Stand back, mugger – this mobile phone will self-destruct in 30 seconds

It sounds like a gadget from Mission: Impossible – the mobile phone that will self-destruct on receiving instructions in a text message.

US scientists have developed new technology that will allow a simple text message or even a voice command to destroy the SIM card in any phone that has been stolen.

The technology was made possible by a team of chemists at the University of California in San Diego who discovered how to make silicon, normally extremely stable, into an explosive material. Frederic Mikulec, a member of the San Diego team, stumbled across the discovery by accident.

The researcher took a silicon wafer and substituted the chemical compound potassium nitrate with gadolinium nitrate. "When he (Mikulec) tried to cleave the wafer with a diamond scribe, it blew up in his face," said Professor Michael Sailor, who headed the research project. "It was just a small explosion, like a cap going off in a cap gun. But it really surprised us, so we started looking more closely at it."

It is being hailed by many within the telecommunications industry as a sign that the tide can be turned on spiralling mobile phone theft. A recent Home Office report estimated that as many as 770,000 mobile phones were stolen in Britain last year, the equivalent of more than one every minute. It is a problem that has refused to go away, with 75 per cent of the population now owning a mobile.

Jack Wraith, spokesman for the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum (MICAF) and Chief Executive of the Telecom Users' Fraud Forum (TUFF), said that the development was encouraging, but was also just one of a number of recent initiatives.

"The explosive chip sounds great," he said, "but it's part of a bigger crime-prevention jigsaw. Unfortunately, it's not a panacea.

"In this country alone, there are already 55 million handsets out there," he continued. "Those phones are going to be out there for a long time, and none of them are compatible with this technology.

"One could certainly see this kind of thing being incorporated into high-end products, especially if the phone in question contains delicate data or sensitive phone numbers," he said. "It would have been useful, for instance, if one of these chips had been fitted inside those MI5 laptops that went missing."