 |
Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms |
|
|
|
Nanotechnology Weapons
Quoted:
“NANOTECHNOLOGY
AND GLOBAL SECURITY
ADMIRAL
DAVID E. JEREMIAH, USN (Ret) Fourth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology This
paper is available on the web at: http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nano4/jeremiahPaper.html
Thank
you, Ralph. I want to shift the focus a little bit from what has gone on
through the course of the day and talk a little bit about policy
implications in nanotechnology but more particularly I want to talk about
what I think the world is likely to look like at the time that
nanotechnology is coming to some form of fruition and where it is going to
have practical implications. I'm not going to talk about nanotechnology --
I'm going to talk about the world and what I think it's going to look
like. I'd
like to preface my remarks, however, by saying that it is surprising in
retrospect that almost no one has said anything about national strategy
for the post-Cold War world until we were in the post-Cold War world. This
is strange. There is nothing in the literature and yet, historically, we
have had policy debates, an understanding of what we think the world was
going to be about and we laid out strategies to deal with that world. As
an example, in the early 1950s we came out with NSC68 which laid out the
fundamental strategies for the Cold War with two components in it. One, a
containment strategy around the Soviet Union and two, an effort to create
an international system in which our nation and its values could survive
and flourish. Today we don't have that same kind of well understood and
generally accepted national strategy as we did during the Cold War. Second,
the conventional paradigm for policy planning is changing radically and it
is changing because technology is now forcing policy. In the past
technology was the servant of policy. The stirrup, longbow and gunpowder
served policy. But today it is different. Explosions in information
technology and telecommunications have become much more powerful than
weapons in driving the changes in the political system in Russia and
Eastern Europe. That power of technology imposes an additional burden upon
those of you that are scientists and are interested in the field. The
burden is this: Whoever develops the technology not only has that
challenge but also has the challenge to inform policymakers so that they
understand the policy consequences of the applications of technology like
nanotechnology. The worlds of technology and policy must be much more
tightly coupled than they have been in the past. If you look back in the
past, you can see gigantic examples jump out at you: the first one, of
course, nuclear weapons and nuclear power. The way we handled those issues
was not very well thought out from a policy perspective. Secondly, Star
Wars went off and down a path of technology before the policy implications
and objectives were thoroughly understood. It was a very different kind of
program than the one that was originally envisioned and presented to
President Reagan when we put it together and sent it over from the Joint
Chiefs in the early 1980s. I
want to tell you that the world I come from is a world in which
"NM" means nautical miles. That is the world I came from when I
went to be Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When I got there my
task, among others, was to look at the future and try to understand the
military capabilities required to succeed in that future world.
Unencumbered as I was of any understanding of science and technology, I
started looking around to find out what might be out there. Among some of
the books that I read was Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, which I
found fascinating reading. I was able to understand from time to time, at
least conceptually, what he was trying to say! Brashly I then decided that
I would go on and take up Nanosystems and flamed out completely in that
one. Eric was not writing that one for me! I told my staff I wanted to go
out and talk to some laboratories and find out what this was all about and
understand some more about technology. We were steered to the University
of California at Berkeley. We spent some time with Dr. Muller in the
Electrical Engineering Department -- a little bit of a misfire, but
nevertheless very interesting. So interesting that we were very much
caught up in it although it was a little more complex perhaps than some of
us were able to deal with. Afterwards, one of my aides said,
"Admiral, I thought this was really great, I just had a little
difficulty trying to understand everything he said after 'We're working on
some very interesting things here'." Despite that, I found that I
could be a messenger for nanotechnology because the little tiny bit that I
knew about it was an enormously larger amount than almost everybody else I
talked to. In most of the speeches I made as Vice Chairman I would drop in
references to nanotechnology and the kinds of things that were happening
there which really amazed the audience and was sufficiently complex that
they didn't ask me any questions! Planning
is obviously another important task for a military policy staff like the
JCS. Military planners usually have at least a ten year time horizon. So
today's planners should be thinking about forces they will deploy in 2010
to 2015 with a mid-life of about 2020 to 2025. This usually puts the
planner in an awkward position. Because of construction, funding, and
political constraints, the technical community requires about ten years to
deliver their product in sufficient quantity to make a difference.
"Fair enough," says the planner, "Tell me what technology
will be available 10-15 years in the future so I know what capabilities I
can expect." "Haven't you heard about the technological
revolution?" says the technologist. "Things are moving so fast
today we cannot possibly tell you what will be available 10-15 years from
now." At which point the planner begins to wonder why he is buying
the technologist's current product since it will apparently be obsolete by
the time of delivery. Planning is tough work. A
few years ago I asked my staff to do some tough planning work to explore
the world of 2025. I think that that world has a relatively good
synchronization with when we believe nanotechnology would be a factor in
the world, although not yet in its maturity. I will quote their response
to me in their first report because I think it is relevant to some of the
discussions we are having here today: "From the outset, this project
proved a humbling exercise. Explaining the past is far easier than
predicting the future ... Policy makers can prepare for the future
realistically only by accepting the fact that their plans may have little
relevance, while totally unexpected events may catch them by
surprise." This is the part that I think is particularly relevant to
your deliberations: "Yet they cannot afford to wait and merely react
to events. Instead, the prudent policy maker takes anticipatory measures
today, both to bolster the chances for what he hopes for tomorrow and to
ward off what he fears. While it is impossible to predict the future with
any accuracy, it is still useful to develop a plausible range of
hypotheses, in order to design flexible policies and forces for an
increasingly uncertain world." That's the task that I think this
conference is all about and that is what I think you are looking at today
and the next several days. Just
to put what I am going to say in context -- we can go back to Ralph
Merkle's diagram this morning. I can't do anything about any of the lines
he drew in there, but what I'm talking about is the world in 2025 or
nearly so. That, you will see, is a world that has considerable need for
the products that you will develop over those intervening years. That's
why what you are doing here and what you're doing in your occupations is
essential. Let
me begin by noting an enormous amount of change in the international arena
over the past few years. Much of it is clearly favorable. The end of the
Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Empire. Renewed vitality, at one
point at least, in the UN. Peace talks in the Middle East and, most
importantly I suspect, a democracy in Latin America. Collectively those
events exceeded our wildest dreams of just a few years ago. Change also
has its dark side. The renewal of bitter ethnic, religious, and
territorial squabbles. Proliferation of modern weapons. Desperate regional
bullies, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the late Kim Il Sung in North
Korea, who used military bluster and intimidation to carry out their
designs. Violence and unrest because of economic, political and social
reform in Russia and the other former Soviet republics. And I think most
depressing of all, total humanitarian catastrophe throughout much of
Africa, particularly south of the Sahara. Many people believe this is
simply the "hangover" after the Cold War and that things will
settle down soon. I hope they're right, but frankly I don't believe that's
going to happen. I think we are seeing the emergence of an entirely new
world situation. A world situation in which regional conflict, chronic
instability and persistent crisis -- conditions that the U.S. population
does not respond to well -- is going to be characteristic of the future to
a far greater extent than will be peace and tranquillity. There
will be competition in that unstable future. There
will be competition between the developed and the developing world. I will
not try to define which nations will be developing and which will have
moved on to developed status by that time. Some developing nations may
well grow into major economic and, potentially, military powers. China
will almost certainly be in that category. Much of the developing world is
going to be faced with exploding populations, hunger, abuse of the
environment, and political instability. Ethnic issues such as those we see
in Rwanda and Bosnia will inhibit growth and foster instability. Political
turmoil will reinforce poverty and starvation as we saw in Somalia. The
gap between the developed and developing world will widen. The developed
world will continue to increase its wealth but instability in the
developing world will have consequences for the future. In some cases
internal strife will interrupt the developed world's supply of raw
materials. Those sentences are captured by an October 17, 1995 article in
The Washington Post on the economic turnaround in the Philippines. The
story stressed the progress made by the upper and middle class but made
the point that nothing had changed for the urban underclass and the rural
poor. Humanitarian concerns brought about by drought or lack of food or
any number of other things was brought to our living rooms by ever more
pervasive and life- like communications media that will compel action.
Refugees fleeing from instability and economic problems in their countries
will create serious political and military problems for the developed
world. The flight of Haitians out of their own country in search of a
better life was perhaps a foretaste of a major trend. As a result of the
fighting in the Balkans and emigration from Africa and Eastern Europe,
there are more refugees today in Europe than at any time since the end of
World War II. There
will be competition over the degree to which the developed world invests
in research and new technology. That competition will come from forces are
at work to divert government resources towards social programs rather than
"wasting" funds on research and new technology such as space
stations. Yet without those funds we cannot reap space benefits like cheap
solar power, minerals mined from the moon and asteroids, and
weightlessness in the assembly of large heavy structures. Most military
research and development investment will be curtailed without the Cold War
engine to drive investment. This means the military will look to
commercial sources for much of our new technology. Science will compete
with shareholder value for scarce research moneys and generally will lose
because of today's short term profit focus. The
competition for world power will shift towards economic strength and
economic blocs rather than military power and regional security alliances.
In that economic competition, military forces will be necessary to protect
trade against the outbreak of ethnic chaos in a supplier nation or in
sealanes threatened by ideological or ethnic warlords. There
will be competition between regional or global organizations like the UN,
NATO or the GCC on one hand and nation states and regional bullies like
Saddam Hussein on the other. Conversely, regional organizations may also
align against one or more of the great powers. Nation states will find
themselves in internal conflict over their role as members in increasingly
pervasive regional or global alliances that threaten their sovereignty and
independence. Economic competition will strain the cohesion of historic
alliances among the great economic powers of Japan, North America, Europe
and the emerging superpower -- China. There
will be competition between anarchy and international order. The fall of
the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Berlin Wall let loose a host of
long suppressed bloody conflicts. The roots of these conflicts are
unresolved border disputes, religious intolerance and the darkest side of
nationalism. There is a moment in the television drama of "I,
Claudius" where Claudius looks back at all that had happened during
his lifetime and decides that it is all rotten and has to be destroyed. He
says: "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out." I
think that is the best description one can give of what has happened in
the Balkans in the last four or five years. The fighting there comes from
very ancient hatreds, with roots that go back at least 500 years. Without
the police state to keep these hatreds in check, history resumed its
natural course. As we look into the future, the Balkans and Rwanda may
become depressingly familiar models. When you look at the events
surrounding Rwanda, Somalia, the Balkans and Bosnia, you see that national
leadership and international organizations' first instinct is to turn away
from the problem. But it never survives and we are ultimately forced back
to deal with the problem by the enormous pressure and presence of the
media and the visual images of genocide from starvation. An
important subset of this competition between anarchy and international
order is the competition between arms control and proliferation. There are
a dozen countries today with the industrial and scientific capacity to
build nuclear weapons. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea,
Iraq or Iran could force neighboring countries to seek nuclear arms of
their own. That could lead to another escalation of the nuclear arms race
involving smaller nations with the capability like Taiwan, South Korea and
Japan. There are over twenty countries who have the capability for
building at least theater ballistic missiles, relatively shorter range
than intercontinental ballistic missiles. Think about that in the context
of Desert Storm. Beyond Riyadh and Tel Aviv, what would be the
consequences on the actions taken in the Gulf if London, Rome, Berlin,
Paris, Athens, Madrid, Ankara and Cairo were also threatened by those
kinds of weapons or, in fact, were attacked by those weapons with nuclear,
biological or chemical warheads. Those weapons unfortunately are
increasingly available to transnational terrorist organizations. Those can
be groups of 5-10 people. That is a real threat. We only need to look at
the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York and the Federal
Building in Oklahoma City to understand that no nation has a guarantee
against wanton acts of international or domestic terrorism, potentially
with weapons of mass destruction. Weapons
of mass destruction are just that -- but conventional weapons marketed by
the developed nations have killed, and most likely will continue to maim
and kill, far more people. Today, there is rapid proliferation of
conventional weapons to all parts of the world for two reasons. First,
many nations, particularly in Asia, have become much richer in the last
decade. These nations are putting money into their defense budgets because
they perceive (1) a weakened and distracted U. S.; and (2) a growing
regional threat to themselves from one or more of their neighbors.
Secondly, defense industries in both the West and East are looking
overseas for markets to replace their shrinking domestic markets.
Conventional weapons proliferation will increase as more nations gain the
wealth to utilize more advanced technology. The only deterrent so far to
this spread of weapons is an effective nuclear and conventional arms
control regime and thus renewal of the Non- Proliferation Treaty was an
important decision. Think about this in the context of nanotechnology and
the implications of where you are headed and what you are about to be
doing. Finally,
there will be competition between our population and our environment.
According to the World Bank, the western industrial democracies will
shrink from 12.7% of today's population to 8.6% by 2025. At the same time
in the developing world the population will double. To support that
population growth, non-developing nations will exploit their natural
resources. The environment could be ravaged. Natural disasters of Biblical
proportions could result. Consider just this example. Unrestricted timber
harvesting in the foothills of the Himalayas is already threatening
India's water table. If the monsoons should fail for just two consecutive
years, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh could face drought and crop failures
at least as bad as those that devastated Somalia. Imagine that in a nation
of more than one billion people. As soil erodes, forests shrink, and
lakes, rivers and our air become progressively fouled, people will flee.
This will lead to mass migrations to nations with more stable governments
and constant populations. Without question we will see more demand for
humanitarian operations and restrictive immigration patrols as Earth
attempts to support about 10 billion people in 2025. Now
you may say: "Admiral, that is a pretty bleak picture." I agree.
There are worse and better scenarios. For example, in Clifton Berry's
Inventing the Future, he cites projections for the year 2025 by Mal
Currie, Chairman Emeritus of Hughes Aircraft:
Currie's predictions are almost certainly feasible -- but
for the haves. Feasible for the 8.6% of the 2025 population who live in
western industrial democracies and the upper layer of society in the
developing and non-developing world. Not feasible for the rural poor and
the underside of all urban populations. The differences in the quality of
life will be even starker than today between these two worlds. Yet the
world Mr. Currie described and the world I described can be the same
world. They can be that sophisticated and that bad at the same time. That
world is probably most likely the world we looked at when we did the study
about 2025 and saw among 13 different scenarios projected by our
futurists. From
these scenarios, four characteristics will most likely guide our future:
I can't tell you what the implications of those problems
are for everyone, but I can tell you a little bit about the implications
for military forces. We already see a shift in our military forces in the
United States and around the globe from forces that are designed to do
battle on a global scale to those that are designed to contain and deal
with regional conflicts. Maritime forces in particular will concentrate
more upon the seas and gulfs rather than broad ocean areas. Because of
refugee flow around the world, military planners must devise plans to
recover, assist and in many cases, return refugees to their origins. We
should expect more refugee operations in the future. Piracy has become a
serious problem in several areas of the world, notably in the Western
Pacific. And because we have reduced force levels since the Cold War, more
and more even peacekeeping operations will require coalitions to achieve
mass necessary for military operations. Most of all, advances in
technology permit radical changes in the characteristics of military
forces. What are some of those characteristics? What are they going to
look like? First,
I want to tell you what we are going to try, I think, to move away from.
We want to move away from systems that are so inflexible they cannot
easily adapt to exploit new technologies or that are so highly specialized
they can only be used against a narrow threat or in a unique environment.
We want to move away from systems that do not have a high degree of
strategic or tactical mobility. We should move away from systems that lack
low-observable or stealth technologies. We want to get away from systems
that need large vulnerable logistical tails. We want to move away from
large fixed sites that are readily targeted by precision guided munitions
and theater ballistic missiles. We got into the Gulf in a hurry, but it
took us 18 months to bring back all the stuff we took over there and it
was all pretty much in one place -- a very inviting target for theater
ballistic missiles and we lost a number of people, guardsmen from the
State of Pennsylvania, in one hit by a theater ballistic missile. Second,
all elements of our society will place a very high premium on information.
For the military, information for strategic intelligence, tactical
intelligence, precision targeting and after-action assessments. For
commercial purposes, economic, weather, process control, demographic and a
vast field of other kinds of information. There will be a high demand to
protect our own information and exploit open source and our opponent's
intelligence. Opponents can be military or commercial. Increasingly
sophisticated encryption systems will deny us readily available open
source intelligence but will be protected in the future because of its
economic value. Information transmission media will themselves complicate
intelligence collection because of their speed, sophistication, and
relative invulnerability to access and sheer volume of information. Just a
few years ago, if we were going to extract from some nameless nation
intelligence that was the equivalent of a 5 minute conversation, we had to
go through the equivalent of a stack of paper correspondence 5 miles high.
Today that same stack of correspondence would be 112 miles high. That's
the increase in the volume of material we have to go through just to glean
some tactical intelligence. On the other hand, very small bits of
information injected into someone else's system has huge consequences in
confusing an opponent and destroying his confidence in his own system, be
it financial systems, stock market, health systems or air defense systems.
In either commercial or military applications speed in information
processing, higher level languages and artificial intelligence will be
essential to win because to win you must operate inside your opponent's
decision cycle. In short, commercial and military information warfare will
be a major, perhaps dominant characteristic of the future. Extraordinarily
sophisticated systems to control communications, power, stock exchanges,
and monetary assets can break down and will be attacked. Third,
we talked about robotics in the last presentation and I think that most
military planners believe that robotics and remote controlled sensors will
be essential to gather information in the future. Because of the progress
we have made so far in microminiaturization, they will be very small.
Military systems will be deployed in very large numbers, much like
minefields, and specialized in their tasks in order to reduce their size
and minimize data processing. They will be scattered in space, at sea and
on land. Any movement will be detected in specific areas of interest and
progressively more complex sensors will be focused upon the movement to
determine final disposition. For urban combat and surveillance in
peacekeeping missions, many of the sensors will be incorporated into the
human system in order to enhance performance. Today we strap on night
vision devices but by 2025 we almost certainly will implant enhancements
in the human body to deal with biological warfare, to enhance visibility,
to increase strength of the soldier, and do a variety of other things. Fourth,
combatants and weapons will be dominated by robotics. It is not a great
leap forward from today's robotics designed to conduct routine operations
with consistent quality and enhance human characteristics to tomorrow's
robots used as force builders for nations with little manpower or an
aversion to bloodletting -- particularly their own. Robotic systems can
instantaneously achieve a specified level of training and maintain that
level almost indefinitely without the investment of resources that is
necessary for human beings. Molecular manufacturing combined with
artificial intelligence may well give us the capability to build, from the
molecular level to the end product, humanoid robots. We can pull certain
genes and cells out of the human brain and load them into a computer chip
in such a way that you create a neural network. This could lead to an
artificial brain with neural capacity. As an example, the International
Armed Forces Journal in its June 1994 issue reported that: "a
consortium from the Naval Research Laboratory, the National Institutes of
Health, the University of California, and Science Application
International Corporation was 'powering up' a cultured neural device using
hippocampal neurons" -- the brain cells that control memory and
logic. Combined with holographic memories as described in this month's
Scientific American, robots could be very formidable indeed. Isaac Asimov
would be pleased. Fifth,
the traditional element of military dominance, mass, will take on a very
different form. To quote from my staff's 2025 report: "Thirty-five
years from now, ... small, lethal, sensing, emitting, flying, crawling,
exploding and thinking objects may make the battlefield [or sea] highly
lethal to humans in steel (or ceramic, or carbon-fiber) boxes. The
battlefield of the future will be dominated by precision-guided munitions;
enormous quantities and varieties of sensors (some the size of bottlecaps),
will collect and disseminate a vast amount of tactical intelligence; and
advanced automation (including robots) may increasingly reduce the number
of people in harm's way. But while there will be an enormous increase in
the mass of sensors and other minute devices on the battlefield, there
will be fewer weapons." Those
weapons will be smart weapons that will allow us to reduce wholesale
destruction and the tremendous expenditure of ordnance. The goal is finer
and finer precision, more and more selectivity and less need for mass.
Indeed, there is less need for weapons of mass destruction because they
are increasingly less useful to us for military characteristics. Weapons
of mass destruction are political tools used by one nation to influence
the population of another, not tools we in the military need to carry out
military operations. Now
finally, and with some hesitation, I turn to molecular nanotechnology and
molecular manufacturing. I do so with hesitation because everyone here has
spent more time and has far more knowledge on the subject than I. But
every conference needs at least one layman. Thomas
Paine came from England to America less than a year before the outbreak of
the American Revolution. In the pamphlet Common Sense, published in 1776,
he wrote: "We have it in our power to begin the world all over
again." Surely molecular manufacturing is the wave of the future
which can solve the long list of problems I cited in the world of 2025.
Surely we are smart enough to ensure that nanotechnology will be
introduced to the world rapidly enough and broadly enough so that it will
serve all mankind and not be diverted into destructive applications with
enormous leverage. Surely our society, which has introduced more advances
in technology and greater change in the lives of people in the last four
decades than in all of previously recorded history, has the
entrepreneurial skill to bring this technology to fruition before the
competitions I described earlier take us back again to the Dark Ages. And
surely we have international and national governing bodies that will
create the environment necessary for this technology to flourish without
undo interference while inhibiting the opportunities for mischief. Or do
we? Somewhere
in the back of my mind I still have this picture of five smart guys from
Somalia or some other nondeveloped nation who see the opportunity to
change the world. To turn the world upside down. Military applications of
molecular manufacturing have even greater potential than nuclear weapons
to radically change the balance of power. In anticipation of that
possibility the uninformed policymaker is likely to impose restrictions on
development of technology in such a way as to inhibit commercial
development (ultimately beneficial to mankind) while permitting those
operating outside the restrictive bounds to gain an irrevocable advantage.
I don't know very much about the Foresight Institute and Center for
Constitutional Issues in Technology (CCIT), but surely that is the right
track in your efforts to inform the public and the policymakers of this
technology and this future. Ladies
and gentlemen, I have tried to open the lens somewhat this afternoon on
what we can expect to see over the horizon and into the next century. None
of these projections may come to pass. The world may head off in a
radically different direction, it may all be wonderfully green and the
challenges may be quite different. I think, however, that these are
problems the world faces. I don't advocate these changes but events are
moving us in that direction unless we change the course we're on today. Machiavelli
said in The Prince: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand,
more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take
the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." But
you have the power to do that. Thank you”. –End Quote Reference:
Nanotechnology |