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Advances in Bio-weaponry
kjh1 writes "Technology Review is running an eye-opening article on how biotechnology has advanced to the point where producing bio-weapons that were once only possible with the backing of governments with enormous resources is now possible with equipment purchased off eBay. You can now purchase a mini-lab of equipment for less than $10,000. The writer also interviewed a former Soviet bioweaponeer, Serguei Popov, who worked at the Biopreparat, the Soviet agency that secretly developed biological weapons. Popov has since moved to the US and provided a great deal of information on the types of weapons the Soviets were developing."
And I don't even trust the people who have access to bio-warfare now.
A blog about stuff.
I wouldn't worry about terrorist implications of this, it is actually very difficult for a group without large resources (and even for those with them) to create workable weapons of mass destruction and bioweaponry would deffinately fall into this catergory... From a journal article i read by J. Mueller in Terrorism and Political Violence (vol.17:487-505, 2005)
Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult that had some three hundred scientists in its employ and an estimated budget of $1 billion, reportedly tried at least nine times over five years to set off biological weapons by spraying pathogens from trucks and wafting them from rooftops, hoping fancifully to ignite an apocalyptic war. These efforts failed to create a single fatality--in fact, nobody even noticed that the attacks had taken place.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Nothing to see here. Good article, but the point made is fairly worthless. Technology is getting better and cheaper. Why is it suprising that it should extend to the field of biotech? If the dude next door wants to whack you, I don't think that he needs to produce a virus to do it. I'm pretty sure that guns are still more economical and efficient for personal enterprise of this sort.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Can of tuna packed in oil $0.65 . Garden soil: free. Warm spot on top of your refrigerator: free
... I have no idea. Maybe that's where the $9999.35 comes in.
Some way to aerosolize the resulting cocktail of anthrax and botulotoxin:
It doesn't have to be effective. If they did it five times and killed one person each time the population would be effectively terrorized. The purpose of terrorism isn't to kill people per-se. It's to scare them into some sort of action. Most people are perfectly happy to let any situation ride as long as it doesn't effect their daily lives. The terrorists seeks to effect the daily life of a fat dumb and happy or at least create the perception of the effect.
evil is as evil does
So here is the rub. One not only has to have the equipment and expertise to create the biowepon. One also needs a way to infect people in lethal doses. And, to begin with, one needs to believe the bioagent will be more effecient than conventional weapons. Look at it this way. The allies probably did more damage in Dresden using conventional weapons that in Japan using nukes. However, the Japan attack was much more effecient, posed almost no risk to the Allies, had no real defense, and was not limited by the logistics of flying many planes. For a bioagent to be preferable, it must be like a nuke. If Bush is to believed the Iraqis have a bunch of biological agents, yet we see bombs are used more. Perhpas the Iragis to have WMDs, and bombs are just so much more effecient and dramatic. I mean proving to the US forces that defending against IEDs is hopeless to so mouch more dramatic than simply killing everyone in the green zone with lead poisoning, for instance.
This seems like another fear mongering article planted to create an impression that certain not-so-dangerous things are critical, so that the complex really dangerous things can be ignored. It just shows a true lack of imagination. I tink in most cases the villians just want the drama. That is why they blow up the building after it is evacated, instead of blowing up the location to which the people are evacuated to.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
While I understand your sentiment, professionally designed WMDs can be very dangerous and are very effective. Tell me that a 10 kiloton nuke couldn't kill thousands of people with almost no planning and hundreds of thousands with only a marginal plan. There is a big difference between a terrorist organization and a government though. There isn't just the money, there is the rationale and expertise. Terrorists want to be showy, if it isn't scary to think about it isn't terrorism. Governments don't really care about being showy (well, they do, but in the large political scale not in the "every shot counts" way). A crate of CO2 tubes let go in a dense subway tunnel would kill a lot more than 12 people, but it isn't nearly as scary as a sarin gas attack. Just like the concept of a suitcase nuke is so much more scary the the one in the back of a semi truck. It takes top notch engineering to make a small and clean nuke, it takes a library card, some electricians, and some uranium to make a bigger and dirty one.
I want to add an addendum that I personally don't lose sleep over the threat of a terrorist attack. More people die every day in car wrecks or from heart attacks than in any terrorist attack. While I eat a pretty healthy diet, I drive rush hour traffic every day and don't drive slow. My risk from that is about a thousand times worse than any sort of terrorist attack, especially if I were to figure in that I don't exactly live in a top 10 list of potential targets (or top 1000 for that matter). I just wish more people would think about the simple statistics instead of the "fear factor" and terrorists would be out of the proverbial job.
Making HEU is a very difficult task; Zippe-type centrifuges can't be put together in your back shed. More plausibly, they could steal it or buy it on the black market, but even that's going to be very difficult.
WMD's are a bogus category, in my opinion, draw a bogus analogy between nukes, which genuinely can kill tens of thousands of people at a shot without any great operational genius, and chemical and biological weapons, which seem to be very hard to make that lethal, even though theoretically they can be.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
In the classic days of Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance Man was the master of everything and was on top of many topics of interest. However, many modern achievements have been realized through specialists - science, engineering, agriculture, arts, etc... It would not be fair for a world-class scientist to be responsible for establishing the policy guidelines of a new technology. Their main concern is and should be to advance the frontiers of science - their opinions should carry weight regarding policy, but in general they are not adept with such responsibilities.
In the absence of an appropriate entity with this responsibility, the lack of oversight may lead to unwanted outcomes. Einstein's revelations made the atomic bomb feasible, yet afterwards Einstein was one of the biggest opponents of nuclear arms. As someone who is in biotechnology, I know that we may have social responsibility on the back of our minds, but in the forefront is finding that discovery before someone else in our field finds it first!
Bill Joy's well-known article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" predicted this like 6 years ago:
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http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy
The big quesiton is: why aren't the intelligent, well-educated, technically minded of the world actually taking issues like this seriously, and doing something about it? Probably because thinking about this stuff means questioning one's own vocation and existence, and perhaps discovering that the blind pursuit of scientific knowledge or development of technology can have just as many unintended bad consequences as good ones. We can't stop these pursuits; nor should we. But all who are involved in these pursuits must also assume responsibility for analyzing the risks of their application.
Bill Joy called for a "Hippocratic Oath" of sorts for scientists and technologists to take responsibility for the ethical concerns as well as the scientific or technological or design concerns. We already know how to assess some forms of risk. These are just different kinds of risks to be assessed, and they are real.
If we are as good and as smart as we think we are, how can we not step up?