13-03-2010, 10:40 AM
See also this older blog entry from Nov 23 2006, 01:42 AM:
There is an interesting web page at http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/h...wh?OpenDocument ...
the International Committee of the Red Cross...
which provides descriptions and links to a wide range of scholarly reports on biological weapons and international efforts to control them. "The centrepiece of this ICRC initiative is an appeal to governments, the scientific community, the military and industry to recognise the risks, the rules and their responsibilities in this domain."
Five of the twenty five articles are in downloadable pdf format.
The one that caught my attention first was this one:
30-9-2005
Neurobiology: A case study of the imminent militarization of biology
http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/h...helis_Dando.pdf
The biological, medical (and legal) communities should face the near certainty that unless active steps are taken to prevent it, biology will become the next major military technology, and that neuroscience — and by implication much of the rest of modern biology — will become highly vulnerable to use or abuse in entirely unintended, but clearly foreseeable, ways.
Here are some excerpts:
"Obviously it is not possible in a single paper to survey all of the areas of biology that might be subject to misuse, so here we focus on the potential for hostile manipulation of the human nervous system. We do this in part because the widespread public concerns over the misuse of microbiology have obscured other dangerous possibilities, but also because there are very clear reasons to have worries about the misuse of neuroscience by the military."
"As Professor Meselson, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, has said: “[a] world in which these capabilities are widely employed for hostile purposes would be a world in which the very nature of conflict had radically changed. Therein could lie unprecedented opportunities for violence, coercion, repression or subjugation…” 1
"George Poste ... has referred to the “brain bomb” and noted that such capabilities imply “that you can engineer a series, a complete spectrum of activity from transient immobilization (…) to catastrophic effects which can be acute or chronic.” 14
"... our understanding of the brain and human behaviour is reaching the level at which precise manipulation for beneficial reasons is becoming increasingly feasible. Yet such information might also potentially be used for malign purposes, for example to induce anxiety disorders."
"Much of the recent military interest in chemical agents that affect the brain has focused on incapacitating chemicals. An incapacitating chemical may be defined as an agent “which produces a disabling condition that persists for hours to days after exposure to the agent.” 31 Specifically, the term has come to mean those agents that are highly potent and able to produce their effects by altering the higher regulatory activity of the central nervous system. As a recent NATO technical report on future peace enforcement operations noted, 32 incapacitating chemicals could act on “[t]he central nervous system by calmatives, dissociative agents, equilibrium agents.” We are obviously, therefore, not discussing traditional riot-control agents here."
--
"The recent search for new non-lethal chemicals has taken place, of course, against a background of very rapid and intense civil research on agents affecting the brain. 38 Yet military interest is already directed towards the next generation of agents. A 2004 US Broad Area Announcement stated the objective as follows: 39
“The Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) is soliciting proposals for research, development, integration, and demonstration of next-generation non-lethal weapons (NLW) and capabilities... ”
Amongst efforts requested were:
“Studies/Analyses to address technology-specific legal/treaty/public acceptability issues associated with: (1) extended duration incapacitation (...) and (3) precision long-range engagement of threats...”
In addition to drugs causing calming or unconsciousness, compounds on the horizon with potential as military agents include noradrenaline antagonists such as propranolol to cause selective memory loss, cholecystokinin B agonists to cause panic attacks, and substance P agonists to induce depression. The question thus is not so much when these capabilities will arise — because arise they certainly will — but what purposes will those with such capabilities pursue."
--
"Of course, military utility will go beyond weapons to performance-enhancing agents for use by one’s own troops. Amphetamines have long been used to extend alertness, and manipulation of the sleep/wake cycle is currently used to enhance the performance of air crews (and probably special forces teams) on long missions. But as a recent National Academies report 40 noted, within a few decades we will have performance enhancement of troops which will almost certainly be produced by the use of diverse pharmaceutical compounds, and will extend to a range of physiological systems well beyond the sleep cycle. Reduction of fear and pain, and increase of aggression, hostility, physical capabilities and alertness could significantly enhance soldier performance, but might markedly increase the frequency of violations of humanitarian law. For example, increasing a person’s aggressiveness and hostility in conflict situations is hardly likely to enhance restraint and respect for legal prohibitions on violence. Given the kinds of operations other than war that are the increasingly common pattern of military engagement, we will also probably see soldiers armed not only with traditional lethal weapons, but also with a range of “non-lethal weapons” — acoustic, electromagnetic and chemical. Among the chemical weapons will be traditional riot control agents such as CS (“tear gas”) and OC (“pepper spray”), as well as various pharmaceutical compounds that cause unconsciousness, paralysis or delirium at very low doses. Whether the traditional laws of war — for instance, protection of civilians and of soldiers “hors de combat” — will withstand these changed circumstances is unsure. 41
Certainly the historical record gives little comfort, as the major military use of “non-lethal” chemical compounds has traditionally been to amplify lethal force, not to replace it. In Vietnam, for instance, the US used approximately 10,000 tons of CS. The purported use was for humanitarian purposes, for situations in which combatants and non-combatants were intermixed, or where extensive property damage would result from attacking the enemy in urban environments. However, a 1973 Army report 42 reviewed after-action reports on the use of CS, and found no record of humanitarian use.
Currently in Iraq, the US is using acoustic beam weapons to flush snipers from cover, who are then killed. 43 And in the previously mentioned example of the Moscow siege, Chechen hostage-takers rendered comatose by the fentanyl derivative were shot dead. 44 It is credible that novel agents would find similar military uses, and that these “non-lethal” agents would often be used to increase the lethality of other weapons, rather than to replace them.
There is also a serious potential for misuse of pharmaceuticals during interrogation. 45 During the Cold War the CIA, for example, sought substances that would change personality and thus induce increased dependence on others. 46 The recent abuses of prisoners under interrogation by US forces in the aftermath of the second Gulf War remind us that even democratic countries with long traditions of support for humanitarian laws may act unlawfully when it appears to be vital to security. Accounts claiming forced medication with psychoactive drugs have come from detainees released from US custody, 47 and detainee medical records have been made available to interrogators. 48
Progress in understanding the biological basis for repression 49 may allow the selective deletion of specific memories, which could not only protect sensitive information from unfriendly interrogation but also protect interrogators from effective oversight.
Torturers in all countries will have a greatly expanded repertoire of capabilities. “Non-lethal” police devices such as electric batons and OC sprays are now widely used for torture, and there is no reason to think that future devices and chemicals will not be similarly used. 50 In the hands of the sophisticated torturer or the interrogator willing to use torture to gain information, chemical agents will offer the ability to induce at will panic, depression, psychosis, delirium and extreme pain — and to offer instant relief as well, or even euphoria.
Even greater might be the danger of such capabilities in the hands of dictators to quell dissent. In addition to expanding the ability of dictatorships to use torture to gain information during interrogations, the possibility may exist of pacifying entire populations through additives to food or water.
--
"... we see the near-term future (10-20 years) possibly including militaries whose troops will go into action with chemically heightened aggressiveness and resistance to fear, pain and fatigue. Their memories of atrocities committed will be chemically erased in after-action briefings. They will be equipped with a range of weapons, including chemicals that incapacitate their opponents, who may then be executed in cold blood. Civilians will be targeted with incapacitating chemicals when they get in the way, and many will die of overdoses or secondary effects. Civilians in occupied territories will be pacified by chemicals included in food distributions (and civilians at home may also be so pacified). Enemy captives, and civilians suspected of collaboration, will be treated with psychoactive chemicals to extract information, including the use of devastatingly effective chemical torture when necessary. The chemical compounds will be rapidly metabolized and will leave no forensic trace. In this dire future scenario, many fragile democracies will have yielded to totalitarian rule, whose governments repress any dissent with brutal effectiveness, aided by chemical pacification of entire populations, use of incapacitating agents for crowd control and capture of dissident leaders, and use of chemicals for torture and interrogation of dissidents. A worldwide criminal underworld will be using similar technologies to deal with both victims and competitors. Terrorist groups worldwide will be finding frequent use for the force-amplifying effects of chemical agents.
Since the future possibilities become very difficult to discern with any confidence and cannot be defined at this point (unlike the near-term possibilities above, which we can discern with more clarity), we offer a few speculations only to hint at what is likely to be possible in the long term. We can imagine, however, that in the longer term (50 years?), soldiers could become wired for rapid and direct communication with headquarters, and to control powerful military drones by their thoughts. They could be triggered remotely to enter specifically programmed behaviour patterns — evasive, suicidal, berserk, etc. Their memories and convictions would be subject to alteration and erasure.
We would like to hope that this is not the world we shall leave to our children, but we are not particularly sanguine. Human history gives ample grounds for pessimism about our ability to prevent widespread exploitation of the manipulative, hostile and malign possibilities that the emerging technologies will bring within reach."
--
"We know of no major technology with military utility that has not been vigorously exploited for hostile purposes, and there is no reason to think that the revolution in biology will not be similarly bent to military ends. Of course, anticipating such an eventuality, and dealing effectively with it, are two very different things. We see three major generic strategies for attempting to contain the malign applications of biology...."
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/f...entry=846#
There is an interesting web page at http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/h...wh?OpenDocument ...
the International Committee of the Red Cross...
which provides descriptions and links to a wide range of scholarly reports on biological weapons and international efforts to control them. "The centrepiece of this ICRC initiative is an appeal to governments, the scientific community, the military and industry to recognise the risks, the rules and their responsibilities in this domain."
Five of the twenty five articles are in downloadable pdf format.
The one that caught my attention first was this one:
30-9-2005
Neurobiology: A case study of the imminent militarization of biology
http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/h...helis_Dando.pdf
The biological, medical (and legal) communities should face the near certainty that unless active steps are taken to prevent it, biology will become the next major military technology, and that neuroscience — and by implication much of the rest of modern biology — will become highly vulnerable to use or abuse in entirely unintended, but clearly foreseeable, ways.
Here are some excerpts:
"Obviously it is not possible in a single paper to survey all of the areas of biology that might be subject to misuse, so here we focus on the potential for hostile manipulation of the human nervous system. We do this in part because the widespread public concerns over the misuse of microbiology have obscured other dangerous possibilities, but also because there are very clear reasons to have worries about the misuse of neuroscience by the military."
"As Professor Meselson, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, has said: “[a] world in which these capabilities are widely employed for hostile purposes would be a world in which the very nature of conflict had radically changed. Therein could lie unprecedented opportunities for violence, coercion, repression or subjugation…” 1
"George Poste ... has referred to the “brain bomb” and noted that such capabilities imply “that you can engineer a series, a complete spectrum of activity from transient immobilization (…) to catastrophic effects which can be acute or chronic.” 14
"... our understanding of the brain and human behaviour is reaching the level at which precise manipulation for beneficial reasons is becoming increasingly feasible. Yet such information might also potentially be used for malign purposes, for example to induce anxiety disorders."
"Much of the recent military interest in chemical agents that affect the brain has focused on incapacitating chemicals. An incapacitating chemical may be defined as an agent “which produces a disabling condition that persists for hours to days after exposure to the agent.” 31 Specifically, the term has come to mean those agents that are highly potent and able to produce their effects by altering the higher regulatory activity of the central nervous system. As a recent NATO technical report on future peace enforcement operations noted, 32 incapacitating chemicals could act on “[t]he central nervous system by calmatives, dissociative agents, equilibrium agents.” We are obviously, therefore, not discussing traditional riot-control agents here."
--
"The recent search for new non-lethal chemicals has taken place, of course, against a background of very rapid and intense civil research on agents affecting the brain. 38 Yet military interest is already directed towards the next generation of agents. A 2004 US Broad Area Announcement stated the objective as follows: 39
“The Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) is soliciting proposals for research, development, integration, and demonstration of next-generation non-lethal weapons (NLW) and capabilities... ”
Amongst efforts requested were:
“Studies/Analyses to address technology-specific legal/treaty/public acceptability issues associated with: (1) extended duration incapacitation (...) and (3) precision long-range engagement of threats...”
In addition to drugs causing calming or unconsciousness, compounds on the horizon with potential as military agents include noradrenaline antagonists such as propranolol to cause selective memory loss, cholecystokinin B agonists to cause panic attacks, and substance P agonists to induce depression. The question thus is not so much when these capabilities will arise — because arise they certainly will — but what purposes will those with such capabilities pursue."
--
"Of course, military utility will go beyond weapons to performance-enhancing agents for use by one’s own troops. Amphetamines have long been used to extend alertness, and manipulation of the sleep/wake cycle is currently used to enhance the performance of air crews (and probably special forces teams) on long missions. But as a recent National Academies report 40 noted, within a few decades we will have performance enhancement of troops which will almost certainly be produced by the use of diverse pharmaceutical compounds, and will extend to a range of physiological systems well beyond the sleep cycle. Reduction of fear and pain, and increase of aggression, hostility, physical capabilities and alertness could significantly enhance soldier performance, but might markedly increase the frequency of violations of humanitarian law. For example, increasing a person’s aggressiveness and hostility in conflict situations is hardly likely to enhance restraint and respect for legal prohibitions on violence. Given the kinds of operations other than war that are the increasingly common pattern of military engagement, we will also probably see soldiers armed not only with traditional lethal weapons, but also with a range of “non-lethal weapons” — acoustic, electromagnetic and chemical. Among the chemical weapons will be traditional riot control agents such as CS (“tear gas”) and OC (“pepper spray”), as well as various pharmaceutical compounds that cause unconsciousness, paralysis or delirium at very low doses. Whether the traditional laws of war — for instance, protection of civilians and of soldiers “hors de combat” — will withstand these changed circumstances is unsure. 41
Certainly the historical record gives little comfort, as the major military use of “non-lethal” chemical compounds has traditionally been to amplify lethal force, not to replace it. In Vietnam, for instance, the US used approximately 10,000 tons of CS. The purported use was for humanitarian purposes, for situations in which combatants and non-combatants were intermixed, or where extensive property damage would result from attacking the enemy in urban environments. However, a 1973 Army report 42 reviewed after-action reports on the use of CS, and found no record of humanitarian use.
Currently in Iraq, the US is using acoustic beam weapons to flush snipers from cover, who are then killed. 43 And in the previously mentioned example of the Moscow siege, Chechen hostage-takers rendered comatose by the fentanyl derivative were shot dead. 44 It is credible that novel agents would find similar military uses, and that these “non-lethal” agents would often be used to increase the lethality of other weapons, rather than to replace them.
There is also a serious potential for misuse of pharmaceuticals during interrogation. 45 During the Cold War the CIA, for example, sought substances that would change personality and thus induce increased dependence on others. 46 The recent abuses of prisoners under interrogation by US forces in the aftermath of the second Gulf War remind us that even democratic countries with long traditions of support for humanitarian laws may act unlawfully when it appears to be vital to security. Accounts claiming forced medication with psychoactive drugs have come from detainees released from US custody, 47 and detainee medical records have been made available to interrogators. 48
Progress in understanding the biological basis for repression 49 may allow the selective deletion of specific memories, which could not only protect sensitive information from unfriendly interrogation but also protect interrogators from effective oversight.
Torturers in all countries will have a greatly expanded repertoire of capabilities. “Non-lethal” police devices such as electric batons and OC sprays are now widely used for torture, and there is no reason to think that future devices and chemicals will not be similarly used. 50 In the hands of the sophisticated torturer or the interrogator willing to use torture to gain information, chemical agents will offer the ability to induce at will panic, depression, psychosis, delirium and extreme pain — and to offer instant relief as well, or even euphoria.
Even greater might be the danger of such capabilities in the hands of dictators to quell dissent. In addition to expanding the ability of dictatorships to use torture to gain information during interrogations, the possibility may exist of pacifying entire populations through additives to food or water.
--
"... we see the near-term future (10-20 years) possibly including militaries whose troops will go into action with chemically heightened aggressiveness and resistance to fear, pain and fatigue. Their memories of atrocities committed will be chemically erased in after-action briefings. They will be equipped with a range of weapons, including chemicals that incapacitate their opponents, who may then be executed in cold blood. Civilians will be targeted with incapacitating chemicals when they get in the way, and many will die of overdoses or secondary effects. Civilians in occupied territories will be pacified by chemicals included in food distributions (and civilians at home may also be so pacified). Enemy captives, and civilians suspected of collaboration, will be treated with psychoactive chemicals to extract information, including the use of devastatingly effective chemical torture when necessary. The chemical compounds will be rapidly metabolized and will leave no forensic trace. In this dire future scenario, many fragile democracies will have yielded to totalitarian rule, whose governments repress any dissent with brutal effectiveness, aided by chemical pacification of entire populations, use of incapacitating agents for crowd control and capture of dissident leaders, and use of chemicals for torture and interrogation of dissidents. A worldwide criminal underworld will be using similar technologies to deal with both victims and competitors. Terrorist groups worldwide will be finding frequent use for the force-amplifying effects of chemical agents.
Since the future possibilities become very difficult to discern with any confidence and cannot be defined at this point (unlike the near-term possibilities above, which we can discern with more clarity), we offer a few speculations only to hint at what is likely to be possible in the long term. We can imagine, however, that in the longer term (50 years?), soldiers could become wired for rapid and direct communication with headquarters, and to control powerful military drones by their thoughts. They could be triggered remotely to enter specifically programmed behaviour patterns — evasive, suicidal, berserk, etc. Their memories and convictions would be subject to alteration and erasure.
We would like to hope that this is not the world we shall leave to our children, but we are not particularly sanguine. Human history gives ample grounds for pessimism about our ability to prevent widespread exploitation of the manipulative, hostile and malign possibilities that the emerging technologies will bring within reach."
--
"We know of no major technology with military utility that has not been vigorously exploited for hostile purposes, and there is no reason to think that the revolution in biology will not be similarly bent to military ends. Of course, anticipating such an eventuality, and dealing effectively with it, are two very different things. We see three major generic strategies for attempting to contain the malign applications of biology...."
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/f...entry=846#
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"