Annihilation from Within Fred Iklé (cool books to read .txt) 📖

components, scientific papers on the Internet explaining how to engineer lethal viruses. We can hear the distant thunder, we can see the dark clouds, we feel the chill in the air that precedes the approaching storm, and yet we are grasping for reasons to deny what our knowledge is telling us.

The Anarchists’ Return

The “curse of dual-use technologies” will become a growing predicament for all democracies—indeed, for all nations that want to be part of a peaceful international order. As I have noted in chapter 2, genetic engineering, molecular biology, and other life sciences serve valuable peaceful purposes, as do several applications of nuclear technology. Yet all these great achievements can be misused to build weapons of mass destruction, in some cases with but minor modifications.

Exploiting dual use to inflict immense injury on a society is not a new idea. The nineteenth-century anarchists had thought of it. As documented in Walter Laqueur’s magisterial history of terrorism, the International Anarchist Congress of 1881 passed a resolution that its affiliated organizations and individuals ought to learn about the most deadly weapons by studying chemistry and other technologies. At that time, the anarchists also gleefully welcomed Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, expecting that it would empower them to destroy the political order they wished to erase.8 It turned out dynamite was not destructive enough, although the anarchists amply demonstrated that they had the necessary ruthlessness. Between 1880 and 1914, they killed U.S. President McKinley, assassinated over a dozen European prime ministers, and killed many other senior statesmen. What they lacked were the necessary tools. Now, in the twenty-first century, they will have the tools to pursue their ambition in ways far more consequential than the assassination of McKinley in 1901 by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.

Anarchists and doomsday cults are likely to attack their own country from within, not from abroad. They want to create havoc in their homeland and may not care about preserving the wealth and strength of their nation. Like Karl Marx’s proletarians, they believe they “have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Although today’s anarchists and leaders of doomsday cults can obtain far more destructive weapons than dynamite, few will have the strategic brilliance and political cunning to win in their country, let alone “to win the world.”

The lack of a winning strategy is well illustrated by Shoko Asahara, the founder and leader of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo. Shoko Asahara gained the world’s attention in 1995 when his followers released the poison gas sarin in Tokyo’s subway. The attack injured some 6,000 people, in addition to killing 12 subway passengers. As a manager, Asahara was astonishingly effective and successful. He built up a global organization with assets worth several hundred million dollars and a scientific-technical staff competent enough secretly to manufacture sarin. Yet his strategic thinking was utterly vacuous. He fantasized that he could cause some kind of Armageddon in Japan and then miraculously impose his cultist state on Japan, or perhaps on the whole world. This story conveys a significant point: The fact that a cult leader possesses the charisma to recruit technically competent followers who can build weapons of mass destruction does not mean he has the savvy to lead his cult to victory.

But another aspect of the story is troubling. Precisely because his goals were so nebulous, Asahara found it relatively easy to recruit and retain well-educated followers. The renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami watched Asahara’s followers in their court trials and interviewed several of them. He found that the cult members, looking back at the crime in which they had participated, repeatedly praised Asahara’s “correctness of aims.” He had won their hearts and minds by letting them hitch their own well-meaning private fantasies to his vague pronouncements about “the five races living in harmony” or “the whole world living under one roof.” What the technicians and scientists working for Asahara had in common, Murakami concluded, “was a desire to put the technological skill and knowledge they had acquired in the service of a more meaningful goal.”9 This is a cautionary tale for those who contentedly assume democracies will be able to control the dark side of science.

Biological agents might be the weapon of choice for anarchists. In one of the many biotechnology laboratories at universities or pharmaceutical research institutes, a technically qualified member of an anarchist group could divert peaceful applications to create weapons. And since anarchists, in essence, want to create chaos to destroy the existing order, they need not fret about the unpredictability of untested biological agents. By contrast, a Muslim organization that wants to resurrect the caliphate would be ill-advised to use infectious bio-weapons. By starting a global pandemic, they could cause a boomerang effect that would kill far more Muslims than “infidels.”

How would a small gang of anarchists or one of the doomsday cults want to use a biological weapon? An attractive target would be a summit meeting that brings together many presidents and prime ministers. In recent years, the annual G-8 meetings that gather the leaders of rich and powerful nations have been a favorite target for rowdy demonstrators. Their purpose has been to accuse the wealthy nations of some misdeed and attract media attention with their ranting and chanting. But a twenty-first-century anarchist who made it to the gates of a G-8 summit with a powerful biological agent would have more in mind. He would seek to incapacitate, or kill, the entire political leadership of the world’s most influential nations. Just one such attack, if successful, would inflict great damage on international relations. Keep in mind, a biological agent that is being smuggled into a building is far more difficult to detect than a nuclear bomb. Hence, all future meetings among senior officials would have to adopt massive security measures that would constrain international diplomacy and cramp democratic practices.

Moreover, there is a threshold of civilian deaths and destruction beyond which even the most stalwart society begins to malfunction. Detailed studies from World War II