The weaponisation of everyday items throughout history

Georgi Markov felt a sharp pain in his thigh. The Bulgarian writer, broadcaster, and dissident was waiting for a London bus in September 1978 when a stranger bumped into him with an umbrella. By evening, he had developed a fever and gone to the hospital; four days later, he was dead. Markov’s demise was no accident. He was a victim of professional Bulgarian and Soviet assassins using an ordinary gadget: an umbrella, the tip of which delivered poison into his body.

As Markov’s fate reveals, last week’s attack on Hezbollah members using their pagers and walkie-talkies was not the first time everyday devices were used to kill. Indeed, there is a long history of common gadgets being repurposed for more nefarious uses, including by Hezbollah itself. The Israeli attack does differ in a meaningful way, however, from some of the key past historical examples. The difference is not in the indiscriminate nature of the attacks but rather in their scale and sophistication.

Blankets, wagons and cars

Historical examples of the every day being used to kill abound, but not all date from the 20th century. Take a basic component of human life as we know it: blankets. In 1763, English colonists in North America were engaged in warfare with indigenous peoples, defending their land against European encroachment. Indigenous warriors surrounded an English fort, and in desperation, its commander wrote to Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the leader of British forces in North America.

Knowing that the virulent disease smallpox was particularly deadly for indigenous peoples, Amherst suggested spreading the disease among those engaged in the siege against the fort. In words that would not be out of place in the present, he advised, “We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them,” encouraging the deliberate use of smallpox. He was too late: an English trader had already attempted to infect indigenous peoples by giving them blankets and other cloths taken from smallpox patients inside the fort. Whether or not the effort was successful is unknown, but it established a precedent of weaponising everyday objects.

Another landmark came courtesy of a horse and wagon in 1920. In the early era of motorised transportation, horses remained prevalent in urban environments. Nothing appeared unusual, then, in New York City on September 16, 1920, when a horse pulling a wagon stopped outside the offices of major financial institutions on Wall Street while workers milled around enjoying their lunch breaks.

In this case, the wagon was a delivery device for Italian anarchists seeking to send a deadly message to the American capitalist state. At one minute after noon, a massive bomb exploded, composed of dynamite and packed with ball bearings to serve as shrapnel. Around 40 people lay dead in its aftermath, and hundreds were injured in the worst terrorist attack in the United States until the 1990s.

The attack—believed to have been masterminded by an anarchist named Mario Buda—began a pattern across the 20th century and into the next of ordinary vehicles, ubiquitous in urban settings, being used, in the words of the late radical historian Mike Davis, as the “poor man’s air force.” Davis was referring specifically to non-state groups engaged in political violence.

In one such example, the Provisional Irish Republican Army became notorious for its use of car bombs in the 1970s. Most infamously, the group detonated 20 bombs, most of them in cars, in less than an hour-and-a-half across Belfast on 21 July 1972—a day which would become known as Bloody Friday, resulting in nine deaths and over 100 injuries.

Bombs borne in cars or trucks are both discriminate and indiscriminate. The precision comes because the vehicle can often be positioned near a particular target, like a guided missile. However, randomness is because there is no guarantee as to who might be in the vicinity when the explosion occurs.

To reduce the indiscriminate aspect, groups such as Hezbollah combined vehicles packed with explosives with drivers willing to sacrifice their lives to ensure the bombs directly hit specific targets, including a barracks containing US Marines in Beirut in October 1983. Vehicles bearing bombs would become a staple during the occupation of Iraq after the American and British invasion in 2003.

Although everyday objects appeal to non-state actors as instruments of death because of their inexpensive nature and often abundant supply, states will inevitably engage in similar tactics in an almost copycat fashion.

Take two bombings four-and-a-half years apart. In June 1985, Sikh extremists based in Canada and unconnected to any state agency brought down an Air India 747 off the coast of Ireland, killing the 329 people on board, using dynamite hidden in a stereo tuner that was then packed into a suitcase. Then, in December 1989, Libyan intelligence agents destroyed a Pan-American flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, ending 270 lives. That bomb was hidden in a radio cassette player.

Telecom bombs

Israeli intelligence agencies have long been a world leader in turning everyday gadgets into instruments of death. In the operation Wrath of God, designed to seek vengeance against Palestinians connected to the attack against Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Mossad killed a Palestinian Liberation Organisation representative in Paris through a bomb hidden in a telephone on a desk. A year later, another PLO official met his end in Cyprus through a bomb placed in his bed by Mossad.

Read more: Israel's assassinations via telecoms predate pagers

More recent Israeli attacks show the capacity of almost any object to become a potential weapon. In 1996, and in small parallel to the recent attacks, the Israeli internal intelligence agency, Shin Bet, killed a Hamas bombmaker through an explosive built around the battery in his mobile telephone, which was remotely detonated when he answered a call from a family member. Twelve years later, a CIA-Mossad combined operation used an explosive device hidden in a spare tyre on the back of an SUV to assassinate a senior Hezbollah commander in Damascus.

Numerous examples exist of the weaponisation of everyday objects over the last 100 years. Nevertheless, the Israeli attack against Hezbollah using pagers and walkie-talkies represents a new benchmark because of its combination of sophistication and scale.

The former involved the apparent establishment of a front company by Mossad to manufacture pagers, with some of them containing explosives whereas others operated normally. Terrorist groups steal cars to place bombs into them; they don’t set up companies to build the cars themselves. Only states have the resources to engage in such an elaborate undertaking.

Read more: By paging Hezbollah, Israel took aim at a chip in Iran’s armour

Then there is the scale of the pager/walkie-talkie attack by Israel against Hezbollah. Except for the occasional use of multiple vehicle-borne explosives, most attacks with ordinary gadgets turned into weapons have been singular in nature. The numbers involved in Lebanon are truly unprecedented.

Indeed, the use of this tactic on this scale by a state is a worrying harbinger for the future. Given the prevalence of personal communication devices, it is not hard to imagine nightmarish scenarios where comparable attacks are carried out not in the thousands but in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Huge implications

As much as such tactics might appeal to states going forward, there are enormous consequences as well. First, there is the indiscriminate nature of the attack. There was no guarantee as to who would be in the vicinity of or holding the devices when they exploded. In a real way, then, there is little difference in principle in the pager attacks from car bombs deployed by terrorists. Innocents will always be caught up in such violence, whether instigated by state or non-state actors.

Second—and this should give pause to states contemplating similar tactics in the future—there is the reality of being careful of what you wish for. Inevitably, the clever tactics developed by one state will be used against them—either by another state or an independent entity. A telephone might kill your opponent, but the final number being answered might be yours someday.