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Later reporting apparently sourced from Lebanese security says that less than 20g of PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) was placed on the batteries and then detonated by remotely overheating the battery.
Which is still terrifying to me, tbh, as I have a device in my pockets that has a significant amount of components built in a country that my country could realistically be at war with within this decade.
Yeah, but Israel targeted pagers because few normies have or use them, so blowing them up is fairly constrained. On the other hand blowing up lots of cellphones is basically just carpet bombing, which is widely recognized by military theorists as pointless.
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IMHO this doesn't scale well.
A few thousand targets, who are trying to stay in hiding, who you know you'll be hitting within months, who are already at war with you, and who are soldiers in that war? Sure, slip some explosives into their pagers. What are they going to say if they catch you, "Gosh, we only launched seven or eight thousand rockets at your towns this year, but now the gloves are off!"
A hundred million targets, a million of whom take their cell phones through airport explosive detectors each day, another 20,000 of whom have their cell phones dismantled for repairs each day, who are a mix of 99% civilians not at war with you and 1% soldiers who are also not at war with you but who still have a few thousand nuclear warheads ready just in case? You would have to be completely insane to start loading their phones with explosives.
China could realistically be at war with us within a decade, but it'll be a "gosh, Taipei really wanted to reunify with us and we just had to very suddenly send over a bunch of troops to what's really also our own territory to deal with the criminal terrorists who wanted to oppose the will of the people" sort of war, not a "the trouble with Pearl Harbor was it didn't piss off the US enough" sort of war. I wouldn't be surprised if every chip they manufacture for us is compromised with a you-can-find-it-under-an-electron-microscope plausibly-deniable-backdoor for SigInt or DDOS purposes, but I would be astonished if they tried to pull off a you-can-find-it-with-a-screwdriver obvious-killing-Americans-preparation for unclear purposes. Your phone may stop working when WW3 starts, or it may start transmitting every word spoken around you to Chinese AIs to sieve through for intelligence, but it's not going to explode.
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