Your Government at Hard at Work to Make You Safe

Somehow the following doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling of "being safer". This is from Wired Magazine:

Forget the Oscars, the event I want an invitation to is the Army’s annual mad scientists’ ball. That’s right, the Army actually holds an an annual conference — formally titled the “Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar” — that brings together scientists, science fiction writers, futurists, academics and members of the government and the private sector to discuss the military implications of emerging science and technology.

Sounds fun. I mean, where else can you get together to talk about electromagnetic pulse guns, cyborgs and swarming mini-bombs?

According to an unclassified summary obtained by Danger Room, the theme of this year’s Mad Scientist confab, held January 20-23, was the “blending” of science and technology in ways that might threaten the United States.

I take this example from the unclassified summary pointed to above:

As early as 2015, we assess that bioengineering will allow adversaries to modify diseases and tailor organisms to produce pathogens against which there is no existing defense or treatment. This capability may soon be available for less than $5000. A realistic example would be to alter a naturally mutating flu virus.

What's wrong with this picture? Ever since WWI sensible people have realized that chemical and biological war is crazy because it will turn around and bite you. You may think you are spreading anthrax on "the enemy" but the wind or an infected person will track it right back into your big cities and kill tens of thousands if not millions. What kind of "weapon" is that? Oh, I guess it is like putting a six shooter with 5 chambers loaded, spinning it, putting it to your head, and pulling the trigger. Sure one-out-of-six times you will unleash a hellish blow on "the enemy" but the other five-out-of-six times you take down your own population as well. Nutty.

The MAD strategy of the Cold War (which is still in place as far as I can tell) was to respond to an attack by unleashing everything you have and causing an irradiated, nuclear winter world in which nobody survives. Wow! Chalk that up as a "big win" for the military. Military thinking is pretty warped.

Sadly we live in a world in which suicidal fanatics are happy to unleash this kind of mad biological war. Their madness goes beyond the MAD of the military. Fundamentalist will shrug a the blowback of biological war and say, so what? For them this just means that they will be back in the loving arms of God all that much faster. For the rest of us who think this is the only world we have and there is no Big Guy with a Beard who wants to cuddle us "on the other side", this is a nightmare vision.