An Interview on Nanoweapons

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

In 1985 I did some contract work for a company that claimed to be researching "artificial intelligence" along with a lot of other buzzwords. They had a guy at the front desk guy working the phones full time giving this line of bull to potential investors and writing up press releases. It was sad because I knew one of the programmers who told me how their demos were all faked, etc. They took the money and ran.

What does your anecdote have to do with anything? Rhetorical fallacy is NOT a compelling argument. So you worked for criminals, but what does that have to do with the rest of the world?

Like I say, though, I don't know if they really believe in it or if the people who research nanotechnology are sincere.

Seeing as how most of the money is coming from millionaires and billionaires who also happen to be engineering executives, they are fully competent to evaluate the technology. The people putting many of these companies togethers are people who've accomplished real things and are highly respected for their contributions to the pool of human knowledge and technology.

More to the point, who exactly are they ripping off? A lot of these companies are funded primarily by the scientists and executives that created them, and the credentials of many of the people involved are as good as they come. In other words, the only people who are going to lose if it fails are the people who created the companies in the first place. It sounds like clean American capitalism to me.

My point is that there are a lot of criminals in the world. There are about two million of them in jail, but those are just the dumb ones, the ones that got caught.

You can seldom recognize a smart criminal by talking to him. He knows that other people want to know if he's a crook so he does everything he can to appear to be honest so he can take your money. He might even have a legitimate Ph.D but it could come from a diploma mill, the company may be registered with the SEC but that doesn't mean anything. The SEC and the FTC have no way to insure that businessmen are competent or honest.

Criminals in business are not rare and it is nearly impossible to prosecute them. It happens all the time.

So you need to understand:

1) There is money to be made in fooling people.
2) There are millions of criminals willing to do it.
3) The risk of getting caught is nil.

That means you have to make a judgement about whether what they are telling you is true. You have to use your head. Evaluate the source, if you can, and what they are saying.

Regarding self-replicating machines. We have machines, industrial robots, that build other machines. But we're talking dozens of robots each performing one specific task. Can you imagine how impossible it would be to build a machine out of Tinker-Toys and Lego blocks that would make a copy of itself? Can you imagine how impossible it would be to do that on a molecular scale?

Why would having "credentials" mean that a person is honest? Men with "credentials" have ripped off people before and it will happen again. It happens even more today because schools and professional organizations are a lot more tolerant of cheating and amoral behavior. Look at how Mr. & Mrs. Clinton ripped off that bank and then went on to the White House.

I have no doubt at all that there are people in this field who completely fund their own firms. That would make them appear to be honest. But I suspect they aren't really doing research, they are just hyping the field. Although the lobbying has to be done with private funds, the big money comes from NASA and the NSF grants.

The folks getting ripped off are the ones who pay for people (mostly government employees) to go to the seminars, conferences and tutorials for $1000.00 a head. In other words -taxpayers. The folks who will be getting ripped will be the ones eager to get in on the ground floor by investing in those other start-ups run by the nano-guru's brother-in-law.

But the big con will be when they convince congress to fund a "Manhattan Project" for this stuff. Then there will be no limit. It will be classified with no peer review of the "science".

The dotcom bust was not just a market bubble caused by bidding up the price of stock. There were some 800 companies that went broke. Some went broke because they were mismanaged or badly conceived but likely some of them were fake companies. The firms you worked for turned out to be legitimate because the chances of getting a job in a fake company are nil -- fake companies don't hire a lot of people, they just rake in a lot of cash.

The dotcom crash was the inevitable result of a new industry shakeout just like the electrical industry in the first part of the last century. Crooks are attracted to that climate because there are a lot of people don't know what they are doing.

However there are other industries, like cold fusion, AI, and now nanotechnology that are almost exclusively run by charlatans.

However there are other industries, like cold fusion, AI, and now nanotechnology that are almost exclusively run by charlatans.

Whatever. Empty assertions don't carry much weight, and that you are only vaguely familiar with the field itself isn't exactly bolstering your position either.

...destroying enemy human beings as cancerous polyps could be developed--leaving the nation's infrastructure intact to be repopulated.

ewww!

Thanks for the ping.

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.

What do these little beasties eat, or are they powered by a perpetual motion device?

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