Posted on 10/12/2003 10:02:58 PM PDT by sourcery
Before launching the Web site www.worldthreats.com, Ryan Mauro was a geopolitical analyst for a maritime security company called Tactical Defense Concepts. I like our interview and have decided to publish it in my column because it "starts from scratch,? a useful approach, since in the last eight years or so the media have created an honest-to-goodness vacuum on the subject.
A Glimpse Into China?s Post-Nuclear Super-Weapons: Lev Navrozov Interviewed by Ryan Mauro for www.worldthreats.com (PhilNDeBlank9@aol.com)
I am thankful to Lev Navrozov, an expert in post-nuclear superweapons, as he calls them, for granting this interview.
Ryan Mauro: Mr. Navrozov, your "nano weapons columns? on Newsmax.com and WorldTribune.com are intriguing. What is nanotechnology and how can it neutralize the U.S. means of nuclear retaliation?
Lev Navrozov: The word "nano? means "one billionth.? Nanotechnology is a field of many fields, some of them civilian, dealing with such small systems. What is of interest to us is tiny systems (they are called "assemblers?) of molecular nanotechnology. Such assemblers can penetrate molecules and transform or destroy them.
The world peace has been based on Mutual Assured Destruction. That is, every nuclear power such as the United States, Russia, or China has had means of nuclear retaliation, which an enemy nuclear attack cannot destroy. Thus, nuclear weapons can destroy New York, Moscow, or Beijing, but they cannot destroy submarines deep underwater, carrying nuclear missiles, underground nuclear installations, or bombers on duty high in the air carrying nuclear bombs. Nano assemblers are expected to be able to find these means of retaliation and destroy them by penetrating in between their atoms. Thus an attacked country can be destroyed safely by nuclear weapons because it has no means of nuclear retaliation to retaliate after the enemy nuclear attack and destroy the attacker by way of Mutual Assured Destruction.
RM: If nanotechnology is to be used as a weapon, how does it work?
LN: Let me recall the description a nanotechnologist has e-mailed to me. A molecular assembler I spoke about is a device capable of breaking and creating the chemical bonds between atoms and molecules. Since a molecular assembler is by definition able to self-replace, the first could build a duplicate copy of itself. Those two then become four, become eight, and so on. This compounding capital base could lead to a massive and decisive force within days. As Eric Drexler described it in his book ? which he published in 1986! ? "a state that makes the assembler breakthrough could rapidly create a decisive military force ? if not literally overnight, then at least with unprecedented speed.?
Such a device is capable of rapidly manufacturing and deploying billions of microscopic/macroscopic machines at relatively little cost. These machines could comb the oceans for enemy submarines and quickly disable the nuclear arsenals they carry. Similar acts of sabotage could be carried out simultaneously against land-based nuclear facilities and conventional military forces in a matter of hours, if not minutes.
The race to build a molecular assembler, if won by China, will result in its worldwide nanotechnic dictatorship. We are certainly at a crucial juncture in history, not unlike 1938 and its nuclear scientists who foretold the atom bomb. This time, we cannot afford to be caught sleeping.
RM: What countries are developing the post-nuclear superweapons involving nanotechnology?
LN: It is worthwhile to speak only of China, Russia if dictatorship comes back to that country, and the United States if it awakens from its sleep, which may well be its last. To make the nanoweapons useful, a country must have the ability and the will to either world domination or to the defense against another country?s world domination.
RM: What do you believe are the motives and goals of the countries that are developing the post-nuclear superweapons?
LN: The national student movement of 1989, associated with Tiananmen Square, endangered the Chinese dictatorship more than any group in Soviet Russia endangered the Soviet dictatorship two years later. Yet the Soviet dictatorship fell. What a lesson for the Chinese dictators! We know authentic information about the Tiananmen Square movement from Zhang Liang?s publication "The Tiananmen Papers,? a 514-page collection of Chinese government documents. It is clear that the dictators of China saw how absolutism was endangered in China and understood that the only way to prevent future Tiananmens was to annihilate or subjugate the source of subversion, viz., the West.
RM: What do you believe are going to be China?s next steps in terms of acquiring territory?
LN: In contrast to Hitler, who stupidly grabbed the rump of Czechoslovakia in 1939, China has been very cautious in its territorial claims, since the position of China now is the best for the development of "Superweapon No. 3,? such as the nano superweapon.
RM: Who does China see as allies and enemies?
LN: The worst enemy is the democratic West, whose very existence produces Tiananmens able to destroy the Chinese dictatorship. The best ally is the democratic West, supplying China with everything necessary for the annihilation or subjugation of the democratic West.
RM: Are the other post-nuclear weapons being researched to this day? If so, are they known? If not, can you enlighten us?
LN: Since the nano "Superweapon No. 3? is a hypothesis, and not an absolute certainty, the Chinese Project 863 has been engaged in genetic engineering and at least six or seven other fields.
RM: If China has or is close to, molecular nanotechnology to be used in war, what is the purpose of having a large, advanced conventional army and "traditional? nuclear weapons?
LN: Eric Drexler, the Newton of nanotechnology, alive and enriching us with his wisdom, discusses the problem in his historic book of 1986 "Engines of Creation.? My assistant Isak Baldwin says that, according to Drexler, "A nation armed with molecular nanotechnology-based weapons would not require nuclear weapons to annihilate a civilization. In fact, it seems that a rather surgical system of seeking and destroying enemy human beings as cancerous polyps could be developed--leaving the nation?s infrastructure intact to be repopulated.?
Nevertheless conventional weapons might be useful even on the "D-day,? after nanotechnology has been successfully weaponized. Conventional non-nuclear weapons have been useful even after 1945. Please recall that two "atom bombs? were delivered in 1945 by conventional U.S. bombers with conventional machine guns and all.
RM: What beliefs or desires are motivating the rulers of China? The belief that Communism must triumph over Capitalism?
LN: A New York taxi robber risks his life, life imprisonment, or death sentence to acquire the taxi driver?s $200. Hence the bulletproof partitions in taxis. The dictators of China defend not $200, but their power, which is worth trillions of dollars, apart from what cannot be expressed in terms of money (royal grandeur, cult, and glorification). Remember the French king who said, "The state ? it is me?? Many dictators have been saying and can always say: "Communism/capitalism/democracy/freedom/socialism/national socialism/our great country/the meaning of life/the goal of history ? it is me."
RM: If the U.S. is the most technologically advanced country, does this mean we have been surpassed?
LN: The "most technologically advanced country? is an ambiguous generality. In the 1950s, Russia was still a technologically backward country, with most of its population deprived of running water, to say nothing of passenger cars. Yet it did not prevent Russia from outstripping the United States in space rocketry, when the Soviet space satellite was launched before its American counterpart. In its annual "Soviet Military Power,? to which I subscribed, the Pentagon could not help praising certain Soviet weapons as second to none in the world.
RM: What today is holding China back from becoming overtly aggressive and reshaping the geopolitical world?
LN: The dictators of China are not insane! China?s government-controlled "capitalist corporations? have been penetrating the entrails of the Western economies, absorbing the latest science and technology ? or sometimes entire Western corporations, induced to operate in China on cheap local labor.
To become "overtly aggressive?? What for? To invade Taiwan? To perish, along with the West, in Mutually Assured Destruction? No, the dictators of China are not insane! They are developing superweapons able to annihilate the Western means of nuclear retaliation.
RM: What are your suggestions for defending the U.S.? What steps must be taken?
LN: It is necessary for the U.S. political establishment to understand what is going on. Then the right steps will be taken. This is not a recipe that one person or one group can offer. This must be a national effort.
In 1978, to enlighten the West, I convinced nineteen outstanding Westerners to join the Advisory Board of the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies under my presidency. The irony is that when we concentrated on Soviet Russia, before 1991, we had all the grants we needed. But in the last eight years or so, China was the American holy cow, and we have had no funds to carry on our research of China and the enlightenment of the West.
RM: How much progress have you made in alerting the government and intelligence apparatus about the Chinese threat?
LN: Since our Center for the Survival of Western Democracies began to regard China, and not Russia, as the key geostrategic player, the donations to our organization stopped. My assistants work without pay or with a token pay. We need a top-level publicist at $10,000 for four months, Chinese translators at $100 a week, etc. Quite unlike a conjectural $200 billion on the war in Iraq, where WMDs are still being hidden (presumably under Hussein?s bed, which is also being hidden) and a conjectural $600 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq (well, once it has been destroyed by the Coalition bombs, missiles, and shells, it is to be reconstructed).
RM: What do you predict will occur in the future?
LN: For the time being, the prediction is not difficult: Unless the situation changes, the West will be annihilated or will become a Chinese colony with all the consequences arising therefrom.
Maybe it looks like gobbidge, maybe it's gobbidge.
Molecular nanotechnology is the ability to build objects to atomically exact specifications; to synthesize complex structures by using precise, mechanically controlled positioning of individual chemical building blocks. Real nanotechnology, in the form originally envisioned, should not be confused with the modern misuse of the term to denote nanoscale bulk manufacturing - technologies operating on a scale of tens or hundreds of nanometers which do not involve atomic-scale precision or the exact specification of molecular structures. Real nanotechnology would be a world-shaking development, and the term shouldn't be appropriated to describe the latest computer chip; but unfortunately eager venture capitalists have now confused the issue beyond repair. The people still discussing real nanotechnology usually use the term "molecular nanotechnology" to avoid confusion; this term has not been abused as yet.
Although nanotechnology probably still lies years in the future, the theory has already been analyzed in considerable detail. One of the best references is "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation". Every now and then a chemist or physicist whose knowledge of nanotechnology derives from overheard conversations at cocktail parties is quoted in the newspapers as declaring loudly that nanotechnology is a crackpot notion because, e.g., scaling laws mean that all the engineering rules are different at the molecular level. Well, yes, scaling laws do mean that the rules change at the molecular level, but the way in which they change has been analyzed in considerable detail. If anyone tries to tell you that nanotechnology is impossible, ask to see their math. Advance analysis of nanotechnology has long since moved beyond vague arguments to running the equations and, in a few cases, specific technical details of proposed systems.
So why all the controversy? Because, if and when molecular nanotechnology comes into real existence, the consequences will be enormous. We're used to the idea that computers get faster as they get smaller, but for nanotechnology "faster" doesn't even begin to cover it. For example, suppose that you build a nanocomputer using diamondoid rods of a few thousand atoms apiece as the computer elements; they click against each other, mechanically, and thereby implement transistors and logic gates - an extremely miniaturized abacus. Chapter 12 of Nanosystems brings together the pieces of such a system, analyzed in previous chapters, and goes on at length about energy requirements, heat dissipation, thermal excitation and error rates, acoustic signal propagation speeds, clocking based on oscillating drive rods... and so on, but at the end of the chapter we find the final numbers: A CPU-scale system containing a million transistors would fit within a 400-nanometer cube, run at 1GHz, and consume 60 nanowatts. A desktop nanocomputer consuming 100 watts of power would process 1018 instructions per second. That's a billion billion instructions per second, roughly a billion times faster than a modern Pentium chip, and an order of magnitude higher than most estimates of the power of a human brain. (1011 neurons and 1014 synapses firing 200 times per second ~ 1017 operations per second.) A faster nanocomputer might consume a hundred kilowatts, process 1021 operations per second - ten thousand brainpower - and still fit inside a single cubic centimeter. (Yes, you can cool it.)
These numbers should be taken with a large grain of salt, except that the grain of salt is in the opposite of the usual direction - a real nanocomputer would be faster, not slower. The design analyzed in Nanosystems has solid rods shuttling around at the speed of sound in diamond, not because rod logics are optimal for real systems, but because rod logics are easy to analyze. Preliminary numbers on electronic nanocomputers, published a few years later, suggest somewhere on the order of 1025 operations per second for a "desktop" system - roughly a hundred million brainpower - but nanotechnologists still stick to talking about rod logics because rod logics have been extensively analyzed and the assumptions are easy to defend. And yet rod logics are essentially the nanotechnological equivalent of vacuum tubes. Nanosystems contains a design for a six-degrees-of-freedom manipulator that would have used around 4 million atoms; a later, atomically precise design for a six-degrees-of-freedom manipulator turned out to require only 2,596 atoms. If the ultrafast nanocomputers that are usually analyzed are the equivalent of vacuum tubes, then the corresponding ultrafast manufacturing technologies are the equivalents of steam engines. The kind of nanotechnology we know how to analyze in advance, despite its enormous power by comparison with current technology, is a very awkward and primitive form of nanotechnology. This shouldn't be all that surprising; current human technology just isn't impressive in a cosmic sense - we're nowhere near the limit of what we already know is possible.
Nanotechnology often pops up in discussions of the Singularity for three major reasons. First, when the components are individual atoms, the world contains an unlimited supply of perfectly machined, perfectly interchangeable parts; molecular factories can reproduce exponentially. (Nanosystems concludes that a one-kilogram factory should be able to build an exact copy of itself from acetylene feedstock, plus some nutrients, in around a thousand seconds - i.e., less than twenty minutes. Closing the loop completely by extracting materials and energy from a natural environment is possible - biological organisms do just that - but would probably be rather unwise to attempt while we're still all human-level intelligences; there's this thing called the "grey goo" problem...) The benefits of the Singularity need not be absurdly expensive, even during the very first stages; like free software, self-replicating technologies can be created once, and then used by millions or billions for very little additional cost. Second, while a molecular manufacturing factory can build exact copies of itself, it can also build improved factories instead. The time it takes to go from the very first self-reproducing box to the most advanced technology that can possibly be built from individual atoms is twenty minutes plus however much time is required to do the thinking. A fast mind with nanotechnological "fingers" can build and test and observe on a scale where actions take microseconds, nanoseconds or even picoseconds. The time it takes to go from nanotechnology to the ultimate limits of material science - assuming there are any - could turn out to be effectively zero, at least from the standpoint of a modern-day human. Third, even the most primitive nanotechnology is still advanced by comparison to biology. It may take a mature nanotechnology to handle uploading, but for almost anything else, the steam engines and vacuum tubes that are usually analyzed should be more than enough. The characteristic size of a nanodevice is considerably smaller than the characteristic size of a cell (this mobile in vivo nanodevice design is 1 micron; an average cell is 10 microns), and the manipulators contained in a nanodevice are even smaller. To a nanodevice, a cell is a large, complex structure whose parts can be handled and manipulated. Almost all medical problems would become trivial tasks: extinguishing viral and bacterial infections, removing or even repairing cancerous cells, regeneration of missing body parts, the various challenges involved with aging reversal, and so on. Food could be synthesized directly from dirt and sunlight (plants do this slowly and inefficiently), which would be enough - in a material sense - to solve world hunger.
Actually, world hunger today is an essentially political challenge rather than a material or technological challenge; we grow enough food, we just can't get it through the various warlords holding the territory. This is why it's important to emphasize that the Singularity is not just a physical technology like nanotech; it involves smarter-than-human intelligence. Similarly, a "utility fog" might be able to intercept bullets fired at a living target - although this also might require mature nanotechnology - but from here to ending war is, again, more of a Singularity issue than a nanotechnological one. The applications listed above underestimate the impact of the Singularity, or at most, provide a lower bound; they describe a patchwork of mid-range technological solutions to current nagging problems, rather than an encompassing transition to a transhuman standard of living. An upload doesn't need nanotech medical treatment. Of course we have no idea what a post-Singularity way of life would really be like, but we can see that a patchwork of nanotechnological bandages isn't it.
From a Singularity perspective, the point of discussing nanotechnology is to say that if you can get control over the physical world at a molecular level, you can solve problems that exist at higher levels of organization. You can do a lot more than just solving those problems - reprogramming matter is overkill if all you're trying to do is cure cancer. But the nice thing about overkill is that it works.
Now consider the other points raised above: nanotechnology can self-replicate, and the characteristic speed of transistors and nanodevices is very rapid when compared to the thoughts and biology we know. The impact of the Singularity will not necessarily resemble the technological and economic revolutions we know - revolutions that took years or decades to complete. The Singularity may take the form of a literal wavefront sweeping out from a literal epicenter.
From the perspective of the Singularity, nanotech is the prototypical example of rapid infrastructure. Nanotech can self-replicate; it moves physical manipulation into a new timescale - microseconds instead of seconds - and thus acts as a very rapid base for the acquisition of further ultratechnologies; and it turns matter into information, allowing in a sense the "reprogramming of reality". Whether nanotechnology turns out to be important in itself, or only as a platform for reaching technologies as yet unimagined, nanotech can be said to be an informational challenge rather than a material challenge. We could almost certainly build nanotechnology with present-day tools; we just don't know how. We can synthesize arbitrary sequences of DNA, and we can turn arbitrary DNA strands into proteins; one floppy disk, if we only had the right floppy disk, could probably contain a DNA sequence that would create a protein that would act as a very crude manipulator that could be directed by acoustic information to create a diamondoid nanodevice which, though itself slow and crude, was flexible enough to create the most advanced nanotechnology for which the user possessed an atomic specification. It may take years for humanity to cover this territory, arriving at "wet" nanotechnology long before "dry" nanotechnology, and perhaps taking the pathway of larger-scale chemical synthesis or finer-scale mechanical manipulation. We lack the knowledge needed to take shortcuts. We still haven't cracked the protein folding problem; instead of using evolution's molecular factories, it may be easier for us to go down the long slow path of building our own molecular factories from scratch. But that would be a human story; a story of human-sized minds running at human speeds.
Nanotechnology may or may not be the final technology, and the future may or may not lie in countless diamond specks. Rather, nanotechnology represents the human paradigm of material technology pushed to its final limit - nearly complete power over the physical world. Since technology is the product of intelligence, we can expect nanotech or some such similar ultratechnology to be the product of the Singularity, but in a final sense the Singularity is unrelated to nanotechnology; the Singularity is the breakdown in our model of the future that occurs with the arrival of transhuman intelligence, not any particular increase in material capabilities. The point of discussing nanotechnology is to show that technologies accessible outside the human regime are significantly more powerful than those we are accustomed to dealing with; they can bypass existing human infrastructure; operate on timescales far quicker than human hands; and provide a substrate for thought tremendously faster than both existing human brains and existing computer technology.
So called "machine phase" nanotech is alive and doing very well. In fact, I have to confess that it is moving faster than I anticipated. In reference to the article specifically, the US does seem to be leading the field in machine phase nanotech. What you are talking about is "wet" nanotech, which while also moving along, isn't as easy to engineer as machine phase technologies.
That said, the article glosses over a lot of important points. This is not a simple topic, and can run far afield while still being germane.
If we already happen to have one, I wouldn't expect it to be common knowledge.
This article has many earmarks of an AI type who has just suffered from a stroke.
If you think biology is comparable to what these other people are talking about, you don't understand the subject matter. Apples and oranges, really.
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