Do Not Try This in London: A Video Guide to 'The Anarchist Cookbook'

From Cairo to Vancouver to Anonymous to London, breaking the system apart is what the cool kids are doing this summer. Forty years ago, angst over domestic turmoil left behind by the Vietnam War led an American named William Powell to write a guidebook to political mayhem. Despite his later attempts to recall the text after becoming a born-again Christian, The Anarchist Cookbook is now the stuff of suburban legend, a DIY mischief manual that you can still buy on Amazon. To write a little book report in 2009, Vice’s Rocco Castoro documented his attempts to recreate some of the vaguely lawless weaponry in its pages. There is a video too. You are of course strongly suggested not to try this stuff at home or on the streets of Hackney.

MEGA SMOKE BOMB

Ingredients: sugar, saltpeter (aka potassium nitrate), a regulative heat source, a pan you don't mind ruining, a container for the solidified mixture, matches or fuses This was both the easiest and nastiest undertaking of the day. Potassium nitrate is not something most drugstores carry offhand, but call around enough and someone will place a special order for you (the best bet is to go with nonchain pharmacies). The recipe calls for four parts sugar to six parts saltpeter. We based our concoction on six tablespoons of saltpeter. The Cookbook claims a pound of this stuff will smoke out an entire city block, and we're inclined to believe it. After pouring the two powders into a pan, we placed it on top of a burner at low heat and gradually increased the temperature, stirring slowly until the sugar began to caramelize. The fumes were pretty intense (the saltpeter bottle has a warning against inhalation), and wearing a respirator or gas mask is recommended. Three minutes later, it looked like liquid dogshit. We took that as a sign that it was done. As soon as the heat source was switched off, we scooped the sludge into an old whiskey tumbler, filling it about a third of the way. Then we embedded a few matches and fuses in the brown goop. There was still snow on the ground outside, so we brought some in and stuck the glass in a pile of it. The brown mess was hard as a rock within five minutes. Next we placed the bomb on the ground and lit the fuse. A five-foot flame immediately flared up, along with a mind-boggling amount of smoke that smelled like rotten fish wrapped in week-old dirty diapers that were fished out of a biohazard dumpster full of cadavers, cigarette butts, and burned chorizo. The landlord of the building just happened to be strolling through at the time and started to (politely) freak out, so we were forced to put out our handiwork with a fire extinguisher. The explosion created a mini-atmosphere within the warehouse, and clouds of smoke were still visible 24 hours later. We hope it didn't scare away the prospective tenants who had come by to look at the efficiencies upstairs while we were making low-grade explosives.

Again, we are not condoning any sort of anarchy here or anywhere. But if it must happen, hopefully it will have something to do with a bad dictator, or at least the fall of manned spaceflight or the debt ceiling, and not, say, robbing a Victoria’s Secret or a disastrous hockey game.