Stardate 20010923.0714 (On Screen): In Belgium, certain suspects were arrested and they also seized chemicals which could have been used to make explosives. When they say that, I have to wonder just what they found. A surprising number of common materials can be used to make explosives.
Ammonia and tincture of iodine are a lot of fun. Mix them together and pour the resulting fluid on something and let it dry; part of what remains is nitrogen tri-iodide, which is a contact explosive. High school students have been having fun with this one for decades, but the stuff is too sensitive to use for anything big time. Acetylene is also fun; take a solution of copper sulfate and bubble acetylene through it, and a blue powder will precipitate. Filter it out, and as long as it's wet, you're safe. Once it dries, you've got contact-sensitive high explosive in the form of copper acetylide (CU2C2 -- Kids, don't try this at home! You'll blow your arm off!). A tank of propane is 
a bomb, lacking only a detonator. For that matter, so is that tank of acetylene. But if you really want to make a big sound, then you load up on ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil, which is what McVeigh used in Oklahoma City.
Of course, not everyone who buys fertilizer is planning on making a bomb out of it. So it would be nice to know just what they did find that they are calling potential bomb ingredients. For example, if they had fifty pounds of potassium perchlorate, I'd be convinced. (Not too many other uses I can think of for that in those kinds of quantities.) But if all they found was ammonia, someone's trying to trump up a case. (discuss)
