Anarchist Cookbook (1971) [pdf]
ia600700.us.archive.org
ia600700.us.archive.org
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.
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.
This was in 2010.
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.
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.
Its kind of a "safety third" document for really shitty situations, lol.
Safety is quite relative when it comes to anything that explodes.
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.
Before we touched any chemicals, we would go through the reaction on paper and calculate what would happen (eg ΔH) for education and safety.
That’s actually the origin of my username.
Must have something to do with the direction of acceleration, but I can't see how exactly.
That's insane
But it turned out that our chem teacher wore open-toed shoes that day (not a lab day for her) so she made us detonate it all ourselves.
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.
It was not until the 00's that the schools went crazy
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.
I feel your pain though. I didn’t get to see any of this cool stuff until I was in college.
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.
I never used them. Not once. I never saw them used. They were a feature of hopeful design, or vestigial hands-on activities.
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.
Edit: really makes you feel old when you start talking about things you did 20 years ago on the internet.
How to make a car bomb:
Ingredients:
1 car
1 bomb (large)
Directions: Mix.
That may be practical instructions if you’re in a war zone, but getting four live 105 mm artillery rounds is bit harder in the suburban United States
Ingredients: 1 car. 1 Plutonium powered flux capacitor. Mix.
"Doc, are you telling me this sucker's nuclear? Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium! Did you rip that off?"
And talking about the internet decades ago doesn’t make us old at all, it just gives us a little more perspective.
That only gets worse.
Better than the alternative
Oh dear.
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.
If this link works...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-terrorism-act...
There's an instance where two teenagers were charged with possession of it, but were found innocent: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7685636.stm
However, if you're also involved in terrorist activities, then possession of it could count against you.
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.
With so many 3rd party sellers it isn't too surprising.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-60051861
The country is unambiguously anti-freedom.
I think the Army's "Improvised Munitions Handbook" is better/safer - for educational purposes only of course... :-)
https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Army-Improvised-Munitions-Handboo...
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.
Not everything old is good, this is garbage.
“Anarchist Cookbook” author William Powell has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001238 - March 2017 (85 comments)
Burn After Reading: William Powell and the Anarchist Cookbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132852 - March 2015 (10 comments)
I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936672 - Dec 2013 (190 comments)
Anarchist Cookbook authors hopes for discontinuation (read the author review) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694601 - Sept 2010 (41 comments)
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.
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.
He’s not one of the good guys.
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chom...
Simple. Look at the guards at the border. Are they employed because people keep trying to sneak into the country, or out of it?
To me it seems self evident and non-controversial to all but the sneeriest of intellectuals, that some people are just bad.
What are you talking about, it’s 160 pages. I remember carrying around a binder in my school backpack, it’s fairly slim actually.
Anarchism has earned this reputation for a reason, and it's definitely not a conspiracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very lucky and careful folks at MIT it seems.
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.
“‘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.
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.
William Friedkin used the instability of nitro as the basis for his movie Sorcerer[0].
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.
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 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.
"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."
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/b2b3m7/til_t...
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
Unfortunately I can't find the file anymore with a restaurant called "Bananarchy" polluting the namespace.
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.
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.
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.
https://thehardtimes.net/blog/recipes-anarchist-cookbook-tas...
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.
Different times. (This was 1996-1997)
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...
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:
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”.)
also, I read the preface and found this interesting:
I believe it is usually the "square guy" who wants to know what is going on, though (or because) shocked and even tantalized by such subjects.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
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)
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.
Excellent observation...
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.
I never saw it myself of course...
And I remember people lying about what they made and blew up etc
Porn, drugs, and bombs. A great time to be alive.