Darpa Is Making Insects That Can Deliver Bioweapons, Scientists Claim | Hacker News Reader

Darpa Is Making Insects That Can Deliver Bioweapons, Scientists Claim

newsweek.com

122 pointslxm36 comments

The same capabilities that are necessary to test defenses against chemical and biological attacks also prepare the way for offensive applications. If party A doesn't trust B, they are naturally wary of B's calls for A to halt defensive research. If B doesn't trust A, they are naturally wary that said "defensive" research is merely a precursor to or cover for weaponization. Party Z may later come along and use the research of parties A-Y to their own ends (e.g. Aum Shinrikyo cribbing the chemistry of nerve agents from open chemistry literature, poisoning people for their own weird reasons.)

I personally don't think that DARPA actually wants famine-causing bioweapons. The US has a large nuclear arsenal should it ever want to inflict mass destruction on the world, and its incentives align against making mass destruction cheaper or more accessible. But I can also understand why countries the US is hostile to may be less assured than I am. I can also understand the point of critics who worry that if this sort of research becomes normal and openly published, results may be later weaponized by some group, maybe a group that's not even a nation state.

If you're interested in issues like this, I can recommend the book "A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare" by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman. Caveats: I found some technical errors in areas where I have knowledge (chemistry). It goes beyond documented history into speculation in places. But it's what first introduced me to the complicated issues around trust and Janus-like defensive-offensive R&D in this area; those have remained useful insights.

If they wanted to counter a biological weapons attack on food crops, they would be creating a detection network, a facility to produce a specific compound to counter the threat, and a delivery network comprising of dusting aircraft.

They would NOT be creating mosquito-delivered viruses. Through public research. Now their enemies have access to the same technology too. What's the fucking point? To kickstart a biological weapons race?

IMHO the US needs to put a cap on the emerging bioweapons race right now. Academics can be part of it, please deny developing dual-use technologies like this, which is obviously single-use. The world is going to become a horrifying place to live in if this trend continuous the way it's set.

Significant difference is that nuclear weapons are not deniable, bioweapons are.

The United States (and allies) have already used rain seeding, river damns, and a number of other techniques for damaging adversary nation's economic and agricultural abilities. It's even a relatively common practice in geopolitics (India uses the Indus river as a carrot/stick against Pakistan).

Nukes, in the general sense, also cause massive destruction of an area and make it uninhabitable for long periods. The "targeted" use of bioweapons (in theory) allows for the clearing of people sans the mess and down time.

I'm pretty sure that that is common knowledge and openly discussed among people who care about such stuff.

> The United States (and allies) have already used rain seeding, river damns, and a number of other techniques for damaging adversary nation's economic and agricultural abilities.

Would you provide more information in the form of a reliable source?

"Operation Popeye (Project Controlled Weather Popeye / Motorpool / Intermediary-Compatriot) was a highly classified weather modification program in Southeast Asia during 1967–1972. The cloud seeding operation during the Vietnam War ran from March 20, 1967 until July 5, 1972 in an attempt to extend the monsoon season." [1]

"After World War II, the U.S. military bombed dams in North Korea and North Vietnam to destroy the communist governments’ electricity and irrigation infrastructure. This was, until the Iran-Iraq War, the final occurrence of such soggy tactics. In 1977 the Geneva Conventions specifically outlawed the targeting of water infrastructure in wartime." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye [2] https://medium.com/war-is-boring/dam-warfare-3da6ee24518a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Vietnam%27s_dikes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye

Biohazard by Ken Alibek is pretty descriptive of Soviet bio research efforts and denials of such. It does, however, read like fiction.

Your points are true for all technology. It can be used for good or evil. I work almost exclusively under DARPA grants doing NLP work - things like automated sentiment analysis might be used to detect fake news or to fabricate it. Detecting people tweeting about a need for medical supplies in some obscure language could be used to provide those supplies, or to confirm that your bomb just destroyed their stash. I think you’re correct in your assessment - the US already has all the destructive power it needs. We spend more effort today on relief or more precise strikes.

Who spends more? DARPA on weaponized insects, or The Gates Foundation on eradicating malaria by controlling mosquitos?

It's a combined effort really. Gates is using effective PR campaigns and the help of DARPA funding to basically conduct military research on the African ecosystems under the auspices of philanthropy.

The project was not democratically demanded or organised according to the will of the people affected. The like of it sure as shit wouldn't slide in the West. But Bill Gates is one of the "Good Guys" so we are told to applaud this.

Malaria is the reason settler colonialism failed in Africa. If you remove malaria, Africa will be inevitably invaded by colonial settlers.

To substantiate your point - that's also what I read (specifically regarding sub-saharan Africa). South Africa is the only exception due to it being much more elevated.

Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prisoners-Geography-Everything-Glob...

Does this funding contradict the biological weapons treaty? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Conventio...

I got it - the system could be used in multiple ways so that the weapons aspect is deniable.

Trying to stop any synthetic biology research that might have military applications is like trying to stop fission research in the late 1930s.

Rather than attempting to stifle research, we need to start thinking about how we regulate, detect, and defend against potential threats. DARPA's synbio research is at least mostly carried out in academic labs (which have a strong incentive to publicize their work).

Really? How many insects to genetically modify the Ukraine's wheat? I, too, wonder what they're doing.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a buzz.

With so many crops engineered to withstand a particular herbicide like glyphosate, how likely is it that this standardization also creates a single bio profile that can be targeted?

If a bacteria gains antibiotic resistance, we declare the bug stronger and ourselves vulnerable. If we make wheat resistant to an herbicide, we declare it weaker and ourselves vulnerable.

If you can make insects that can deliver viruses to save plants you can use insects to destroy food supplies of "enemies" and cause famine.

About 18-20 years ago I remember reading a thread where a poster basically said (as a counter to China) that the US has developed a blight that could basically wipe out all the rice in the world. It would be deployed via Mosquito and according to the poster had the ability to spread quickly and leave over 3 billion people without their main staple of food. Not a single shot would need to be fired. Within 6 months half the worlds population would be gone.

I figure a day where this will be a reality is completely possible if not already.

Quite disturbing....

That betrays a basic misunderstanding of both economics and China. Firstly, rice is the staple food of _southern_ China; northern Chinese eat wheat noodles and buns as stables. Secondly, China is developed enough now that the average person is not so poor that they couldn't afford to feed themselves enough non-rice food to avoid starvation for the 6-12 months necessary for the rice to be replaced with a different crop (and for the truly poor, the government could just ration the wheat).

Look at it another way: wheat is the staple food of western countries, but how many westerners would starve to death if all the wheat products suddenly disappeared from stores? Very few, given the ample supply of rice, corn, potato and dairy-based alternatives.

> Within 6 months half the worlds population would be gone.

Within 6 months, a country with nuclear weapons is forced in a desperate situation. What could go wrong?

Is there really a point to such a scenario between nuclear powers? It doesn't make much sense to me. The US might as well launch all its warheads from the start.

Of course, it's about plausible deniability and logistics: You can't launch your nuclear arsenal and then look deadpan at the camera and shrug your shoulders. But killing a third of the world's population with insects sounds so unbelievable that there would be skepticism even if the President held a news conference and claimed responsibility right into the microphone.

Who cares about deniability or skepticism in an apocalyptic scenario as described? Do you really think cool heads would prevail if China was put in a such a situation? Chaos, and desperate people would be the result, with a nuclear arsenal in the mix. And they would, most likely, blame whoever they want, proofs and rationality be damned.

Keep in mind, I don't deny that the military can find uses for what the article describes. But, to go from this, to deliberately provoking WW3 by massively launching such a weapon on China is suicide. It would provoke a counter-attack, guaranteed, no matter the political arguments.

Plausible deniability is fine when the targeted countries can't counter-attack, or the matter is relatively minor. But, directly against China and with world-ending repercussions? No way.

Maybe. But maybe not. Stranger things have happened in history, and they really have. I'm going to go out on a limb here with some wildly uninformed speculation, but the people running the show in the PRC aren't normies. They are people that have clawed their way to the top of a ruthless pyramid of power. Or were raised from birth by people who clawed their way to the top. Either way, they're at the top for a reason. Look at China's communist history, and you'll see a fairly consistent, running theme of systemic paranoia -- sometimes thinly-veiled, sometimes outright -- that occasionally spirals into non-trivial political purges. History is full of examples of plot twists even more bizarre-sounding than this, and I am far less certain than you are that the perceived perpetrator(s) of such a targeted depopulation event would be so clear cut to the Politburo.

All that aside and more importantly, after one really bad crop failure, the PRC will have more existential problems on its plate than who gets the blame.

If there was a huge famine in China then the US (and the whole world) would feel obliged to pour enormous resources in to help mitigate the effects.

> You can't launch your nuclear arsenal and then look deadpan at the camera and shrug your shoulders

https://media.giphy.com/media/l4FGuhL4U2WyjdkaY/giphy.gif

Corporations already have significant control over agriculture, especially seeds.

How is this a good idea? How do you know the insects you make won't get out and kill you and your whole army?

I mean, imagine Dr. Strangelove, but with bugs instead of bombs.

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Is this news? Newsweek seems to have gone totally down the bog.

Link to the Science editorial:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/crop-protecting-insec...

this is the beginning of the end

Before I saw the article, I was thinking they were going to talk about SHRIMP[0] (SHort-Range Independent Microrobotic Platforms)

It's the upcoming DARPA Challenge for design improvements in insect-scale robotics. This includes miniature actuators, efficient and extremely compact high voltage DC-to-DC power converters to drive those small actuators with large forces, denser batteries, then putting everything together in autonomous systems.

[0] https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/SHRIMP_Proposers_Day_DIST_...

I kind of developed a hunch that maybe the Zika outbreak might've been cooked up in some lab in Siberia or Mongolia, and got dumped into South America as a warning shot. But honestly, who knows?

Everything feels like the rumblings of full-spectrum warfare these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_dominance

Humans literally are not good enough at biochemistry to have created Zika.

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