12:05PM
Tom's latest column at KnoxNews
Saturday, October 14, 2006 at 12:05PM Epidemiology meets Dr. No
As Iran and North Korea capture headlines, "loose nukes" dominate our definition of catastrophic threat for the foreseeable future, with the presumed holy grail of international terrorism being the suitcase bomb.
While stipulating that here-and-now danger, let me help you look beyond "foreseeable."
Security experts classify weapons of mass destruction in three major baskets: nuclear, biological and chemical. That's the NBC trio you hear so much about today, even though, in historical sequencing, it's more like C-N-B. [read more]
Reader Comments (6)
This is an A+ effort: hope everyone gets the 28 Days Later reference--hilarious and of course deadly serious.
brains! ;-)
28 Days Later, IMHO best Zombie movie ever because it "could" happen. That's why I like Tom, he's up on cool movies that he's probably too old for, lol.
I went through my first Atomic, Biological, and Chemical (ABC) school in the Navy in 1956. One thing that impressed me at the time was that the instructor said that atomic weapons were the least dangerous of the three and that biological was the most dangerous. He talked about putting various germ agents in water-supplies as one very easy method of inflicting large scale casualties. And now it has progressed to genetic modification of viral agents to deliver a pandemic. It's interesting how the big picture has not changed much in spite of advancing technology.
Looking at the "advancing technology" issue (which tends to dominate my thinking about most things), I would like to see Tom Barnett's thinking about personal/desktop manufacturing in this context, as well more generally. Is there something on this I've missed? My current feeling is that if Bush's "Big Bang" doesn't work, the coming era will be an era in which losses of 655,000 (which may be high, but I found the Lancet study reasonably convincing) will not seem large. Dictatorships breed terrorism, religious fanaticism makes it worse, and Moore's Law, shifting from chips to machinery via projects like fablab.mit.edu and reprap.org, will enhance their productivity too. Ten years for GETs seems roughly reasonable, but I think there's a lot of opportunity for creative destruction of all kinds -- if more-or-less secular globalization doesn't dominate pretty soon.
There is no reason not to expect GETs at any time. The knowledge is spreading rapidly and DNA sequencing and synthesizing cost reductions exceed Moore's law.
For a terrorist organization, a purchase of about %50,000-$150,000 worth of equipment can create a GE lab (if you don't care too much about what happens in an accident or in the nearby caves). A few thousand a month in reagants, with a few people graciously educated in American universities and you have a nasty organism.
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One mistake that is often made on this subject, whether about C or B, is weaponization. Military weaponization and terrorist weaponization are very different. For example, while the silly narrative on Iraqi WMDs demands thousands of tons of C for Bush to have been "right," one of the 750 old, decaying C-WMD's found so far (by the good guys) are enough for a terrorist. The binary Sarin artillery round, used as an IED by terrorists who thought it was HE, would have been a nice present in the hands of an enemy with just a little knowledge. Take out the two reagents (not too hazardous - that's why it's a BINARY weapon) and don't mix them together again until right before you spray the solution into the air handler intake on a medium size office building. Instant mass death - from ONE round. This is not weaponized - it's useless in a 3GW situation. But for 4GW, it's great. The repercussions would be vast and damaging.
Likewise, with biological agents, the weaponization criteria are very different for the terrorist (especially those with suicidal operatives) than the military general. Deadly agents create great fear, even if the death toll is minor, which it doesn't have to be.
The Anthrax attack had a tiny death toll, but a dramtic effect (although on net it might be positive - serving as a "vaccination" by dramatizing the dangers of BW). Yet as a military action, it would have been meaningless. From publicly available information, it appears that only the failure to (easily) engineer antibiotic resistance prevented this action from having a much larger death toll. You don't even need GE to create antibiotic resistance!
Or, ake vaccinia virus (smallpox vaccine), add in an ILK-4 producing gene (this has been done and published with a closely related virus - mousepox) and you have a disease so lethal that even vaccination may not save the infected. We are not talking difficult GE here, and the agent is readily available. The biggest problem is weak contagion (and too rapid death of the host). But for a terrorist, killing only a few dozen people (given the inefficient spread of such an agent) is a big win
Hence beware of those who speak of the difficulties of weaponization - they may have too much of a 3GW military mindset, since that is where the experience and (in the past) attention lay.
Finally, we should not discount the nuclear threat. The terrorists don't need a suitcase nuke - a shipping container sized nuke (minus concealment material volume) is adequate. Just about anyone can make one a lot smaller than that (U-235 gun design) if they can get their hands on the HEU. Alternatively, an implosion weapon using a golf-ball sized pit of Plutonium might be acquired from a state actor like North Korea.
Hence weaponization for terrorists means creating agents which merely need to cause great economic cost, more from the secondary effect of fear than the primary attack.
Consider the effects of one nuke attack, say the Long Beach scenario.
Beyond the death and destruction, the economic effects would be extreme. Small towns would start looking very good, and big city centers very scary. Real estate values would be inverted, with tremendous losses to the economy. Vast sums would be spent on prevention, which would also add friction.
Now look at the ILK-4 example - our society might decide to become VERY germ-conscious, at great cost.
Hence the whole NBCR spectrum is dangerous, with BW capable of causing the most damage per attack, but small attacks causing tremendous economic (and social) damage.