Exploding pagers

Both the pagers and the walkie-talkies were sabotaged - and sold to Hezbollah - some time ago. Quite why Israel didn't blow up both sets of gear at the same time escapes me. Most likely it was two different operations, having a common inspiration and separate implementations.

My guess is the people who set up the walkie-talkie operation were surprised when the pagers were blown up and blew up their units as soon as possible afterwards, before their gear could get run through X-ray imagers.

But Israel's casual attitude to collateral damage is equally uncivilised.

Recycled joke from the WW2 Italian campaign.

Christians have much the same problem. The hundred years war thinned out that particular gene pool, but it does seem to be built into the religious mind-set.

indeed, there is no way known, that israels murder squads can absolutely guarantee that none of the supply chain batch didnt get diverted to a private company, say, in the U.S.A.

There is a repeating pattern here:

We have two countries, A and B, at war with one another.

Country A uses weapons of low accuracy, killing mostly civilians plus a few unlucky military.

Country B uses weapons of high accuracy, killing mostly military plus a few unlucky civilians.

Which is better, and why?

Joe Gwinn

Not a relevant question in this context. Israel may be using some weapons of high accuracy, but what they are mostly using are heavy weapons which kill a lot more civilians (and children) than the military they were presumably aimed at.

If lots of civilians end up dead anyway, the "accuracy" of the weapons is of largely academic interest.

Does that include slaughtering and raping people at a concert?

OK, buy someone else's chips and natural gas and food.

And invite Germany back in to rule your country.

My thought was that the attackers knew that the pagers were in daily use and the walkies were backups. So they blew the pagers, left a day for survivors to switch to walkies, then blew them to clean up stragglers.

I don't have the energy to check all those definitions, but one would think that the concert is clearly terrorism, not just collateral damage. But the original question concerned collateral damage, as discussed in another posting.

Joe Gwinn

I expected there'd be politics, but I was hoping for more discussion of

Apparently "somebody" built batteries containing PETN which would detonate when the battery exceeded some temperature. Then installed these batteries into ordinary pagers; the only clue that something was wrong would be that battery life would likely not be what the spec sheet said it should be.

Then by repeatedly triggering the pagers, caused the batteries to heat up resulting in detonation of the PETN. I wouldn't be surprised to find a piece of nichrome inside the battery; it would heat a little when the pager activated and then cool off, but repeated activation would push it over the threshold. Maybe a schottky involved somehow, to prevent heating when the battery is being charged.

The radios on the next day would have been fitted with similar batteries but I'm not sure how they would have triggered the heating.

It sounds easier to just add an explosive and a detonator.

The latest round has been sonic booms during a speech from 'a secret location'. What better way of identifying the location than by generating a sonic boom and accurately timing when it is heard in the speech?

Given what they're doing with it, I'd sooner it be cut off altogether.

The US devolved foreign policy to Israel a long, long time ago. And given as you say the average American isn't bothered, it's not something that'll merit much air-time in any debate. It'll be all about the Left accusing Trump of being callous and uncaring and the Right about tax rises under Harris.

Thank god one of them didn't go off in an airliner with Europeans on board at the time. That could so easily have happened. Hopefully the airlines' explosive sniffers would have detected them. If they cannot, they'll have to do something *quick* to improve security measures to ensure it can't happen going forward.

That would account for your bad temper when you've had a drink! :-D

Is there such an explosive? High explosives - as it appears were used here

- generally need a significant *shock* to set them off. Heat alone isn't normally enough and even if it were, the temp required would have necessitated the rapid discarding of the pager before it got sufficiently hot.

When we're in a really wild mood, Mo and I will split a beer.