Alerted by the UK Daily Pundit I go to the Secure Your Fertilizer site. Fair enough, ammonium nitrate (and others, such as Urea) can indeed be turned into bombs, seems a sensible enough idea to tell everyone to keep it safe and secure. Despite my certainty that they overspent on their website (a wet Monday afternoon should have sufficed, but hey, we’re talking government and IT here, aren’t we?) a fair enough use of taxpayers’ money, reducing the chance of their being blown up.

They point out that a number of the IRA bombs were based on that old standby of ammonium nitrate and derv.

The UK has a history of terrorist attacks using fertiliser based
explosives dating back to the early 1970s. The Northern Ireland
‘troubles’ saw both Republican and Loyalist terrorist groups deploying
explosive devices containing fertiliser which resulted in significant
fatalities, injuries and damage. More recently, dissident Republican
groups such as the ‘Real’ IRA (RIRA) and the Continuity IRA (CIRA) have
rejected the Good Friday agreement and still pose a serious threat to
the UK mainland and Northern Ireland.

One thing that caught my eye was the existence of the "Detonation Resistance Test Certificate". Some more is here. This is a bit of a guess on my part but I assume that everyone is asked, very politely of course, to make sure that the ammonium nitrate they make is not too easy to turn into an explosive. Perhaps don’t make it too pure or something. But in order to sell the stuff you’ve got to have it tested, in an approved lab, to make sure that it is indeed not too too easy to make into an explosive. Then you get your certificate and make sure that as it moves through the marketplace that certificate stays with the goods…or at least the number does.

OK, fine, whatever. Should mean (given the chemical signatures that will inevitably be in any given batch of such a material) that the lot of ammonium nitrate that was used to make the bomb can be traced. We’ll have, over and above the certificate itself, a 25 kg sample of every lot and batch at one of those testing laboratories. Good.

Then this:

(NB: Detonation resistance test certificates do not apply in Northern Ireland.)

WTFF?

Please tell me I’ve missed something! We’re not really ruled by morons are we?