Methods of suicide bombing

Up throughout history, people have been known of performing suicide missions in many different ways. I have been doing this research as part of a novel I am working on, and decided I might as well node it

Grenades

A popular way (I can't believe I'm using that phrase about suicide bombers, but there you go) to perform suicide bombing missions is to use regular handgrenades. Although I don't know a lot about these kinds of explosives, I would think that hand grenades are made to devastate and rip apart people. One grenade in every hand (or possibly even three or four, if you can find a way to pull the pins) would have nasty effects in a crowd

Dynamite

A particularily nasty way of suicide bombing involves fixing as much dynamite to your body (traditionally under a robe, trench coat or whatever), walking into a large mass of people, and pressing the button that sets off the charges.

An even more sinister version of this one works basically the same way, but instead of pressing the buttons to set off the charge, it works the other way - The charges go off when the button is released. This way, a suicide bomber can stroll around casually, holding the button pressed. The psychological effect of this is tremendous - the bomber can walk around with all the explosives visible, scaring the hell out of people. Police know that if they shoot the bomber, he (or she) lets go of the button, and the charges go off.

Plastics

Same as above, but using Semtex, C-4, PETN or something else equally nasty.

Shatterbombs

I don't know the technical term for this (if you do, please tell me). A shatterbomb is a mix between dynamite and a handgrenade. The idea is to kill a large number of people, not by the blast itself, but by killing them with shrapnel. Imagine what happens if you take a huge hitching backpack, add 3 pounds of high explosives, and fill the rest of the bag with nails, pieces of metal, broken glass etc? Yes indeed- things get very nasty. This has actually been used several times.

According to CNN, plans for making these kinds of nasty suicide bombs were found in the garage of the kids guilty of the Columbine nastiness (plans? For a shatterbomb? sorry, but to me that makes me doubt CNN's reliability.

Why suicide bombers are unstoppable

Unfortunately (as the world noticed in particular September 11, 2001) people who are willing to die for their cause are extremely hard to stop. I mean, what are you going to threaten them with? "Don't set off that bomb, or I'm going to kill you!" ?

There are ways to make a bomb virtually undetectable - take C-4, for example. The stuff explodes when a certain current runs through it. This current, you could get from a battery (nobody would question anybody carrying a battery). C-4 by itself is very hard to detect. The result is that basically anybody can smuggle a fairly massive bomb in anywhere. An old-style (i.e big and chunky) laptop with all it's content ripped out, filled with C-4 and with the on/off switch coupled to the explosives and a battery makes a horrible bomb.

All of this adds up to making the world disgustinly unsafe. Come to think of it, it makes me rather worried. I think I'll just go to bed now.