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GovernmentAttic Publishes Declassified Survey of Worldwide Bio-War Research
An anonymous reader writes "The GovernmentAttic website has just published a dossier of reports produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency describing biological weapons development in nations throughout the world. The 16 reports were released by the Department of Defense in response to declassification request submitted five years ago. Although the sensitive bits were removed, the remaining portions of the reports demonstrate the prevalence of research, development and deployment of bio weapons worldwide, despite an international treaty prohibiting such activity. The same website has also published a Thesaurus of Biological Warfare terminology (PDF) and a listing of pre-1946 reports on biological and chemical warfare (PDF) from the Army."
Bet you'll get a plus 5 informative.
They have a section on "European Communist Countries" but it does not include Russia. I guess that part of the report was not released? That was the only thing I was interested in as there are some scary rumors out there about what they have (ebola/smallpox hybrids, etc.)
The
It's for duck hunting.
But where's the breakdown? This is useless.
"demonstrate the prevalence of research, development and deployment of bio weapons worldwide, despite an international treaty prohibiting such activity."
As if America in its adventures around the globe doesn't violate the Geneva Conventions regularly. Countries are afraid. Very afraid.
Or ar least vaccinate me against small pox... As it stands, only a few countries have the capability of all out world wide nuclear war, and I would like to believe those nations are smart enough to not start pressing big red buttons. An un-winnable end of all life as a deterrent scenario and all that. But any idiot country could potentially develop bio-weapons of mass destruction, and any idiot country is potentially short-sighted enough to unleash something they might not even fully understand. With nukes you can stop pressing buttons, but the right bio-weapons could potentially yield an unstoppable runaway process of slow, agonizing, world wide death.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
If you had said it's for quail hunting I would say we've found an evil ex-vice-president /. account.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
When I attended University of California, in the early '90s, the UC system received a full third of their funding through the military.
There were research programs into mutated pathogens with the stated goal of vaccine research, but the pathogens were not naturally occurring, and were cataloged, preserved, etc. A thin veil of legitimacy to hide a very large bio-weapon research program behind.
A physics professor at UC Berkeley was so bothered by the weaponization of research from the UC system, that he began publicly speaking about the suspicious programs. It is from him that I learned the 1/3 of funding from the DoD figure. Of course, UC managed the nuclear weapons national laboratories too.
I looked at the 1983 document and it's a complete manual on how to make all these agents.
Sometimes Russia is considered European, sometimes Asian.
And since biotech is available enough if you have the money and not exactly restricted, sooner or later there's potential for rogue actors to have access to weaponizable materials. Not just typical terrorist groups either, as there is plenty of financial motivation for criminal activity. Someone out there could very well try to play the broken windows game, and purposely release a genetically engineered plague in order to profit from the vaccine they developed along with it.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ..."
"... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This should have been +5 funny. It's a Futurama reference.
A Head in the Polls
Great points. Because we can always make solar panels and windmills, I'm not too worried about space expansion being impossible from running out of fossil fuels from Peak Oil or whatever. And I agree that with enough energy, pretty much all resource issues become easy to solve.
On making it into space, see my comments here on self-replicating space habitats:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4080869&cid=44543237
On energy in general, as Amory Lovins an others have said, if fossil fuels and older nuclear had to pay their true costs up front (including health costs, environmental damage, centralization risks), renewables (like solar thermal) would have been cheaper since the 1970s. It's only because of tax preferences and unpaid externalities (e.g. politics) that fossil fuels have remained in widespread use. What is happening now is that wind and solar are becoming even cheaper than subsidized polluting risky fossil fuels etc..
In a capitalist society, prisons and war can be profitable, so we get lobbying for laws and politics such that they increase. Of course, in other societies, prisons and war can be sources of political power, so that growth is not unique to capitalism. In the theory of social decline, those cancers will grow until the society collapses because it can't afford them. And then the whole thing would start over, The difference this time is we have nukes and bioengineered plagues and soon autonomous killer robots, so its not clear humans will survive if our global society collapses in some likely ways. But, perhaps some isolated habitats might survive (ocean, subterranean, antarctic, space).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
So, in that one sense, perhaps people like William Catton are right that the Earth has surpassed its "carrying capacity" -- but only in the narrow sense of carrying capacity including the ability to absorb humanities follies from greed and war. Otherwise we could probably support trillions of people on Earth with advanced technologies using lots of nuclear energy as you outline. A related story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside
Not that we'd probably want to do that compared to living in space and making the Earth into a nature park and religious shrine?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Jeez, Paul, you just don't stop with all the things you write that, due to my own failings to be sure, require me to read and try to think about.
I'm not so sanguine (now that's a strange word to come to have this use) about "renewables", principally solar, viz. reality of utility (yes, I like bad puns) in U.S. Oops, nevermind; I just looked at this:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.aspx
I read it through but only quickly checked a few of the sources; I get the impression this is legit. Good; let's do it. If gov could do Hoover and Grand Coulee, it could easily do this - except for the aspirin Congress. Penny wise, pound foolish, bottom-line Friday, who's buying the votes; bidness as usual. (And no, I don't need the sanctimoniously self-proclaimed expertly literate yahoos critiquing my language choice and use; I've heard at least six high-flying execs speak it this way. Well, two were high flying, anyway, they had their own jets. Kids these days need to read more, get out more. Get off my lawn.)
I've passed through Death Valley, it could use some shade. It's also much cheaper than SPSS. The Sahara and others have some spare real estate as well, I believe. I'll leave it to the crunchers to work things out, but I'm guessing all of Africa could get a big boost in available electricity. Float bonds, live a little, have some faith in future, pay for the grandkids college. It's not just money, it's doing something useful with it and the payoff in real terms is relatively quick, the eventual payout is enormous.
Prisons, manufactured wars, enforced poverty, are the mechanisms of people who like to hurt other people whatever their guise and rationale du jour. Ask any madame - the weirder and more sadistic patrons are invariably at the peak of the power game. (see also de Ropp, The Master Game) Our world is mostly run by sociopaths, a fine bunch of charismatic idiots. The more that things get worse the better they like it - it reinforces their self-sense of superiority while filling their wallets and renders the peons powerless to change anything. (I also have in mind, I think it was "The Arms Merchants" or somesuch, read it about twenty years back; also a fine book on the Krupps figured in there somewhen.) I suppose the counter might be that only the madly bad run things because nobody else wants to; but then, no one else gets the chance, and when someone tries they're killed off right quickly. I recently read a historical analysis of Athens. Ouch. Yet a small voice inside keeps insisting there's gotta be a way....
A friend once suggested that for sanity's sake an easy way to look at things is that we're in a school, a testing ground, and an experiment all in one; that 'do what you can, don't stand too proud lest a hammer, and enjoy as able, persevere as needed' is the way to go. That's a fine choice of a non-choice, really, yet it may be just the thing. Doesn't set quite right, tho.
Ah, Lovins et all, thank you. Some of these folks really did their homework, unlike so many of their detractors. I came across C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite about the same time, so some things began to make more sense about how things were the way they were. (I am un-sophisticated in all this stuff; I read the occasional bit, sometimes hit the stacks for some very dry and tedious source and background, try to keep some of it in mind.)
Isolated habitats are well and good but meaningless if they haven't at least sufficient infrastructure to not only survive but sustain and grow - I posit some growth needed to overcome in some meaningful time (centuries OK, millenia meaningless) whatever the global calamities. Isolated pockets surviving at some level of prosper is fine existentially, until red giant phase, but does little if one has hopes for any larger possible meaning for our species. In that regard I still get a warm-and-fuzzy from Fuller's musing that perhaps the purpose of i