Technology Exists To Trace Explosives

Imagine, if you can stomach it, the scene of a future terrorist blast. Amid the wreckage, investigators use ultraviolet lamps to illuminate tiny color-coded plastic chips that they then sweep up.

Reading the color sequence under a microscope, investigators quickly determine the type of explosive, the manufacturer and even the date it was produced-essential information in tracking down the culprits.

Sound futuristic? The system was tested successfully more than 15 years ago, but languished in the face of opposition from the National Rifle Association and explosives manufacturers.

Only Switzerland requires that explosives carry the plastic bits, known as “taggants.” And although bomb experts warn that the technology won’t solve all problems with explosives, they contend that it could have been making an important contribution to forensics for more than a decade.

Taggants - conceived of by Richard G. Livesay, a 74-year-old chemistry professor at Whitewater State University in Wisconsin - were developed by him at the 3M Corp. The federal government performed a two-year test involving 7 million pounds of explosives. The test involved two kinds of tagging: “identification” tags to help trace explosives after the fact, and “detection” tags that would emit a nontoxic gas to make it easy to find explosives before they are detonated.

In 1977, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reported the results of its tests, it estimated that the cost of adding identifying taggants to high explosives would be no more than two cents per pound of explosives - a figure that manufacturers say is still close to the mark. At the time, the agency said that military explosives and such common compounds as ammonium nitrate (used in the Oklahoma City bombing) are “rarely used in crime and would not be tagged,” though many of the compounds necessary to set them off would have been.

That test program even led to a Baltimore criminal conviction, according to ATF records. In May 1979, Robert J. Riffe was killed in the explosion of a co-worker’s truck. Detectives found taggants from the 7-million-pound test batches - sold as part of general commerce - in the wreckage and traced the bomb to a Martinsburg, W.Va., dealer. James L. McFillin Sr. was arrested and convicted of charges related to the bombing and death in December 1979.

Rex D. Davis, then ATF director, called taggants “a breakthrough technology to help solve explosives crimes.”

But Congress cut the funding for the taggant program in 1980, and ordered ATF to stop working on the technology. The NRA claimed that tagging gunpowder and other materials used to reload ammunition might affect the performance and stability of bullets; explosives manufacturers complained that the technology would be too expensive for too little forensic gain because most criminal blasts involve explosives that would not be tagged. The technology idled at 3M; eventually Livesay bought the licensing rights and started his own company, Microtrace, to market the technology to industries looking for ways to keep track of their products and beat counterfeiters.

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, taggants are getting a second look.The Clinton administration has said it will propose that the ATF study the technology as part of a broader look at controlling terrorism; Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole, R-Kan., has introduced a bill that would call for substantially the same studies.

Many supporters of the technology say that it already has been studied thoroughly. Charles Faulkner, general counsel for Microtrace, said, “Our company’s position is the studies have already been done.” But Ralph C. Ostrowski, chief of the arson and explosives division of ATF, said, “It would be important for us to at least assess the state of the technology and the research and development that has been done in the last 15 years. We need to get ourselves up to speed.”

An NRA spokesman said the organization’s opposition to taggants had nothing to do with their use in high explosives, “We’re not the explosives lobby.” If questions about the stability of ammunition made with taggants can be resolved, the spokesman said, “we’d have no problems at all” with renewing the issue.