Making safe: The dirty history of a bomb disposal robot

Abstract

In the Ulster Museum’s new gallery The Troubles and Beyond, the central display showcases a Wheelbarrow bomb disposal robot. This machine was invented by the British Army in Northern Ireland in 1972 and used by officers of the 321 Explosive Ordinance Disposal Squadron (321EOD) to defuse car bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). This article offers an alternative history of that machine – a dirtier history – that critically assesses its role during the Troubles. Centrally, the article contests the British Army’s preferred account of this machine as a ‘game-changing’ technological innovation in counterinsurgency, and their understanding of themselves as benign peacekeepers. Rather than figure the Wheelbarrow robot as an unreadable ‘black box’ used instrumentally by the superior human operators of 321EOD, this article seeks to foreground the unruly transfers of agency between the machine and its operators as they tested and experimented in the exceptional colonial laboratory of Northern Ireland. The article further explores the machine’s failures during bomb disposal episodes, the collateral damage that resulted, and the multiple and often unruly reactions of local populations who watched the Wheelbarrow robot at work. Providing a ‘dirty history’ of the Wheelbarrow robot is an effort to demonstrate that war can never be fully cleaned up, either through militarized mythologies of technological innovation or hopeful museum displays.