Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Budaexploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap nearNew Yorks Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Budas prototype thecar bomb has evolved into a poor mans air force, a generic weapon ofmass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City. In this brilliant and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces itsworldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role ofstate intelligence agenciesparticularly those of the United States,Israel, India, and Pakistanin globalizing urban terrorist techniques.Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather thanthe more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that ischanging cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of powerincreasingly surround themselves with rings of steel against a weaponthat nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.