Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
by Mike Davis
Verso ₤12.99, 228 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤10.39

It began with a horse-drawn wagon on Wall Street in September 1920, when an Italian anarchist called Mario Buda tried to blow up the federal Assay Office in downtown Manhattan. Forty people were killed, 200 injured, but the real consequence of this attack, argues Mike Davis in his horrifying new book, Buda’s Wagon, was more imaginative than physical. An idea exploded, and has not stopped yet.

Davis jumps from here to the right-wing Zionist Stern gang in Israel in the late 1940s, which attacked British police stations in Palestine with trucks full of explosives. Car bombs spread to Saigon in the closing days of the French occupation, and then to Algeria; in the early 1960s, the Sicilian Mafia, learning from the lessons of Algeria, packed Alfa Romeos with explosive to assassinate independent magistrates.

Terrorist groups borrow a vocabulary and mechanism of terror from one another, and the model spreads. In 1969, a group of left-wing anti-war students at the University of Wisconsin, using a brochure called Pothole Blasting for Wildlife, worked out the right mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to make a car bomb - and destroyed half their campus. Later, in the 1970s, the IRA began using them too.

From here, we leap to early 1980s Beirut, where a series of detonations culminated in the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks. The CIA replied with a car bomb in an attempt to assassinate the leader of Hezbollah, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Eta in Spain, Pablo Escobar in Colombia: all have used car bombs. As Davis notes: ”By the mid-1990s, more cities were under siege from bomb attacks than at any time since the end of world war two.” Oklahoma City, Chechnya, Bali; the list goes on, all the way to Iraq where, Davis estimates, 578 car bombs were detonated between June 2003 and June 2006.

Car bombers, Davis writes, ”are currently or recently active in at least 23 countries”. These bombs are stealthy, cheap, simple and anonymous. You can buy a manual to make a car bomb on Amazon.com. All you need, in the end, is the will and a couple of thousand dollars.

”Stolen nukes, sarin gas, and anthrax may be the sum of our fears,” writes Davis, ”but vehicle bombs are the brutal hardware and quotidian workhorses of urban terrorism.” What is most bleak about this book is what it indicates not about technology, but about the human imagination: it is a repetitive and savage force.

The book is basically a catalogue of horrors. What larger lessons can we learn? That forms of violence are mimetic; that technology informs the imagination; that brutality is simple. ”The car bomb probably has a brilliant future,” Davis concludes, but also something much scarier: ”Nihilism, if systematic, works.”