Shoe Throwing: The New American Pastime

The shoe-hurling incident earlier this week, in which President Bush narrowly dodged a couple of Size 10 projectiles, has become a full-fledged phenomenon. So it's about time Danger Room took a closer look at footwear-based weaponry.
The thrown boot is a traditional non-lethal weapon. However, technically it might fall into the hazardous classification. "Within the nonlethal community, it is generally accepted that any impact exceeding 58 foot-pounds of kinetic energy will result in a potential fatality," according to an Army article on engineering non-lethal artillery projectiles. That's "roughly one-half the impact one would feel being hit by a baseball thrown by a professional pitcher." And there are some people out there capable of hurling a boot with considerable force.
The modern sport of throwing a rubber boot – known as "Wellie Wanging" - seems to have originated in Yorkshire but may well have been invented independently in other places. Notable competitions also take place in New Zealand (Taihape claims to be the Boot-Throwing capital of the world). But it is Finland which is hosting the "World Championships of Bootthrowing" on June 25th-29th, 2009. Following the strict rules for International Competitions, the world record for so-called "Wellie Wanging" is over 219 feet. The combat effectiveness hand-thrown boots is open to doubt, but future developments like the robotic welly wanger could be more potent.
Another approach is to make the footwear itself more lethal.
Modern air travelers will be all too aware of the shoe bomb. As worn by terrorist Richard Reid in 2001, this incorporated a mixture of powerful PETN plastic explosive and sensitive TATP (triacetone triperoxide) as a detonator. Reid is six feet four inches tall, so the soles of his trainers were big enough to hold an estimated five ounces of explosive each which experts believe would have been enough to bring down an airliner.
Shoe bombs are not a new idea. During WWII, the Special Operations Executive discovered plans by German saboteurs to smuggle in explosives disguised as "the heels and soles of a boot." Bombs were also disguised as lumps of coal, a car battery, a belt, and "a tin of Smedley's English red dessert plums." SOE agents themselves used hollow boot heels to conceal various devices, including a small fighting knife, a three-inch version of the celebrated Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife.
It is only one step from a knife concealed in a boot heel to the most famous killer footwear of all: the shoes with a poisoned flick knife used by Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Russia With Love. (Another SPECTRE agent, Morzeny, uses similar boots, but nobody ever remembers him.) Although some sources suggest that the blade was activated by clicking the heels together, an inspection of the movie's props shows that each boot has a small protruding pin which works the mechanism. While it has the advantage of being a hands-free weapon, having a blade in your shoe makes it very had to stab any of an opponent's vital organs, hence the need for poison. Ian Fleming specified that the substance was poison from the Fugu or pufferfish. The fictional version killed within twelve seconds; in real life, it can take between four and twenty-four hours, giving the victim a bit more time to go find the antidote. (Fleming had Bond dying at the end of the novel, but later decided that prompt action by a colleague saved him when it was clear that fans wanted more 007.)
Were the shoes hurled at the President also poisoned? Further investigation is warranted: it's never too late to discover a chemical weapons plot in Iraq…
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/12/the-assault-on.html