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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Thanks to nanotechnology, he'll be a lethal superman who can heal himself.
Oct 20, 2005 | Vast government contracts have corrupted the American university system, turning off the fountainhead of unfettered ideas and scientific discovery. Multibillion-dollar federal R&D budgets have replaced the solitary inventor with veritable armies of scientists and engineers in laboratories across the country. Public policy itself has become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
2005? Try 1961. The paragraph above was taken with only minor changes from President Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell address.
Things have only gotten worse in 44 years. If Eisenhower was worried about the power and influence of what he called "the military-industrial complex" then, he'd be catatonic now. The risks -- and opportunities -- posed by today's corporate-academic-military behemoth are exponentially greater than in his day. So is the money: Total military spending on basic R&D is probably somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion per year and rising. Scientists funded by this bottomless war chest are working on mind-blowingly powerful devices that threaten to plunge the world into a deadly new arms race. Oh sure, this stuff could also revolutionize medicine, communications, transportation and every other aspect of human life: the shopworn "spinoff" argument honed for decades by NASA's P.R. machine. But whether humanity will get to use the awesome power of these new technologies -- in particular nanotechnology -- for good rather than ill is one of the key questions of the 21st century.
As a five-star general and the commander of Allied forces in Europe during WWII, Eisenhower was front-row center when the Manhattan Project transformed our reality. He watched a small group of the world's brightest scientists and engineers, with access to the enormous financial resources of the federal government, creating blueprints for machines capable of tearing apart the very fabric of the universe -- followed, in short order, by the conversion of those blueprints into enormous production facilities operated by corporate contractors with even more government funding. The result: a gargantuan arsenal of thermonuclear weapons capable of destroying the world many times over -- a capability previously unknown in the history of war and warriors.
But the insanity of the Cold War pales by comparison to what the military-industrial complex and the scientific-technological elite have in the pipeline for the 21st century. Nuclear war is terrifying but, technologically, it's a one-trick pony. The weapons of the future will be infinitely more diverse and creative. And the driving force behind them, the technological cutting edge, will be nanotechnology.
There has never been anything like nanotechnology. It draws on our accumulated scientific knowledge about how to measure, modify and manipulate the very building blocks of our world: atoms and molecules (see accompanying article). Homo sapiens, the animal world's most skillful toolmaker, has finally begun to create the ultimate toolkit, one that will someday be capable of breaking the world down into its smallest parts (or creating new parts) and putting them back together again in new ways.
For the past five years, unknown to most Americans, the United States has been buying tools for this kit via a strategic program called the National Nanotechnology Initiative. (Full disclosure: I am on a National Research Council committee charged with evaluating the NNI.) One of the NNI's chief purposes is to revolutionize military equipment. In 2003, MIT and the U.S. Army officially opened the flagship nanotech R&D facility, theInstitute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
This 28,000-square-foot facility in Cambridge, Mass., underwritten by a $50 million grant from the U.S. Army, may very well be the world's most exclusive R&D club. Its members include bluebloods of the old military-industrial complex like Raytheon and DuPont, along with new blood like Zyvex ("providing nanotechnology solutions -- today") and Carbon Nanotechnologies.
According to the original press release, the ISN "combines basic and applied research to create an expansive array of innovations in nanoscience and nanotechnology that will dramatically improve the survivability of soldiers. Current ISN research focuses on several key soldier capabilities, including protection from bullets, blasts and chem/bio threats; automated medical monitoring and treatment; improved performance; and reduced load weight."
This description of research projects -- "protection" from bullets and blasts -- makes them sound purely defensive, but there is simply no way that can be true. Our military knows very well that, ultimately, the best way to "improve the survivability" of a soldier is to eliminate the enemy. If a revolutionary ultra-light nanofabricated material can stop today's bullets, why not use this same material to make tomorrow's bullets? But for real war gamers this logic is only a trivial beginning. It is incumbent upon them to assume that, if we don't make these nanofabricated bullets, somebody else will. And if somebody else can have them, it is further incumbent upon serious war gamers to recommend that a further round of R&D is necessary to protect our soldiers from the nanomaterials initially designed to protect them. These games get much, much deeper ... and they get there really fast. Plus, the most amazing things these folks are factoring into their games undoubtedly remain classified
And so it goes, the endless upward spiral of theoretical escalation driving a downward spiral of research into the small, smaller and, finally, smallest. Research that, enabled by the latest breakthroughs in nanofabrication, will bring imaginary terrors into being. It is exactly this circular logic that has led America to initiate the next global arms race in recombinant DNA-based, nanotechnology-enabled bioweapons.
In two previous articles, this author has reported on the vicious cycle of paranoia that has made "biodefense" the top priority across all federal R&D laboratories. (The biggest untold science and technology story in America is that one-third of all basic research at NIH is now on biodefense. The Federal Biodefense Research conference for fiscal year 2006 will be held at the end of this month.) There is a profound and dangerous Catch-22 clause involving high-technology "biodefense" research, one that we ignore at our own peril.
Put simply, the whole world knows that you can't separate biodefense from biowarfare. This concept was clearly enunciated in the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction (signed by the United States on April 10, 1972). Yet, 35 years later, the second Bush administration has given us a policy based on these same two fatally flawed assumptions explicitly recognized in the Bioweapons Convention. Logic error 1: that a defensive bioweapons program differs fundamentally from an offensive program. And logic error 2: that it is possible to defend against biowarfare agents. (Shades of Reagan and Bush's dreams of a defense against ballistic missiles.) The community of nations has universally rejected these assumptions as unfounded and completely incorrect. But as we know, when it comes to deciding the fate of the world there is a higher authority than the community of nations. Or even the American people.
Our bioweapons research programs, enabled by recombinant DNA technology, were frightening enough. But the danger is about to increase exponentially, as "biodefense" research meets nanotechnology.
