THE BIOTECHNICAL AGE AND FUTURE WAR
- From: "Robert Morpheal, Morphealism, Bob Ezergailis" <morpheal@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 08:58:59 -0800 (PST)
THE BIOTECHNICAL AGE AND FUTURE WAR
The current epoch is no longer the nuclear age, it is the biotechnical
age.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan commission is asserting the country
should expect a terrorist attack using nuclear or biological weapons
sometime in the next five years.
The report, which is scheduled to be publicly released on Wednesday,
suggests that the incoming administration of President-elect Barack
Obama should improve the capability of the United States to counter
such an attack and to prepare if necessary for germ warfare.
This is not a startling realization. It shows how backward United
States strategic thinking
really has become. Other nations need to take a lead where the USA has
clearly fallen far behind where it ought to have already been.
1). HIV is an example of an infectious agent which defies both
prevention and cure. The epidemic continues. It is a very important
example because it shows that the best medical science remains unable
to quickly and effectively create a successful preventative and cure
for a dangerous infectious disease. How many years have we been
plagued with that virus ? Still no effective vaccine.
If you know anything about epidemiology you know that one instance of
an infection can spread extremely quickly across a very large
population from that one carrier, in an extremely short period of
time. This is true of conventional, known, infections, but it could be
even more true of designer bugs which have been bio-engineered for
warfare.
2). There is no truly effective way to detect bio-engineering for war
or terrorism, other than agents infiltrating on the ground. In many
scenarios that method is at best unlikely. It is needle in the
haystack to begin with. This is compounded by the amount of
information that must be sifted to find one clue to know where to send
covert operatives to investigate a possible bio warfare lab which
could exist anywhere in the world.
3). The myth that complex, sophisticated, facilities are necessary for
bio engineering is exactly that. It is purely a myth. It can be done
with readily available materials, made for the life sciences and
medicine, commonly used in production and research. A lot of what is
necessary can be home made, by those who know how, from readily
available materials. It can be done in the basement of any dwelling
nearly anywhere where there is a source of water and power.
4). Hospitals and doctors as such are not prepared for it. Hospitals
are largely not designed for handling epidemics. In fact they do not
even have wards suitable for isolating and containing large numbers of
infected patients. Their emergency rooms do not have adequate
technology. Doctors do not diagnose and report in a manner that would
expedite identification of a threat.
For that you need a real time on line data base, with an expert system
to guide every practitioner in reporting every potentially infectious
illness to a central data base for constant statistical qualitative
and quantitative analysis. We don’t have that yet. It can be done, and
it has been recommended, some years ago to a government, but we don’t
have it in place yet in any nation that I know of. Doctors are the
front line in defence and they have not received sufficient training
to be able to identify significant risks. They are also very poor at
reporting the details.
It is a statistical fact that today’s doctors specialize in
misdiagnosis of even simple, prevalent diseases, failing to
differentiate bacterial from viral infections and failing completely
at identifying which organism is most likely to be responsible. They
treat symptoms, and guess, more often than really practicing hard
science. Medicine has too long been left to its own, as the
salesmanship of wisdom and cure, when in fact its multisyllabic mumbo
jumbo contains more mystification than truth about illness, and covers
medicine’s constant failures. While that might have been an acceptable
practice previously, the only answer in the age of biotechnology is
hard science, fact, and not beliefs, assumptions and salesmanship.
5). Science has proven relatively poor at identifying a new organism
and even poorer at finding a method to combat it, in any reasonably
fast period of time. This means that the adversary who finds, or
builds, a better bug, potentially wins. The polio epidemic of the 20th
century would look like a minor outbreak of influenza in comparison
with the possible worse case scenarios. We would expect that bio
terrorism or warfare would be only the first wave, in a concerted and
continued attack with the next wave being violent shock attacks to an
already traumatized, severely weakened, and essentially defenceless
population. In terms of the existing track record of medical and
biological science, that attack could continue for years, before
science made any real progress. Clearly the science needs much better
funding and a program similar to that which built the nuclear bomb
needs to be established in virology to find a method to quickly
identify and create vaccines for any new organism. Quickly means in a
matter of days, not years.
6). While it is possible to build technologies capable of sensing
micro organisms and identifying them, to a very high level of
sophistication, the technologies are neither readily available nor are
they currently deployed. They are extremely expensive, and extremely
complex. However, they can be potentially effective. The further
development, release for use from their classified status, and their
deployment remains in doubt, due to their extreme sophistication. That
and the fact that those technologies are not fully developed, even if
practically proven and well beyond the conceptual stage. The immense
funding required for adequate further development remains seriously in
doubt.
SUMMARY: Medical infrastructure, training, and medical and biological
science lag far behind the capabilities of today’s bio engineering
technologies in terms of ability to defend against biological attack.
Methods of early detection and warning remain far from adequate and
the budgets remain in doubt. Re-design and engineering of state of the
art infection controls, and medical facilities properly suited to the
“bio-technical age”, remain lagging far behind where they needed to be
to keep step with the advance of widely released bio engineering
methods. The dangers of that technology were not in its proper use,
but rather in its misuse as a means to potentially produce deadly
weapons of mass destruction.
Robert Morpheal
.
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