Fantastic analysis of the implausibility of the London explosives plot

This is a fantastic and humorous look at the difficulties involved in the bomb plot. In short its very tricky to do, let alone on an airplane.

So, lets say you have your oxidizer mixture and now you are going to mix it with acetone. In a proper lab environment, that's not going to be *too* awful -- your risk of dying horribly is significant but you could probably keep the whole thing reasonably under control -- you can use dry ice to cool a bath to -78C, say, and do the reaction really slowly by adding the last reactant dropwise with an addition funnel. If you're mixing the stuff up in someone's bathtub, like the guys who bombed the London subways a year ago did, you can take some reasonable precautions to make sure that your reaction doesn't go wildly out of control, like using a lot of normal ice and being very, very, very careful and slow. You need to keep the stuff cool, and you need to be insanely meticulous, or you're going to be in a world of hurt.

More here http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html