Products like the iPhone, brands like Coca-Cola and pop stars like Michael Jackson aren’t the only currency of globalization. As Mike Davis points out in this swift, grimly readable little book, weapons are, too.
“Like an implacable virus,” he writes, “once vehicle bombs have entered the DNA of a host society and its contradictions, their use tends to reproduce indefinitely. Between 1992 and 1999, 25 major vehicle attacks in 22 different cities killed 1,337 people and wounded nearly 12,000.”
It would seem the last three years in Iraq have matched this total. But Baghdad wasn’t ground zero of these infernal machines, as Davis takes to calling them, the likes of which were used in London and Glasgow last week. The car bomb’s history started in the good old U.S. of A.
The first car bomb on record exploded in 1920 in Manhattan, on the corner of Wall and Broad streets outside of the offices of J.P. Morgan. Actually, the vehicle wasn’t a car but a horse-drawn wagon. The culprit was Mario Buda, an anarchist, his victims 40 passersby, some mangled beyond recognition.
It would be another 27 years before the car bomb reappeared in urban warfare, but the spark had caught. Car bombs are stealthy, loud, cheap, anonymous and bound to create “collateral damage.” Here was a weapon to empower marginal actors—“the poor man’s air force,” as Davis calls it.
Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb follows the weapon on its destructive path through the past six decades of war and resistance, from the war of independence in Israel to the first Indo-China War to Algeria and Corsica, then back to Vietnam, Ireland, Beirut, Argentina, Chechnya, Oklahoma City and Iraq.
This is Davis’ third micro-history, following most notably Magical Urbanism, his study of the effects of Chicano immigration to American cities.
Cleverly, the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient has constructed Buda’s Wagon to mirror the feedback loop of technological invention. The bomb is deployed, refined, deployed again and refined again across borders, boundaries and time.
This cycle of invention leads to historical ironies. For instance, Davis notes that the first car bombs in the Middle East were deployed by the Stern Gang, a radical Zionist group that targeted civilian Arab neighborhoods and British soldiers. Later, the Israelis found themselves on the receiving end.
Today, SUVs stolen from Texas wind up in Iraq as car bomb vehicles—with their big bulky exteriors and blacked-out windows, they resemble vehicles driven by American contractors and thus draw less suspicion.
One of the biggest technological leaps came in 1970 at the hands of radical students at the University of Wisconsin. Using a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, a recipe gleaned from Pothole Blasting for Wildlife, a brochure put out by the Wisconsin Fish and Game Department, the kids created a bomb that was equivalent to 3,400 sticks of dynamite.
Detonated, it destroyed nearly half of their campus. It killed an antiwar physics student working late in his lab and provided a recipe for years of killing in the future.
Davis predicts the car bomb will continue toward a “brilliant future,” its parts becoming ever harder to trace and easier to obtain. In the language of globalization, its market potential is huge.
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Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
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Mike Davis
Verso, $22.95