Testing Explosives from The Anarchist Cookbook

[FAST MUSIC PLAYING] ROCCO CASTORO: I recently wrote an article for the technology issue of "Vice" about "The Anarchist Cookbook". And if you don't know what "The Anarchist Cookbook" is, it was written in 1971 by a 19-year-old named William Powell. It was a response to the Vietnam War and a type of field manual for civil unrest at the time. And it contains stuff like how to make TNT, how to kill people with your bare hands, firearms knowledge, and all sorts of fun stuff. A few years later he actually became a born again Christian and requested that the book be taken off the shelves and taken out of print. Unfortunately for him he didn't have that luxury because he sold the original copyright to the publisher and today you can still buy the thing on Amazon. Somewhere around the mid-1980s things took kind of an interesting turn with the heyday of bulletin board systems. Someone compiled this list of instructions on how to make low-grade explosives and stuff like flaming tennis balls, and just general malcontent ***. And somewhere along the line they appropriated William Powell's original title "The Anarchist Cookbook" and people started calling it that even though it had very little resemblance to the original. A lot of people know about "The Anarchist Cookbook" but I don't know too many people that have actually tried the entries out for themselves, and they're rumored to be very dangerous and incomplete and incorrect. So I thought it would be a good idea to head out to a warehouse in Brooklyn and just blow some *** up and see if there was any merit to these recipes. [MUSIC PLAYING] ROCCO CASTORO: It's pretty simple here. You just take Strike Anywhere matches-- just going to be cutting the match heads off. I think we figured out that for each tennis ball you need about 3,000 match heads. And you want to cut in maybe a quarter of an inch, and get a split tennis ball. Let's do some sandpaper now. Literally drop your matches in there. Just in case Strike Anywhere match-filled tennis balls don't explode like we hope, we're going to have a plan B. And we're breaking apart some bottle rockets, getting the black powder out, and we're going to make a combination of matches and black powder in one of the balls. We don't know how many parts powder compared to how many parts matches we should be using, so we're just going to fill up the entire *** thing. ED ZIPCO: Black powder. ROCCO CASTORO: Yeah, I mean we're going to need to pack it with a lot of the-- ED ZIPCO: Sandpaper? ROCCO CASTORO: The sandpaper then. Maybe a little bit of cardboard. We just need it like filler, essentially. This is going to be test one of the flaming tennis ball. OK we're going to use the experimental version packed with black powder and match heads. - Whoa! [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC PLAYING] ROCCO CASTORO: I mean this was kind of silly to begin with-- make blow darts out of these pipes, and yarn, and pencil erasers. Those are the directions and I suspected it wasn't really going to do anything. So basically you just take a pencil eraser, push it down to the end of the dart, which serves as a kind of a stopper here. You want to make sure you have, I think these are called beaded needles, with the hole in them. Some yarn which is going to act as kind of like a feather. Kind of stupid and silly-- I didn't really think it was going to work that well, and it really doesn't. I don't know why anybody would really make one of these. Certainly couldn't defend yourself or hurt anybody with it. I think it's safe to say that this was definitely a failure, and "The Anarchist Cookbook", whoever wrote it, just wasn't thinking. [FAST MUSIC PLAYING] Apparently, if you make a pound of this, it will fill up an entire city block with smoke. Going to need four parts sugar, six parts potassium nitrate. It's pretty simple. Got here in your hot plate, you can use your stove if you're a little daring, I guess. Very low heat. [MUSIC PLAYING] ED ZIPCO: This is the first time where I felt like we're really cooking up something. It's like *** foul. Oh wow. ROCCO CASTORO: This is what the saltpeter and sugar mixture turned into. We've got wicks and matches in it. We'll see what happens. If it smells as bad as it does now when it starts smoking then we're all in for a bad night. - Whoa! - Put it out. - That's awesome. ROCCO CASTORO: Basically the idea here, you've got the BB gun, you've got the can of hairspray. And what theoretically this is supposed to do, at least what "The Anarchist Cookbook" says it'll do, is spark the matches, also puncture the bottom of this can, and send it down the road. We're not doing it outside because there's a school across the street. Because we just think it's going to explode. ED ZIPCO: Dude, Nick? His *** buddy, ah what the *** was it, they threw a keg into a campfire. One kid got decapitated. ROCCO CASTORO: What? ED ZIPCO: It was for real, *** like proper *** charges. They charged everybody, everyone who was involved. It was like a *** thing. People got really *** up. ROCCO CASTORO: Who was this? ED ZIPCO: One dude gone. Nick. He was here earlier. Shrapnel ain't a *** joke. [MUSIC PLAYING] LOU: Did that hurt? Don't, don't, don't, don't! Seriously! Ow! Back up if you're going to do it. Back up [INAUDIBLE]. ROCCO CASTORO: This is what we call the down the road rocket, and what "The Anarchist Cookbook" calls the down the road rocket. We've attached ours to a skateboard. It's a little modification. We don't think it's going to work, but if it doesn't work, we're going to either put some *** in the back, or figure out a way to do it. [MUSIC - LIVEFASTDIE, "WEAPONS"] - What are we going to do now? LOU: Another one of these. But we're gonna light the matches. Whoa, ***! ROCCO CASTORO: Simple ingredients for ***. Basically, take gasoline, put it in a bucket. Put as much Styrofoam as the gasoline will eat. So just keep feeding it the Styrofoam until it stops dissolving. You'll end up with a really nice little goo that you can spread on your baby sister, or a car, or somebody and burn forever. And it doesn't go out so make sure whatever you're burning you don't want. And you're able to control it somehow-- either be a big open space or some kind of space blanket you can throw over it because I don't know what else will put it out. ED ZIPCO: Yeah, but if we mash it down first, and we flatten it-- MILES: Like that? ED ZIPCO: Yeah, look at that. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] - That's awesome! LANDLORD: Hey guys? As soon as you can, you should turn that off because if the sprinklers go off, all our equipment gets damaged, and that's quite a bit of-- - OK. OK. OK Can we turn it on? - Yeah, but we're not turning it on. -No we're not. [MUSIC PLAYING] - That's badass. - That is so *** up. [MUSIC PLAYING]