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He gets the best guests and he's got some great old history at content as well. This week on this podcast, it's an original from James Rogers, From Dynamite to Drones How terrorist technology impacted the start of the First World War. He interviews Professor Audrey Cronin. She's the world's leading expert in terrorism and technology. It's so interesting. She explains how there was a technological boom which occurred before the First World War and created new opportunities for terrorism with gigantic strategic consequences.

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Enjoy. Hi, Audrey, thanks for coming on the show. Your award winning new book, Power to the People How Open Technological Innovation Is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists. Let's dive into it. What is the book about?

The book is explaining the difference between technological contexts that are open versus those that are closed and how important it is to understand early technological development in the last period of time when we had commercially driven technology in understanding how emerging technologies today are evolving. So one of my concerns before I began to write the book was that most people are looking to the heart of the 20th century in order to try to understand what is happening now with the emerging technologies like everything from social media to drones to additive manufacturing to the whole range of digitally based technologies, even synthetic biology.

So they're looking at the 20th century, especially when it comes to understanding the future of how military operations will proceed when they're trying to grapple with new technologies. But what I thought was a far better period of time was the last time we had an open technological context, which was at the latter part of the 19th century before we headed into the First World War. Now, by an open technological context, what I mean is that technologies are available for individuals, small groups, amateurs to develop.

They're accessible, they're designed to be tinkered with. And we're not looking strictly at state controlled technological development as occurred during the 20th century, which was mainly closed. But we're looking at a period where there's explosive technological optimism and access to new technologies. That's causing a lot of surprising uses of those technologies. So, in other words, it's not right to look at the nuclear period or the development of jet fighters or carriers or highly expensive state controlled systems in order to understand how war is going to evolve in the future.

It's far more insightful to look at the latter part of the 19th century where you had an explosive range of brand new technologies that were developed by people, for example, in their attics or in their back sheds or in their garages. And so I was trying to answer the question, where are we going really? By looking back at a period of time that I think has a certain amount of echoes, a certain sort of resonance with the technological context that we're working in today.

Right.

So this is quite a unique way to look at contemporary technologies, because, of course, we hear a lot about the threats of drones or 3D printing or the way in which individuals and small groups harness and develop social media platforms and fake news. But instead of looking in the 20th century, we need to go back to the 19th century and perhaps even further, to see how a widespread range of commercial developments and new technologies came and influenced society. So let's talk about that period.

Let's talk about that period before the First World War. What technologies were about and which were most impactful?

Yes, well, that was a period of open innovation, which was both wonderful and dangerous. And in the latter part of the 19th century, you had a broad range of people involved, not just military and civilian, like we think of in the 20th century, but professionals, professional consumers, hobbyists, regular consumers. And they were able to develop technologies that later had a huge impact upon the military and with which the military had to contend when it came to the first and second world wars.

But they weren't originally intended for military use. They were driven by commercial processes. So you had things like the development of the radio by Marconi, who invented the radio in the attic of his home, and Orville and Wilbur Wright. You're all very familiar with that example, bicycle manufacturers who made the first powered, sustained and controlled flight in 1933. But you had things like Gottlieb Daimler, who invented the motorcycle in 1885. The internal combustion engine was being invented between the late 60s and the 70s.

All of these things had enormous impact on the battlefield. But the one that I focused especially upon in the book was The Invention of Dynamite by Alfred Nobel. And he was just tinkering with explosives in a shed in his backyard. But he ultimately came up with the first stable high explosive, which built the infrastructure that we still have for the most part today, things from the Panama Canal to the Brooklyn Bridge. But he also set off the huge proliferation of new high explosives and those were important to the First World War.

But at the same time, he set off the first wave of modern terrorism, which specifically used dynamite.

So. This the same Alfred Nobel of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, Alfred Nobel at the end of his life, wrote a will in 1895, and he believed that his explosives were going to be a stabilizing factor globally because he had made war so horrible and so terrible that he said that when two armies could annihilate each other instantly, civilized nations would recoil with horror and would disband their troops, or at least he hoped they would. He had a very skeptical view of humanity, but he thought that there might be something like deterrence.

It was an early vision of what we call deterrence today. But at the same time, he was also hedging his bets because he had considerable remorse about the impact of dynamite in killing thousands of people throughout the world in terrorist attacks. And so he endowed the Peace Prize, but also prizes in medicine, chemistry, a full range of different sciences. And later, the economics prize was in doubt in the 1960s, much later. So his idea was to show a certain amount of remorse about the tremendous devastation that his brilliant inventions had created.

And the devastation definitely did present itself as states harnessed these high explosives and technologies throughout the First World War. But prior to that period, were they harnessed by private actors, small groups or perhaps the first waves of terrorists?

Yes, I will go so far as to say that we would not have had the invention of modern terrorism had it not been for the invention of dynamite. We would not have. What we know today is modern terrorism because dynamite gave individuals who before this would not have been strong enough or even physically powerful enough to engage in terrorism. It gave them the ability to throw a dynamite bomb and have an enormous impact. And so it was a symbolic use of violence that is so crucial to the development of terrorism.

But this was in a context where you had rapid changes in the economy and society that were being brought about by industrialization. You had dislocation of workers. You had growing income inequality at the end of the 19th century. You had an increasing nationalism and you had fast paced globalization of trade and communications. This was the perfect setting for spreading information about terrorism. So the philosophies and ideologies behind anarchism. And there were a number of other types of terrorist groups at this time as well.

But anarchism, social revolutionaries, nationalism, these philosophies had been around for quite a while, but they had not been able to act upon those philosophies in the way that they could once dynamite was invented. So as a result, at the end of the 19th century, you had, beginning in 1867, an enormous number of attacks, terrorist attacks that spread throughout the world between 1867 and 1891. They were mainly in Europe. But then as Alfred Nobel began to build far more factories and dynamite was also spread globally, you eventually went to a period between 1882 in 1900, which was extremely intensive use of dynamite in the capitals within Europe.

There was a huge spike in violence. The European governments responded, particularly with police and regulatory reforms. And so that spike went down. But then the spread of dynamite through the 19th one in 1918 period across continents in Western Europe and in the United States and from Western Europe into Eastern Europe. That was the third period of widespread use of dynamite, even during the First World War in some continents that weren't even directly involved. And then finally, the preponderance of terrorism and dynamite attacks shifted to the United States after the First World War between about 1919 and 1934.

So terrorism in that first wave of violence was extraordinarily destructive and spread by new means of communication that allowed people throughout the world to learn about this repulsive but also kind of fascinating violence in the aftermath of a dynamite bomb.

So who were these terrorists and what did they want to achieve?

Well, the complicated thing about that period is that it's hard to generalize about what each one wanted to achieve them. The anarchists wanted to take down the current system and to start fresh, or at least to remove the power of strong governments to control individual liberty. They were very much about removing power. But then you had social revolutionaries, for example, in Russia, whose purpose was to try to increase the sense of economic equality and social justice. I mean, it had ideas that were quite admirable from the point of view.

Two of the 21st century, or it's not that the ideas were wrong, but they wanted to try to cause a revolution from below. They wanted to try and cause a popular uprising that would overcome the czar's regime that they felt was a tyrannical regime. And then you had nationalists, you had the Irish nationalists who were extremely violent in the U.K. They were trying to achieve the unification of Ireland and they were doing something that was entirely different from what the anarchists were doing.

And then as you shift to the United States, you have an increasing intertwining between labor unrest at a time of tremendous inequality, labor unrest that sometimes had anarchist ideas that were expressed. But oftentimes it was more about responding to the feeling of inequality and the inability of a lower class to make progress. So Dynomite allowed terrorist actors to have a privatization of lethal, deadly force and to act upon their ideology and their ideas, but what communication technologies during that period allowed these ideas to spread globally?

Well, that's exactly the question, James, because it was the fact that you had the laying of telegraph cables much earlier in the century, but they were in place and then the development of mass market newspapers and they were connected via telegraph. But the ability to use mass production capabilities to decrease the price of a newspaper meant that there was a much larger number of people who are exposed to the ability to read the news. And sometimes you'd find, you know, newspapers going from, I don't know, 50 cents a copy to five cents a copy.

So as they were democratizing the access to newspapers, there was a desire to increase the number of subscriptions. And in the United States, for example, that's when the Pulitzer and the Hearst empires were built. You had an enormous shift in the people that the newspapers were oriented toward. And so dynamiting, as they were called, were the perfect sensationalized headlines that would sell a lot of newspapers and that helped build those empires. So it was the combination of not just a new lethal technology, dynamite along with firearms, but especially dynamite that spread through commercial processes.

But then also this new communications vectors, the mass market newspapers that were connected via telegraph and they were sharing sensationalized information about attacks. And as a result, what happened was the global spread of political violence. And I think that that trifecta of those three things is predictable and it's something that could occur again today.

It doesn't take a leap in imagination to see the parallels between what you're talking about there, about economic downturns, global turmoil, new lethal high technologies, new global communications systems that are changing the way in which people can twist and bend the narratives, but also digest information and how this leads to the spread of extreme ideas and, of course, terrorism and political violence. And you start to see the shadows of that perhaps in the world we live in today.

Absolutely. So all you have to do is think about the role of social media right now in perpetuating the attacks that are occurring by terrorist groups. I mean, ISIS is the obvious because they were quite effective at using social media to recruit. But it's not just the Islamist terrorist groups. Of course, it's right wing groups and a range of different small militias and private armies that are gaining the ability to behave as if they were professional armies. I mean, it used to be that you had to have a professional army in order to be able to mobilize people to project your own power and then to integrate different systems in a command and control way.

Those three things you used to have to have the resources of a state in order to carry off. And unfortunately, we're in a period now when because of new technologies and among them is social media, but also other technologies like drones and 3D printing. Because of these capabilities, you've got a number of individuals as well as private armies and militias who can act as if they were state armies.

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Shop online at Currys dealt with that in mind. Let's jump back to that pre World War One period, because as you were talking about, you mentioned the anarchists. Now, are these the same anarchist movements that were in part responsible for the start of the First World War?

Well, the start of the First World War, of course, was very complex. And I'm not going to try to argue that the only thing that was important was the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That was a catalyst for the outbreak of the First World War within a much broader international context, where you had a lot of other things going on, but you still had to have that catalyst. And I don't think that you would have had Gavrilo Princip armed with firearms and 2.5 pound bombs had it not been that there was this demonstration project that had been going on for the last several decades showing that individuals could cause tremendous change through the use of terrorism and assassination.

So by the time we get to the First World War, you have such destabilization within Europe as a result of a wave of assassinations and then a wave of attacks on civilians in various capitals as a result of terrorist attacks. This destabilizing political context is important to the outbreak of the First World War through that terrorist attack.

That is fascinating to think how this combination of new communications technologies and new lethal force combined to allow a small group of actors to assassinate such a key figure that it contributes to the outbreak of a global war and of interstate conflict. What other events during this period terrorist attacks took place? How were they manifest? Who did they target?

Well, one of the things that I think is very interesting is looking at how the evolution of targeting went in the beginning after Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and there was a use of dynamite bombs, along with sometimes firearms, to kill many leaders of European states. So you began the most famous early assassination was Alexander, the second in 1881. But you also had the assassination of the French president, the Spanish prime minister, the Italian king, U.S. President McKinley.

In 1981, there was targeting of high profile leaders that continued into toward the end of the century. I would say it began to taper off in the late 1990s because there was a police response. There was the ability to harden leaders, in other words, to make them less vulnerable to those kinds of attacks. And they were made more distant. And there was a gradual shift to targeting more civilians. But targeting civilians was also politically highly destabilizing. Just because you could protect certain known targets beforehand did not mean that you could predict exactly where there would be a terrorist attack on a civilian target.

And ultimately, that caused far more political impact, I think, than many of the assassinations of the leaders had, because more people became aware of the attacks in conjunction with the sensationalized media coverage that I mentioned earlier. So it was a combination of a change in how terrorist groups targeted, as well as the ability to reach a much broader audience, because, remember, terrorist attacks are always a three sided triangle. It's the attacker, the target. But then the third side of the triangle is the audience.

And the audience is in many ways the most important part. So they had a much broader audience of many, many millions of people. And one of the reasons why those commercial processes went so quickly was not just because Alfred Nobel's dynamite had factories throughout the world, but also because you had the ability to learn, say, in Australia about the attack that had just occurred in Paris or the attack that occurred in New York. There was inspiration. It wasn't just actual links between the attackers, but also awareness of the power of this kind of leveraged use of force.

And that was crucial to how the terrorist attacks evolved during the 19th and early 20th century.

But how easy was it to get hold of dynamite or your own pistol during this period? Because surely if this is a rise of terrorist attacks, this must have also been the birth of counter terrorism. Did states not take action to make it illegal to get hold of these technologies?

Well, there are two questions there, really. The first is, how easy was it to get a hold of these capabilities that depended upon where you were in the beginning, immediately after? Dynamite was invented, it was extraordinarily easy. Now, remember, dynamite was invented in order to primarily make mining easier. So you had a tremendous amount of access to dynamite on work sites. You had access to dynamite and building bridges. All of those huge infrastructure projects at the end of the 19th century gave large numbers of people access to dynamite to steal among the terrorists.

There were a few who actually built individual dynamite bombs, but that was less common. It was usually a matter of secreting it away in a pocket or just having access to be able to buy the dynamite in Europe. The European governments got together in the first conference was in 1898 with the Rome conference and began to build a series of regulations where it was illegal to move dynamite without controls and where it was much harder for ordinary people to gain access to dynamite.

So their response was very much to go to the structures of the state. The UK was a little bit different. The UK had a very extensive regulatory system that was put into place. They had former explosives experts who became inspectors and the UK was tracing the use of dynamite in a way that was highly sophisticated and where Alfred Nobel actually expressed his enthusiasm because he felt that it was easier for him to sell more dynamite, particularly in Scotland. And then later in England, he was able to sell far more dynamite because he knew exactly how to meet the regulations.

They were very clear. But when you get to the United States, it was an entirely different approach, in part because there was no national structure in place, there was no FBI and each local city had its own ordinances. And then you had states with their own rules. And most of these things weren't enforced in any case. So dynamite, except during the height of the First World War when it was federally controlled, dynamite was completely available for anyone.

And in fact, the folks that sold dynamite and other explosives, the powder men, one of them in New York, expressed his horror at the fact that the United States was going to remove all of the regulatory controls that had been in place in the First World War. And he argued that we control other things like opium and other far less dangerous products. But dynamite, which is the most powerful, individually used form of violence, is completely free for anyone to buy.

He was very worried about his own involvement in potential violence. So the United States was to some extent sort of the Wild West when it came to dynamite, because you could carry it anywhere. You could use it in many different locations. And what's interesting about the American response is that it was the railways who ultimately said, listen, we don't want our railroad cars to be blowing up. We don't want our people to be in danger. There were a number of high profile accidents.

And so it was a private company that came forward and began to regulate the movement and access to dynamite, especially as it was transported by the railroads. So you can see some echoes in those approaches now in how people are trying to respond to privacy rules, social media and dealing with the emerging technologies like drones. The American approach is much more open and much more oriented toward commercial voluntary self-restraint, whereas in Europe there's much more of an emphasis upon regulation.

Well, that leads me to my next question, actually, because what was the most effective counterterror effort during this period and what are those lessons that we can learn for the control of potentially lethal commercial technologies today?

The most effective ways of responding were those that involved countries working together. So in this period, you see the origins of Interpol, for example, the building up of intelligence cooperation and practical law enforcement cooperation was quite effective in Europe. And ultimately, it's a major part of the reason why terrorist attacks taper off quite a bit even before the First World War in Europe. Whereas in the United States, again, the use of commercial self-restraint had some impact upon solving the problems, but not nearly enough.

Ultimately, you see the founding of the FBI, the consolidation of controls at the federal level, which becomes very important as well. But that was some decades in the future. So we really were not controlling dynamite very effectively in the United States for quite a while.

So there are definitely some lessons to take from that period. And it actually leads me on to talking a bit about the contemporary threat we face from modern new high technologies.

How real is this threat that we face from, let's say, commercial drones? Because, of course, in the U.K. in. Twenty eighteen and across the world, people saw how Gatwick Airport was brought to a standstill and there's been reports of hostile commercial drone use around the world from the spread of infectious disease in China with African swine flu through to the more kinetic, hostile, explosive use of drones by ISIS. Is this really something that we should be worried about or is the threat over exaggerated?

I think that it is something that we should be worried about, but I don't want to be an alarmist in how we respond. So I think I would take both sides of your question and say I'd come somewhere in the middle. I think that commercial drones are not nearly as dangerous as a lot of the much more effective military weapons that we are concerned about. It's not that I'm saying that a quadcopter needs to be considered in the same way that a reaper might be considered.

For example, when we talk about drones, we're talking about different levels of sophistication and capability on the one hand. But on the other hand, it's oftentimes the use of these smaller technologies, these technologies at lower levels that are much more accessible and much more commonly used. These technologies have political impacts that heavily overbalance the kinds of political impacts of technologies that states control. So what I'm saying is a quadcopter that is used by ISIS to drop an explosive on civilians in Mosul might be nothing compared to the capabilities of the Iraqis or the Americans on the one hand.

But on the other hand, if what you're doing is you're terrifying the population and you're causing 10 or 12 people to go to the hospital every day, and you're causing a lack of confidence in the allied forces who are opposing ISIS, that's a political effect that is extremely important to the outcome of that battle. So we have to worry about both. We need to worry about the use of emerging technologies at the low end, not just the kinds of technologies at the high end that get all the attention.

Those at the low end could have an impact upon civilians in the same way that dynamite, which was very much less sophisticated than high explosives that were used in the First World War, like gun, cotton, white powder, cordite, Palestine, which Nobel had also invented specifically for use in artillery. Those things were more powerful than dynamite. And yet it was dynamite that destabilized European and other governments throughout the world in advance of that war. And those two things cannot be separated from each other.

We can't simply look at state uses of force and non-state low tech technologies in silos. Those two things intersect because remember, after all, with the outbreak of the First World War, it was a non-state actor using a relatively low level technology that set the spark that caused millions of people to die. One of the things to remember is that after the First World War broke out, it naturally pushed the evolution of all military explosives along. But the military was not driving the technological innovation in the use of small explosives.

What's really interesting is that military handheld bombs were still pretty ad hoc and primitive. They were used in large numbers by all sides to flush enemies out of the trenches. But they were very awkward devices. The British had a 16 inch throwing handle on there. I guess you'd call it a grenade, but it was a little handheld explosive. The Australians had jammed bombs which were filled with dynamite or gun cotton, and they were extremely primitive, especially compared to what terrorists were using decades before.

You had terrorists and individuals who were innovating in ways that were way ahead of what the military eventually used. I mean, of course, in 1915, you had the first mass produced infantry grenade, which was the Mills bomb, and it was the most common type of grenade that was used for decades until as late as 1970. But my point is that terrorists were moving much more quickly in their innovation with small explosives. And we need to keep this in mind.

It's not that the military is always leading even when it comes to lethal technologies, but why is that?

Because militaries have vast amounts of budgets which really do dwarf those that a terrorist organization has. So what is it that keeps a military lagging behind?

I think it's a combination of focusing upon what they want to focus on. So you had major militaries who were focused upon the Dreadnought competition, for example, or they were focused on getting larger and more capable and more devastating artillery, and they simply weren't that interested in these smaller innovations. So that was the first thing. It was a matter of where was their attention. But the second thing is that I think there was a certain amount of hubris. There was a belief that you needed to.

Look at what the most powerful types of technologies were, rather than technologies that can have a leveraged impact in very strong political ways.

So it was more about the bang for your buck than the message that was sent by a strategic use of the most perfect weapon for that attack.

Precisely. It was about where can you have the biggest impact, which is the most powerful. Not necessarily which is the most appropriate.

Audrey, thank you so much. You really have provided us with a fascinating history of lethal technologies from dynamite through to drones today. And your book certainly does that as well. Where can people buy the book and what's next?

My book, Power to the People, is available through Oxford University Press, and I'm very pleased to have been a guest on your show. I really enjoyed it, James.

Thank you so much. And I can't wait to have you back on.

Thank you, James. Pretty big in the history of our country. I want just a quick message at the end of this podcast, I'm currently sheltering in a small, windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundie. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material. You guys, in return, a little tiny favor to ask if you could go to get your podcasts, if you could give it a five star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review.

I really appreciate that. From the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.

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