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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

I've been worrying about this for years.

What's next is micro-chemical attacks. Drones that can cloud an individual or small group of people. They'll think it was just dust or something, the thing zips off into the sky, and the linings of their lungs starts dissolving and they die.

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Why does that make more sense than a bomb that just straight up kills a dude? Chemical agents are difficult and dangerous to synthesize, but you can get explosives anywhere there's a mining industry.

Chemical weapons require some specialized knowledge but within that field it is not an impossible task. It is mostly the acquisition of the raw materials.

If you can do a drug synthesis you could probably synthesize a chemical weapon.

With chemical weapons, a tiny palm-sized drone can lift a deadly payload. And it is not hard to assemble a (very) large fleet of cheap micro-drones, so yeah.

Especially since it is much easier to protect yourself against gas than it is to defend yourself against high explosives. Gas masks are cheap, explosives requires armored vehicles.

Nerve agents can kill you even with a gas mask. They absorb right through your skin.

That's still much easier to defend against than high explosives, and probably much harder to procure. If narco-terrorists can get blocks of C4 and cheap drones, why bother with the extra steps and international attention that a nerve agent would get you?

Nerve agents could be attached to much smaller delivery platforms. If you could build a drone the size of a mosquito you could use it to deliver a tiny, fatal dose of nerve agent to your target. No chemical explosive could match that level of miniaturization.

It may be sci fi at this point but it seems entirely possible to me. After all, mosquitoes exist and their behaviour is quite sophisticated. They’re able to locate mammals by detecting our breath, bite us to steal some blood, then fly away their eggs.

Even if we grant the possibility, which is a real courtesy, that still would be a lot more expensive than a Mavic with a Tupperware bomb. And for what? Dead is dead.

It may be expensive to develop but it need not be expensive to produce. Look at all of the technologies and products enabled by computers.

Sure, it cost a fortune to develop computers from nothing and miniaturize them to the scale we have today. But now anyone can grab a cheap RPi off the shelf and use it to build something that would’ve been amazingly difficult to do 50 years ago.

If we manage to develop drones and robots to the point where they’re mosquito sized, we could find a million uses for them. They could become so cheap weed buy them by the thousands and program them for whatever tasks we want. And of course they could be larger as well; wasp sized rather than mosquito.

I’m not expecting the cartels to develop this technology, of course. But I can envision how they’d use it and it’s pretty terrifying.

And worse still, using a nerve agent would draw a lot of unpleasant international attention. Why risk pissing off your large northern neighbor when they’ve been trained to ignore more normal types of violence you commit every day?

Look at this forum, the delivery of explosives via drone is consider an interesting novelty, not something that any other country really should do something about. Narco-terrorism is the norm in that part of the world, and we’re clearly used to it.

The first time a cartel uses an honest to god weapon of mass destruction, the response would be very different, with some serious calls for America to invade and sort the issue out itself. While it’s far from obvious if America would (or should) do that, why risk it when they’ll just totally ignore everything else?

Shouldn't these drones be pretty easy to signal jam? I mean cartels don't really care about the law anyways.

Only if you see them coming; if you have to run the jammer at all times, that's just a homing beacon for drones.

You can run decoy ones as well. I think we’ll see a drone defense industry pop up soon

It exists, mostly defense contractors though.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/5/18169215/london-heathrow-g...

Disclosure: I work for a company in this field.

They are easy to jam if you don't mind also not having GPS, Wifi and 3G/4G/5G service. You can do selective jamming but this is much more sophisticated

More sophisticated actors can fly on vision alone.

Disclosure: I also work for a company in this field.

at some point they’ll be autonomous, running off of IMUs and SLAM. there won’t be anything to jam.

Russia attempted to kill a dissenter in England with a toxic agent and all of Europe went up in arms. Presidents and prime ministers put out condemnations. Public opinion sharply turned against Russia.

The backlash to what you're suggesting would be insane if it actually happened.

How does this stop the next one? It’s not the first time Russia has done this — and they have done it in European countries.

Sure but that tends to work against States. Backlash against non-State groups like the PLO and IRA seems less effectual.

> agent and all of Europe went up in arms.

Not arms as in weapons, arms as in failing their arms about.

Fat lot of good that'll do to prevent the next incident.

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