THE BIOTECHNICAL AGE AND FUTURE WAR

[Morpheal]

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

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. Its an endless vortex

The ideology which asserts that peace should be attained through violent coercion will endlessly produce more vile weapons, and seek more widespread methods of control and coercion which will provide impetus for opponents to seek these kinds of doomsday weapons. Only when we seek peace through mutual respect and cooperation will this ever end.