that wall makes it sobering to watch. does this look like the work of an explosive device or windows popping or something else? i ll tell you what, we will have to wait until we find the wreckage. that will find us for certain or actually a witness to this. in the meantime, a bomb would have the same effect. for instance, put against the skin with a particularly lethal explosive like petn would break the plane apart. a lot of the bombs are detonated by barometric switches. let s take the scenario in complete speculation, one of the people thinks he is carrying something else, gets on the airplane and puts bagging in the overhead and it reaches an altitude of let s say 35,000 feet, explodes and the plane comes apart. these bombs have been around since the 80s.
we ve also seen what the 2009 underwear bomb would have looked like if it had gone off. another similar explosion to the one you just saw. farouk concealed it in his pants and got it through security. that s a law enforcement demo of what it would have looked like. also that british security expert, sidney alford, had previously shown cnn what one of those printer bombs hitten in printer cartridges on cargo planes could have done if they had gone off in that 2010 plot. there s a picture of the printer cartridge bomb there. that plot was disrupted as we look at what that could have done. in those cases it s believed the explosive petn was used but terrorists are learning new ways to construct shoe bombs, takes very little explosive material and a very little bit with bring down a plane. brian todd, thanks very much. so watching the breaking news and want to get some perspective
some things like matches and maybe some lighters are often not detected. so you could conceivably get it through. it takes some kind of a detonation, possibly with a heat source, to get it to go off. and he was able to do that. you can do it in a tube this size or maybe several tubes this size. you can do a small one like that? possibly, yes. it is possible, not easy, but possible. you know, cnn also demonstrated two years ago, wolf, after that 2010 plot to put printer cartridge bombs on cargo planes, we demonstrated how powerful that could have been. that wasn t a whole lot bigger than one of these and that made a huge explosion. we ve got some video of that right here. explosions easily enough to bring down a plane or cause massive casualties in a crowded situation. again, this was also the type of explosive used in that and this are fairly similar. the toothpaste explosive that we used today was substance called rdx. that substance in that video was petn, same substance used
before. and we ve had other alerts. nothing happened. sometimes an alert can disrupt a plot because people say hey we re not going to do this. sometimes the information is simply inaccurate. usually these alerts don t result in us then having some kind of event. and bob, given the fact that russia as we were talk about with nick they ve already banned any kind of carry on liquid on board flights arriving at the two main moscow airports, is the warning from the u.s. unnecessary? is it just that a precaution? no. i think washington is expecting some sort of attack. they re considering all the possibilities. al qaeda uses liquid bombs. as peter said. but you don t need liquids. you can take high explosive like petn and put the in the liner of suitcases. depends how good the russians are. but these things can get very sophisticated and the chechians have access to them. that would be another worry. but again we re looking for specifics.
place, embassy in mind or western interest in mind. and when you talk about al qaeda in the arabian peninsula, their attacks on us have been aviation type attacksor the underwear bomber trying to bomb the plane over detroit at christmastime 2009, later mailing the explosive petn packages at a later date. aqap could strike anywhere. they could strike by aviation. they could pick hotels. they could pick restaurants, any number of targets that would be much softer than an embassy. most of these embassies are like fortresses, and attacks on them in the past have often been futile because they can t penetrate the outer perimeter, which is usually secured by host country military or police. so they end up killing people from the country and not really killing americans. there s been several attacks in yemen that have failed as well at the embassy. tom, you mentioned that u.s. authorities don t actually have specifics, yet they have