The explosive of choice in several of the most spectacular terrorist bombings around the world – from Istanbul to Bali to Oklahoma City – doesn’t take an army of weapons inspectors to detect. It’s cheap farm fertilizer that’s tightly restricted in Europe, but easily available in the United States and elsewhere, despite U.S. warnings after the Madrid train bombings that terrorists might use ammonium nitrate explosives to strike public transportation. On Thursday, Turkey becomes the latest country to join the European Union in regulating sales of ammonium nitrate that, when mixed with diesel fuel, forms an explosive with more than half the force of dynamite. It takes very little expertise to make a bomb from the fertilizer, yet efforts to regulate it conflict with the desire of farmers to easily get cheap ammonium nitrate for their fields. Full Story
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