Ya know that for sure? I don’t mean some lithium chemistry. The simpler solution is obviously to use a traditional chemistry. I’ve been speculating recently that it is likely possible to make a single use battery from an explosive. A battery is just exploiting oxidation like reactions with the galvanic potential of metals. Explosives are basically unstable stuff with lots of potential combined with a rapid oxidiser. The two uses have quite a lot in common. I bet there is a bunch of untapped potential in this space where little research is done in the public sphere.
I suspect explosions from battery chemistry would be too slow compared to what was seen with these pagers, and power derived from an explosive compound that would be this deadly with such a small footprint wouldn’t be good for a pager (and probably not effectively rechargeable at least). Not to say if they wanted to hide things, they could install a smaller battery with the rest of the volume made up by some form of plastic explosive. I just don’t think there’s a battery chemistry in use right now that will both generate a suitable amount of power and also go from stable to boom in the speeds we saw with this attack.
I find it far more likely they had a small amount of plastic explosive (perhaps hidden as part of the battery).
But who knows in reality? Well except Mossad :P
The trick is that explosives react to form pretty much exclusively gasses. That’s where the boom comes from - suddenly you have gasses at the density of a solid, and clearly that corresponds to a lot of pressure by PV=nRT, as well as just common sense about how heavy gas normally is. Batteries tend to be full of stuff that doesn’t like to be gas, so you get more of a firey, sparky effect than “poof”.
The explosions pictured look very clean, and at this point it has pretty much come out how they made booby trapped devices seem like a legit product that Hezbollah should buy.
