New at Reason: Russell Seitz on Just Saying No to Airport Paranoia

January 12, 2010

If we accept the premise that the naughty Nigerian on Flight 253 had 80 grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate sewn into his underwear, it follows that the energy released by its efficient explosion could, at most, have amounted to one or two megajoules. That’s roughly the heat of combustion of a jelly doughnut. And as Harvard University physicist Russell Seitz writes, if al Quaeda’s idea of an existential threat is a befuddled young man with three ounces of not-so-high explosives sewn into his underwear, weapons of mass destruction aren’t what they used to be.

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