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:
“Many hammer all over the wall and believe that with each blow they hit the nail on the head.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“[A] Dada exhibition. Another one! What’s the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb ... can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?”
—Max Ernst (1891–1976)