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook, which is also freely available without copyright by virtue of being an unclassified US Army technical manual subject to FOIA.
That was a classic that got passed around our high school... My favorites were the ones that started with practically nothing. IIRC, they made gunpowder from campfire ashes, a 5 gallon bucket, and a t-shirt filter. Another one - was it rocket fuel? - was made from urine! I think you could even progress that one from urea nitrate to nitric acid, and with the improvised sulfuric acid from elsewhere in the book, make actual dynamite! but our high school teacher warned us that many high school geniuses had blown themselves up making dynamite. Anyway we actually didn't care about blowing things up, really.... we were into fireworks!!!! So we enjoyed concentrating the powder from zillions of sparklers to make an "artificial sun." We also made humungous smoke bombs that went on for a long time making the neighbors antsy.
We did not say that we got the idea / recipe from this book of course. We actually got the idea from our previous chem teacher who retired the year before. (Meaning first year for the new teacher.)
In ~2006 a group in my brother's AP Chemistry class got permission to make thetmite for their class project. Set it off in a fume hood which I believe was already scheduled to be replaced that summer.
In 2010 my AP Physics teacher gave us all really long leashes in terms of how much we could. One fellow made what equated to a water bottle capacitor, charged on a Van de Graff generator. After playing with it for a few days, trying to get the practicum teacher to touch it, and various other shenanigans, he felt a shock across his chest and was writhing in pain on the ground for a few minutes. We all lost Van de Graff privileges after that.
Somehow that happened in 2010-2011 and there wasn't really concern to call for medical supervision. He's still doing great today thankfully.
NI3 isn't hard to make, there are only two ingredients and I also made it in chemistry class by pouring ammonia on the crystals which we left on filter paper. The real 'trick' is not to use that much iodine crystal so you don't get a huge bang. You want to stay under 0.1g of crystal.
There's precious little you can do wrong with the synthesis other than using too much iodine to make too much of it. It won't become particularly unstable until it dries a bit, but after that, yes, it may just go off on its own.
I get the impression that most people's chemistry experience was much different than mine.
Ours was about rote memorization, period. I kind of feel like I missed out.
I think this is the tragic reality of everyone wanting to get their hands in education. Government oversight, district oversight, parent oversight. There’s a fear kids won’t learn enough of the right things, and won’t be competitive. Or will be exposed to “dangerous” information. Or some will get access to better teaching than others. Also chemicals are expensive, budgets are thin, and class sizes are large.
I feel your pain though. I didn’t get to see any of this cool stuff until I was in college.
> Also chemicals are expensive, budgets are thin, and class sizes are large.
This was my experience (growing up outside of the US). I'm not sure I'd call our schools lab a "lab". Oversized closet for 30 year old bunsen burners would be a better descriptor.
In my middle-school and highschool science courses, we sat at tables that had gas feeds to them. I don't recall what they were marked - probably oxygen and nitrogen or hydrogen or something. There had barbed ends, so as to connect to a flexible hose.
I never used them. Not once. I never saw them used. They were a feature of hopeful design, or vestigial hands-on activities.
It's much easier to create stability and equity by making sure nobody gets an exceptionally good education than to make sure nobody gets an exceptionally bad one.
Same teacher told stories about how he nearly killed a student with explosives he made in his home country of britain where he is no longer a practicing teacher.
I'm an older GenX and can state that my high school chem teacher was more about checking how we kept our lab notebooks (neat handwriting, correct spelling and notation, no doodles) than about doing any cool practicums. I got a C minus.
I did try making the tear gas recipe from Anarchists Cookbook in the crawlspace under a friend's house. Gas of some sort escaped from a stoppered flask midway through the process - I don't know if it was anything close to actual teargas, but the stench was memorable! We rolled out from under the house gagging and laughing, very happy his mom wasn't home.
We utterly failed in our subsequent attempt to make thermite. In retrospect, maybe that C minus was generous.
I'm very early (old) millennial. One of my high school chemistry classes stands out as a favorite course of all high school. The teacher was good (likable, engaging, smart) but also did open book tests that had some new never-before-seen problem.
Many people, even those that were "top students" in other STEM classes, complained about how hard his tests were. As someone terrible at memorizing, I not only enjoyed the challenge but aced that course, despite not really being that interested in chemistry.
The remainder of high school and a lot of university was just memorization. If you knew the formula you could do great, but I had such a hard time remembering that type of detail. I did ok, but on many occasions I remember wishing more courses were like that Chem class, and it still stands out over 20 years later.
Nitrogen triiodide really isn't very dangerous as it doesn't generate a lot of gas upon detonation, and its unlikely that you'll ever get enough of it in one place at one time to cause a large explosion. It's really just a chemistry novelty. It DOES make a mess, though.
Some secondary school mates made this and spread it in the corridor. We heard the explosions as the head science teacher stamped through to detonate it all before the classes were allowed out.
I remember downloading this and something published by some Islamic group on Freenet almost (or exactly?) 20 years ago. Never read either of them. I just wanted them because I wasn’t supposed to have them.
Edit: really makes you feel old when you start talking about things you did 20 years ago on the internet.
I read my older brother's borrowed copy when I was in junior high. Me and two buddies went to the Ace Hardware and bought more than a dozen packets of morning glory seeds and then some cheese cloth at the Publix in the shopping center across Michigan Ave. June, 1980.
i had a copy back in the early 80s. Made the mistake of lending it to somone and never got it back. It was notorious as a book that once borrowed, was never returned. I've hear from many other people who lent it then lost it. I wonder if your brother ever returned it?
I remember 30 years ago, when I had just started using the internet, that all one had to do to feel rebellious was to send a bit of data using so called “strong encryption”. You could even get shirts with this stuff printed on them.
And talking about the internet decades ago doesn’t make us old at all, it just gives us a little more perspective.
> I just wanted them because I wasn’t supposed to have them.
Same. I have zero interest in making explosives, but nothing gets me interested in something faster than telling me it's been censored or I'm not supposed to have it. Forbidden knowledge is a powerful draw, especially when obtaining that knowledge doesn't require anything more than a download.
Just FYI, assuming this is a legit link (I'm not checking). You can get into legal trouble here in the UK for downloading this book onto your hard drive. At a minimum it's presence on your hard drive can be used against you in a criminal trial.
I'm also in the UK and a friend brought up the illegality of it once, when we were discussing it, so I ended up having a look and it's freely available and sold by Amazon.co.uk, so I think your fears are exaggerated.
I was trying to find a balance between not exaggerating the risk, while also letting people know that you have to be a little careful when viewing / downloading this in the UK.
If you have cloud backup enabled and you download this then expect to be put on a watch list. If you share this link publicly on social media then expect to be visited by the police. It might not happen of course, but you should expect it.
And you've already been in trouble with the authorities for posting something politically incorrect on social media then possession of this book could quite easily be used against you.
Even if the risk of getting caught and sentenced is minimal the fact that it can be used against you is enough to be a concern. If nothing else it indicates a problem with UK law that should be solved and the fact that children have gotten caught up in it should worry everyone who cares about their freedom.
I have purchased things on Amazon that were illegal for import. I didn't know it at the time of purchase. I only realized months later when I wanted to buy it again, only to find all the listings were gone.
With so many 3rd party sellers it isn't too surprising.
Well, the paperback edition appears to be sold by Amazon.co.uk and it's also available as a Kindle edition, so I don't think importing it would be an issue
The title appears under "Collecting or possessing information", section 7.25, but presumably having a copy would be evidence against along with other nefarious activities.
I used to laugh at Americans for constantly ranting about freedom and guns. The last 3 years has shown me that it is something we should have valued in Europe.
People fleeing under shelling from their destroyed apartment blocks in Syria or eastern Ukraine after weeks without fresh food, electricity, health care or running water, leaving newly dead relatives and live pets behind are at rock bottom. The UK isn't there yet. Getting closer, but not there yet.
Has nothing do with anarchism and as a bonus the recipes in it have a strong chance of exploding on their maker. The only thing clever about the thing is the title. I think many actual anarchists have produced better books (succeeding by default) with the same title since the time of this thing's publications.
I got in trouble for reading this on a school iPad in middle school.
The anarchists cook book is severely outdated. Most of the info it contains is straight up fabricated. It's no longer worthy of the controversial reputation that it has.
The prevailing theory when I was in high school was that this AC was a honeypot.
Anybody trying to order the misspelled chemical names in the AC to cook homemade explosives would get a visit from the FBI
Even the size of it suggests that it’s not an actual revolutionary manual. The thing was huge, and couldn’t fit in a bookshelf. Not exactly something you could hand out and conceal if it wanted to do covert ops outlined in it like blowing bridges and sabatoge.
It’s like the only purpose it served was to be found and tip off who was interested in that stuff.
And it also served to indoctrinate a generation of us that Anarchism as a social movement was nothing more than blowing up shit; illegal and violent by definition.
That’s probably true. There’s a program down to the county level where law enforcement establishes relationships with places that sell certain materials.
If you show up and buy a big bag of ammonium nitrate or order a few hundred pounds of sugar and aren’t known to the seller, you’ll be looked into or talked to.
It is true now. Fifty years ago, not so much. The first crackdown on chemicals was - I think but could be wrong - the precursors for quaalude manufacturing…it came even before the US got serious about drunk driving…around 1982.
Oklahoma City made explosive precursors an area of concern, but meth precursors are a 21st century prohibition/restriction.
Anyway, your local police are likely to have live access to security cameras in area businesses in addition to real time license plate readers in cruisers.
Yes the AC didn't start that bit of indoctrination, but renewed it for a new generation. It was published in the 70s when the counter culture was at it's strongest.
Thanks, that was an interesting letter. I was unaware of it. In any case, there are things to learn from Chomsky, without agreeing on everything with him.
who decides who the good guys are? if you get a good anthropology book, you'll find plenty of societies that value violence (to varying degrees). in fact, you don't even need an anthropology book, just open the old testament.
They probably don't include Pol Pot, who Chomsky defended on the usual anti-imperialist basis that anything American is bad and anything not American is good.
> Even the size of it suggests that it’s not an actual revolutionary manual. The thing was huge, and couldn’t fit in a bookshelf. Not exactly something you could hand out and conceal if it wanted to do covert ops outlined in it like blowing bridges and sabatoge.
What are you talking about, it’s 160 pages. I remember carrying around a binder in my school backpack, it’s fairly slim actually.
> And it also served to indoctrinate a generation of us that Anarchism as a social movement was nothing more than blowing up shit; illegal and violent by definition.
This is somewhat more productive than what anarchism is actually about (holding so many meetings about everything you never actually do it).
But I think people got a better picture from watching Life of Brian.
> It’s like the only purpose it served was to be found and tip off who was interested in that stuff.
it'd be a shame then because the FBI must have spent several years worth of man-hours investigating 13 year old edgelords instead of concerning themselves with actual threats.
In secondary school, I remember some people buying this book. You could not buy it off the shelf, but you could order it just fine. They were more interested in the drug recipes, but I don't think any of the recipes worked out or were practical.
> And it also served to indoctrinate a generation of us that Anarchism as a social movement was nothing more than blowing up shit; illegal and violent by definition.
Anarchism has earned this reputation for a reason, and it's definitely not
a conspiracy.
There are different movements/leanings of Anarchism, and some of them are outright mainstream in multiple countries (e.g. Anarcho-Capitalism is very popular in the US).
Those folks also believe in blowing things up and burning down government buildings. They just believe that capitalism will be sustainable in the absence of a dominant power.
In the late 1990s, MIT's East Campus dorm organized an annual Sodium Drop from the Longfellow Bridge. (Later discontinued after a chunk of sodium survived, oxidized to concentrated lye, and chemically burned an unfortunate clean-up worker who mistook it for styrofoam.) As I remember, the MC of the event would first throw 500g of some foodstuff (I forget which) into the river for comparison, and then throw 500g of metallic Sodium into the river.
At least one year, I remember them following up the Sodium with a salute made with a few hundred grams of TATP (apparently called "Mother of Satan" by Hamas, due to its tendency to detonate during manufacture). A friend of mine described the assembly line process they used for making the TATP. It sounded like they had several kg of TATP out drying on baking sheets at one time. My understanding that around that time, TATP was the most common filler for Hamas suicide vests. I don't think it took very many kg to blow up a whole bus. Batshit insane.
Jogging my memory from over 20 years ago, the "reference" reactive foodstuff they used was "processed pork product" (Spam). Looking at the available Spam can sizes, maybe it was 340g processed pork product. Maybe they then used 300g Sodium, and 300g TATP.
In any case, the third-hand description I heard over 20 years ago of the TATP factory in a residential kitchen was horrifying. They made at least several times as much as they used publicly at the Sodium Drop.
Classic. Had a copy in high school in the 1980’s. I always loved the warnings at the beginning of some of the instructions that went something like this: “do not create this — it can be very dangerous… maybe lethal —- here is how you do it.”
“Power is not a material possession that can be given, it is the ability to act.
Power must be taken, it is never given.”
“‘This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.’
Abraham Lincoln”
Seems self-evidential that you should not let anyone who says this become a leader. And similarly, the problem solves itself if you elect someone who doesn't believe it.
Discussion here of the making of explosives brought back memories. A guy at school used to nick nitric acid (edit: and sulphuric) and glycerine from the chemistry lab and make guess-what. No, the chemistry teacher didn't know and would have strangled us had he discovered.
Well, it turns out to be hard to make, being very exothermic, and it usually just burnt itself up (brown fumes). Failure provoked him into trying for progressively larger amounts, and we would just get closer and closer to it losing all caution. His one success was a very small amount that embedded pieces of the glass container into our study walls. Everything else, especially including the larger amounts just failed – it really is very exothermic. And we would be standing around this right up close.
The angel of very very very very stupid children put in a lot of overtime. If I could I would reach back through time and punch us both in the face.
Making nitroglycerin requires fairly strict temperature control while running the reaction. Ignoring this aspect is a common rookie mistake. If it gets too warm, the nitric acid will essentially auto-catalyze its own decomposition (the brown fumes), which is never pleasant and ruins the reaction. Being too aggressive with the cooling has other issues.
I think amateurs underestimate the importance of temperature control when trying to synthesize chemicals. There is a lot more too it than mixing ingredients like a cocktail.
Sure it was that? NG is terrifyingly unstable, harsh words can set it off. I couldn't conceive of it being bottled without a stabilising agent added. At least he only lost his hand :/
It's funny how I loved reading the AC as a kid in the early 90s vs now how I wouldn't even click that link due to the surveillance state we live in. If you've ever wanted to see a panopticon in action, just look around.
Or maybe everyone clicks on it so that the surveillance lists are polluted by false positives, forcing lazy spies to actually investigate real criminals and not just geeky curious people.
I just did: From page 114 ("How to make mercury fulminate"), 1st line of the recipe says "take 5 grams of pure mercury and mix it with 35 ml of nitric acid".
I remember being a teenager in the 90s in Erie, PA and making things from the AC was our go to entertainment. Many a weeknight was spent cutting the heads off matches, stuffing them into PVC pipes and throwing bombs at each other in the woods.
It’s nothing short of a miracle that we all made it out of that time period alive, with our limbs and fingers intact, and not in federal prison.
I was a half-step back from you. I was in high school after Y2K and some had already paved the way of foolish use of this stuff such that I got long quiet interrogative looks from my dad over the material. Glancing through the introduction, I'm sure I never understood that stuff at the time.
I remember looking through the electronics ideas and wanting to make a pen-microphone-transmitter, but then wondering why go to all the trouble.
I'm glad I filed it away as "I know where to look if I need the information" and didn't do anything with it.
I do remember the discussion of the honeypot nature of some topics and keywords. It is important to understand more about the giant before you attempt to stand on his shoulders.
I think most people were intrigued because of the experimentation and just having that kind of knowledge (ability) at your fingertips. There's a very strong DIY mentality that gets spawned from information like this. I don't think the mere presence of such material should be discouraged for that very reason. Anyone who seriously wants to implement any of these projects for nefarious purpose will need an extraordinary amount of self-discipline to carry it out. Even if they succeed, it's hard to believe any will succeed without raising red flags. The societal benefits outweight the risks.
Growing up in the 70s, I remember seeing lots of injunctions against being a "basement bomber". Apparently it had been a thing (in the 60s?) to make pipe bombs, from match heads etc.
Wasn't familiar with the book until I came across this Reddit thread few years ago.
"The author of the Anarchist Cookbook, an infamous instructional book on homemade explosives, weapons, and drugs, regretted its publication. He attempted to have it removed several times, only to be thwarted by the publisher Lyle Stuart."
The original author went as far as to publish a "second edition" more recently. This second edition is actually literally a cookbook. It's geared towards the mutual aid scene and the recipes are recipes you can make for hundreds of people
We actually used it when starting a new Food Not Bombs chapter locally and most activists I talked to seemed to mainly be familiar with the followup. So I guess it had some level of success in covering up the original
Ah I guess it's more specifically a Food Not Bombs thing. Also it wasn't mostly written by the original author, but the original author provides a forward (page v) and obviously gives his blessings for this work to take the namesake
I guess it being Food Not Bombs specific explains why most people I knew only knew of this version XD
I still have my hardcopy that I bought at a punk music/book store in the 80s. It's on a shelf next to titles like J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, and Book of the SubGenius.
TBBOM was hilarious in middle school. But not nearly as funny as the "Bananarchy" text; a whole set of banana based explosives and weapons that was probably just a joke on the anarchist cookbook / the big book of mischief and their often not quite right "recipes". Things like making explosives out of banana peels or freezing bananas into ice bullets, etc.
Unfortunately I can't find the file anymore with a restaurant called "Bananarchy" polluting the namespace.
This book was so much better. A friend got in tons of trouble for printing it out and bringing it to school when we were kids. Too funny! It was awesome to learn some real-world stuff that you'd never be taught in school though.
Please, for the love of God, don't follow any of the recipes in here. Many are dangerously wrong (as in blow yourself and your neighbors up dangerous).
While it's true that some of the simpler recipes will work, a lot of the others just won't work or are dangerous. From memory, the TNT and mercury fulminate recipes are wildly dangerous and omit key steps. Messing with stuff like this in any capacity is dangerous, even with proper PPE and good procedures, but if you must, there are much better resources available freely online these days.
Meh. Follow them at your own risk. The best way to learn is to make mistakes and blow your neighbours garage, not being prevented from doing so by someone else.
Absolutely fucking don't. In high school, my, uh, friends tried out many of the experiments in it, in ways we "thought were safe". I later got a degree in chemistry and learned actual lab hygiene, and looking back, hooo boy, it's terrifying all the ways in which things could have gone wrong.
Like nearly burning down my friend's garage, were it not for some quick thinking.
By all means, amateur chemistry is a great hobby, and I think the 2000s swung too hard into nanny state stuff post-9/11. But anarchist's cookbook is an exemplar of the wrong way to do things. Watch NileRed, NurdRage, That Chemist, etc.
Your comment I replied to is overbearing, overprotective advice about something titled the Anarchist Cookbook, for God's sake.
I tried to restore a bit of that reckless spirit with a cheeky comment, but I am very sad to see the nanny state is out in force today. Gah, so boring.
I'm all for people pursuing amateur chemistry if they want to, but they should be doing so with accurate resources. The Anarchist Cookbook is not reckless. It's just straight up wrong in a lot of places in ways that very well could get you killed. Making homemade explosives is reckless, doing it poorly is just stupid. If you want to make explosives there are better guides on YouTube of all places. There is no reason at all to use this dated book full of inaccuracies.
The Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook is more reliable, safer, and contains instructions that have actually been tested by the authors (unlike, say, 'bananadine'), but I guess you can't act like an anti-establishment edgelord recommending that one.
There was also the Jolly Rodger Cookbook (http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/) that was thee first set of "philez" that I read as a kid. Finding more like that led to me frequenting a bunch of interesting BBS, then learning how to, um, creatively pay, for those international calls and later into setting up my own board. It all kind of died off as the web became a thing but it was still a lot of fun.
I ordered this book from a local bookstore in 1984 because I heard about it in a book or a movie I saw, but I can’t remember which since it was so long ago.
Four months later I got a call from the store telling me it came in and quoting me an exorbitant price to pick it up. I never did, and I’m sure they didn’t have any difficulty selling it off the shelf.
Coincidentally, just a short while later, I got a phone call from an Army recruiter asking me if I was interested in JROTC. I think I was put on some kind of watchlist for ordering the book.
Anarchist Cookbook is fun, but with all the stories here about high school chemistry, I would have expected most would have also discovered PiHKAL[1] and found it infinitely more entertaining.
In high school, I had a friend that printed out a copy and put all the pages into a binder. Another friend and I had borrowed the binder, and flipped through it one day to pass the time during health class. The following day, our teacher came over and crouched at our desks to talk to us. She said that she has found a piece of paper with instructions on how to make a bomb, and she has given the paper to the principal. She told us that we weren’t in any trouble, but that we were never to bring anything like that to school ever again.
I also remember another friend writing an essay for English class, and then reading it aloud in class, recounting his experience building and detonating a “pipe bomb” in his backyard using gunpowder and a mayonnaise jar.
I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s.
The only chapter I remember was the one about tamping explosives in order to concentrate the force of the blast in the direction you want. That was really interesting to me for some reason.
>I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s...
Slightly veering away from the subject. But your comment reminded me of 'The Little Red Schoolbook' --which was the [supposedly banned] book that we all passed around in school. Although being sadly older than you, this would have been the early 80s. I wonder if anyone else remembers it?
As I recall it was pretty subversive in content, with sections on sex, drugs and anrachist politics.
EDIT: Seems it was quite well-known after all. Wikipaiedia has an article on it:
The author of this book was interviewed for a documentary. It’s kind of interesting to watch the author’s relationship to a book he wrote (I believe) in high school as a man of 66 years. Especially since he repeated tried to stop the book from being published, but couldn’t because the sold the copyright with the initial publishing deal.
> Especially since he repeated tried to stop the book from being published, but couldn’t because the sold the copyright with the initial publishing deal
Had it been a feemw years later when he wrote it, he could have reclaimed the copyright between 35-40 years thereafter, even having sold it. (Note as well as transfer, this applied to all licenses, expressly “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”.)
Oh man this is nostalgic. I remember finding this when I was in junior high and wanted to try out their recipe for a smoke bomb (mostly because it seems to be the least complicated thing on there, requiring only sugar + potassium nitrate).
But living in the city, it was hard to find some place that sells fertilizers/stump remover! So that was the end of that. Fun trip down memory lane.
The first chapter describes "New York White", a super strain of weed that grows white due to lack of sunlight deep in New York City sewers is totally made up, or at best, not researched at all. Weed doesn't grow in the dark, and it doesn't grow albino from lack of light.
Perhaps an update is in order, but to make it more releveant, use a modern title like "Walter White's Guide to Improvised Chemistry" (hmmm... would that be an IP violation of some kind?)
In reality all the information needed to make a wide variety of explosives, chemical and biological weapons, illegal drugs and so on is available in any university library and quite a few public libraries as well as the Internet - a Google Books search for "History of Explosives" is illustrative. The training necessary to successfully carry out the required protocols is available in any university chemistry program. Requisite raw materials are more carefully tracked and monitored than in the past, however (with good reason), but even so, such materials can themselves be synthesized by the skilled industrial chemist from non-trackable sources.
The real risk is not that some isolated nutcase will go on a rampage, however - such people are more likely to blow themselves up or poison themselves than anything else - it's that nation-state governments and the private contractors they hire will decide to do something psychotic like produce drone warfare systems for the wide-area distribution of biological and chemical weapons in some place like eastern Ukraine (indeed, there may be some evidence that this is already going on or being planned).
The real sociopaths all go to work for governments, as history as shown. The largest bioweapon and chemical warfare programs in history were run by the Japanese, British, American and Soviet governments, and they employed hundreds of trained scientists who justified their lunatic behavior with vague appeals to patriotism, duty, and national defense.
The Soviet bioweapons program was arguably the largest and longest-running of them all (see for example Sverdlovsk anthrax), so I'm not sure how drawing attention to it counts as 'Kremlin propaganda':
The use of drones to deliver biological and chemical weapons is also a long-standing issue of concern in all warzones, not just in Ukraine. (Not every comment is part of some organized PR war between NATO & Russia)
In my defence, your original comment made no mention of anything Soviet.
I think it’s not unreasonable to assume that when people say “Ukraine”, they’re referring to the free and independent sovereign nation.
Furthermore, you said that this is happening now or is planned for the future. The USSR doesn’t exist now, so this sounds very much like the common kremlin justification for their illegal invasion — that the Americans are using Ukraine to conduct secret nefarious experiments in bio labs.
The most charitable interpretation of your comment is perhaps that russia may use biological or chemical weapons in the current war against the Ukrainians, but then one would have to ignore that you specified Eastern Ukraine, because nothing is limiting russian terror to the Donbas.
I had a holiday job at the police forensics lab library in Auckland in the early 80s. This was one of the many documents that had been confiscated by police and carefully catalogued and stored away.
Hehe, I remember finding an “underground” bookstore that published all of this stuff. It made for fun reading and was a great conversation starter. I was even watching Nightmare on Elm Street and the girl was setting booby traps for Freddy and I was like holy smokes, this is pretty much Poor Man’s James Bond in chapter order.
But I never made any of this stuff so I can’t say if the recipes are valid or not, but at the time of their release the US was much more concerned by communists then terrorists and this seems like the sort of thing they’d sprinkle out there so that patriotic hero types could wage a war of insurrection and attrition if ever needed to defend the country from an occupation.
The book very specifically says to not make this due to how volatile it is.
We made it in the morning and put it in the undisturbed back room to dry for the afternoon.
We got news of it exploding during a silent study hall and scaring the crap outta everyone there, especially since it was a different teacher in the room. The air current from the AC set it off.
We were again (somehow) given permission to remake it since it went off.