The car bomb has been exploding across headlines of late. In his latest book, Buda's Wagon, Marxist historian Mike Davis explains why: it is cheap, dramatic, deadly, easy, and difficult to trace. With a rise in conflicts pitting states against amorphous militias, rather than well-financed enemies, car bombs are increasingly the weapon du jour because they inflict the most damage with the least capital. But while the streets of Baghdad, Kabul, Jerusalem, and Kirkuk are pockmarked with bomb craters and their morgues are filled with victims, the car-bomb pandemic didn't start in the Middle East, Algeria, or even Sicily. According to Davis, it began in New York City.

In 1920, Mario Buda, an Italian anarchist, furious at the arrests of Sacco and Vanzetti, blew up his horse-drawn wagon on Wall and Broad streets; 40 people died and 200 were injured. Since then, car bombs have exploded in more than 35 countries, causing billions of dollars in damage and creating thousands of casualties. Ever the keen observer, Davis takes an almost epidemiological approach to the death and destruction that car bombs work: "Like an implacable virus, once vehicle bombs have entered the DNA of a host society and its contradictions, their use tends to reproduce indefinitely." Also like a virus, the bombs mutate and evolve.

From their beginnings in an anarchist's horse-drawn cart, car bombs have gone on to be the favored tool of many well-known and, in some cases, well-respected, organizations. Because of their anonymity, they have been used by the CIA, the SAS, the KGB, and the Mossad, among other intelligence organizations. Proxy wars have been started with an auspiciously timed and carefully placed car bomb, and sometimes, as in '80s Beirut, seem to have been fought entirely with them.

In Iraq and elsewhere, the world's battlefields continue to seep into cities, and armies blur into citizens. War is no longer fought between nation states, but between haves and have-nots. Car bombs, Davis notes, are the "poor man's air force" and, sadly, "the hot rod of the apocalypse."

-Joshua David Stein