Don’t Fool Yourself About the Exploding Pagers

Yesterday, pagers used by Hezbollah operatives exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands. Today brought another mass detonation in Lebanon, this time involving walkie-talkies. The attacks are gruesome and shocking. An expert told the Associated Press that the pagers received a message that caused them to vibrate in a way that required someone to press buttons to stop it. That action appears to have triggered the explosion. At a funeral in Beirut, a loudspeaker reportedly called for people to turn off their phones, illustrating a fear that any device could actually be a bomb, including the one in your pocket.

Electronics are a global business, and the events of the past two days in Lebanon have created an unexpected information fog of war. Virtually everyone uses personal electronic devices—phones, headphones, chargers, and even, in some cases, pagers. Those devices can, under certain circumstances, create risk. Gadgets catch on fire, get hacked so that remote intruders can spy on you, or get infected with malware that turns them into botnets. Might your smartphone just explode one morning as you’re reach for it on the nightstand? Almost surely not.

According to the Associated Press, the attack was likely carried out by hiding very small quantities of highly explosive material in the pagers. In principle, intelligence operatives in Israel, which is widely believed to have conducted both attacks, could have done so by compromising the devices in the factory. But given that the exploding devices seem to have specifically targeted Hezbollah rather than everyone who owned a particular model of pager, the perpetrators more likely intercepted the gadgets after they left the factory. The resulting pager bombs were apparently procured by Hezbollah months ago. The pager bombs and radio bombs have since been waiting to be detonated remotely.

You are unlikely to find that your iPhone, Kindle, or Beats headphones have been modified to include pentaerythritol tetranitrate or hexogen, the two compounds currently suspected to have been used in the Lebanon detonations. That’s not because such a thing can’t be done—as little as three grams of these materials can be highly explosive, and it would, in principle, be possible to cram that much into even the small cavities of a circuit-packed iPhone. In theory, someone could interfere with such a device, either during manufacture or afterward. But they would have to go to great effort to do so, especially at large scale. Of course, this same risk applies not just to gadgets but to any manufactured good.

Other electronic devices have blown up without being rigged to be bombs. Yesterday, when news first broke of the pagers blowing up, some speculated that the batteries had triggered the explosion. That conclusion is partly caused by an increased awareness that lithium-ion batteries are at some risk of exploding or catching on fire. The model of pager targeted in Lebanon does in fact use lithium-ion cells for power. But the intensity and precision of the explosions seen in Beirut, which were strong enough to blow off victims’ hands, couldn’t result from a lithium-ion blast—which also couldn’t be triggered at will anyway. A lithium-ion battery could cause a smaller explosion if overheated or overcharged, but these batteries pose a greater risk of starting a fire than an explosion. They can do so when punctured so that the liquid inside, which is flammable, leaks and then ignites. That doesn’t mean your iPhone is at risk of exploding when you tap an Instagram notification. In the United States, low-quality batteries made by disreputable manufacturers and installed in low-cost devices—such as vape pens or e-bikes—pose a much greater risk than anything else.

Accidental battery fires, even from poorly made parts, couldn’t be used to carry out a simultaneous explosive attack. But that doesn’t mean you don’t own devices that could put you at risk. Consider spyware and malware, a concern commonly directed at Chinese-made gadgets. If connected to the internet, a device can convey messages, send your personal information abroad, or, in theory, detonate on command if it were built (or retrofitted) to do so. It feels plausible enough to put the pieces together in a way that produces fear—exploding pagers in Beirut, wide ownership of personal electronics, lithium-ion fire risk, devices connected to unknown servers far away. Words such as spyware and malware evoke the James Bond–inspired idea that a hacker at a computer half a world away can press buttons quickly and cause anyone’s phone to blow up. But even after the astonishing attack carried out in Lebanon, such a scenario remains fiction, and not fact.

And yet, it’s also the case that a new type of terror has been birthed by this attack. In Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East especially, citizens can now reasonably fear that ordinary devices might also be bombs. Depending on how the devices made their way to their new owners, it’s also possible that the bomb-gadgets have leaked into more general circulation. Two children have already died.

In other words, the fear is grounded in enough fact to take root. Abroad, even here in the U.S., that same fear can be mustered, even if with much less justification. Fretting that your phone is actually a bomb feels new but really isn’t. The fear is caused by bombs, the things that explode. A pager or a phone can be made into a bomb, but so can anything else.