The nail bomb is an anti-personnel explosive device packed with nails to increase its wounding ability. The nails act as shrapnel, leading almost certainly to greater loss of life and injury in inhabited areas than the explosives alone would. The nail bomb is also a type of flechette weapon. Such weapons use bits of shrapnel (steel balls, nail heads, broken razors, darts and bits of metal) to produce a large radius of destruction.
Nail bombs are often used by terrorists, in particular by suicide bombers, since they cause large numbers of casualties when detonated in crowded places. Nail bombs can be detected via electromagnetic sensors and standard metal detectors.
Read more about Nail Bomb: Nail-bomb Incidents
Famous quotes containing the words nail and/or bomb:
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““... There, there,
What you complain of, all the nations share.
Their effort is a mounting ecstasy
That when it gets too exquisite to bear
Will find relief in one burst. You shall see.
That’s what a certain bomb was sent to be.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)