The pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon in mid-September added a scary dimension not just to the war in West Asia but also to the risks embedded in global supply chains. The devices were ostensibly made in Taiwan and Hungary but were eventually tracked down to an Israeli entity that inserted the explosives and distributed the product through financial entities based in West Asia. This episode showed how a country took advantage of the global supply chains which typically leverage efficiencies from different entities to maximise value. The success of the pager attack is likely to have every security agency and terrorist network gaming similar scenarios. It is a security nightmare given the impossibility of checking every electronic component of every device in existence. A globalised economy is truly vulnerable in ways which we can barely comprehend, writes Devangshu Datta here