Acro Security Technologies' product is the Peroxide Explosives Tester. Peroxide-based explosives are undetectable by devices that screen for conventional, nitrogen-based explosives like TNT and nitroglycerin.

"That someone will bring down a plane with TATP is not a question of if; it is a question of when," Ehud Keinan, the inventor of PET and Acro's chief scientific consultant, told United Press International in a telephone interview. TATP is triacetone triperoxide, the compound behind some 90 percent of peroxide-based explosives.

Peroxide-based explosives, familiar on the scene at Israeli bus bombings for nearly 30 years, blasted onto the world's radar screen in 2005 when they were used in the July 7 bombing in London, Keinan said.

"The explosions were caused by homemade organic peroxide-based devices, a substance which is dangerous to manufacture but does not require a great deal of expertise," according to a BBC summary of the findings in the British government's "7 July Report" on the attacks.

Keinan recounted a trip he took to London to consult on the explosive compound: "Before the meeting, I left my hotel room, went down the street to buy some hydrogen peroxide, some acetone, lemon -- that's the catalyst, as an acid -- and I prepared some TATP in my hotel room.

"It was about 50 milligrams, or the size of a dime, but when you hold a burning cigarette to it, it makes a fireball the size of a basketball," Keinan said.

The professor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology said he estimates that $15 to $17 worth of TATP is enough to bring down a 747 airplane -- "And I've just told you enough for you to change your career and become a terrorist," Keinan said, stressing the ease of making the material and its ready availability.

The company's current product, PET, is actually less suited to airport security checks as it is a single-use test, Acro's CEO, Gadi Aner, told UPI. However, Acro is also developing the MET, a multiple-use test due on the market in a year, that could screen air passenger luggage, he said.

Acro's ultimate goal is to become "a big homeland security company in the United States," Aner told UPI.

He continued that the technology would be Israeli-based and would "stand on its own two feet, marketing to the whole world."

Aner explained that as Acro sees it, the international security industry is a market for "big players, not small companies -- so as a small company it's hard to realize our potential."

When asked to define a big company, Aner said: "Within two to three years, we hope to reach tens of millions of dollars in sales." This could be a tall order, as the company's current sales "are nothing to write home about. ... There is real potential, but these are still preliminary sales where the customers check the product's ability, how efficient it is and how well it works."

"There is a lot of interest," he added.

According to Aner, about 50 percent of the security market's customers are American, 30 percent come from Europe, and 20 percent from Asia -- India, Japan and China, for instance. "We hope that this will be our market distribution as well," he said.

Though the company is planning growth, this may be an uphill battle: Declines in Israeli defense exports over the past 12 months "seem to be (one of the culprits) in the retreat of high-tech's contribution to export growth," the Israeli business newspaper TheMarker reported this week in an end-of-year wrap-up for the approaching Jewish New Year holiday.

According to TheMarker's report, "High-tech's share of growth in exports has plunged to just 25 percent in the Jewish year of 5767 (ending this week) compared with 80 percent in the preceding three Jewish calendar years, the (Manufacturer's Association of Israel) said."

The security industry in Israel is usually grouped with other high-tech markets such as software and biotechnology for statistics purposes.

Acro's Aner is optimistic. "We feel very good (about what we're doing). There is a real war between those who want to harm and those who want to prevent harm, and we can make a modest contribution to that," he said.

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