The Theory Is Great, But The Reality Sucks

I’m really curious to see how the Great Terror Plot will actually pan out. My money is currently on it being a damp squib born of a couple of deranged losers (who bonded in the daffodils), with a few innocents caught in the police lasso.

Much has been made of the liquid-based explosives. However, this commentary on the known characteristics of the most likely constituents would seem to suggest that the practicality of successfully mixing up a brew in an aircraft in flight is akin to a snowball surviving in Hell.

The commentary leads the author (Perry Metzger) to entertain three possibilities:

1. The terrorists had a brilliant idea for how to combine oxidizer and a ketone or ether to make some sort of nasty organic peroxide explosive in situ that has escaped me so far. Perhaps that’s true — I’m not omniscient and I have to confess that I’ve never tried making the stuff at all, let alone in an airplane bathroom.
2. The terrorists were smuggling on board pre-made organic peroxide explosives. Clearly, this is not a new threat at all — organic peroxide explosives have been used by terrorists for decades now. Smuggling them in a bottle is not an interesting new threat either — clearly if you can smuggle cocaine in a bottle you can smuggle acetone peroxide. I would hope we had means of looking for that already, though, see below for a comment on that.
3. The terrorists were phenomenally ill informed, or hadn’t actually tried any of this out yet — perhaps what we are told was a "sophisticated plot" was a bunch of not very sophisticated people who had not gotten very far in testing their ideas out, or perhaps they were really really dumb and hadn’t tried even a small scale experiment before going forward.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that my money is on (3). 

(hat tip to Schneier on Security)