Recipe for Destruction
By RAY KURZWEIL and BILL JOY
Published: October 17, 2005
Snipped for fair use, read the whole thing at the link
AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.
This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.
First, it would be easier to create and release this highly destructive virus from the genetic data than it would be to build and detonate an atomic bomb given only its design, as you don't need rare raw materials like plutonium or enriched uranium. Synthesizing the virus from scratch would be difficult, but far from impossible. An easier approach would be to modify a conventional flu virus with the eight unique and now published genes of the 1918 killer virus
Gee, it's not as if there's anyone out there who might use this information to cook up a deadly virus in the name of Allen, or anything. It is small consolation to think that the Kerry administration would be handing out free Bubonic Plague samples as well.
Posted by: Ernest Brown ||
10/17/2005 09:35 ||
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If they're planning to reconstruct a virus from a genome template, let's hire them. The US probably won't be able to do that for another 20-50 years without their help.
#2
I would add: Why would they spend the money? The typical terrorist attack is done as cheaply as possible. That allows for more attacks to be planned and funded. Cheap, and simpler attacks also mean fewer points of potential failure. All Tim McVeigh had to worry about was if the timer would work or not. A viral terrorist has multiple points of failure to overcome, not the least of which is not dying by your own product. Chemical attacks and dirty bombs are inexpensive, and plain old explosives even more so.
#3
Mortality from the Spanish flu was 3%. Reason it was so deadly was because it struck half the world population. But nowadays mortality would be a lot less than 3% just from better diagnostic and life support and that before we factor antivirals who didn't exist in 1918.
#4
JFM: Not so, on several points. First of all, the demographics are heavily skewed towards peasants with absolutely no modern health care. Perhaps 3-4 billion.
Second, in 1918, the American medical community were very familiar with epidemics. They had good antiseptics, autoclaves, surgical masks and rubber gloves, specialist hospitals for certain diseases, and took many reasonable precautions that saved lives.
The big difference today is that the general public is far more medically educated. It also has access to tremendous information resources, and can receive information quickly from the government.
As far as antivirals go, only one is left that the disease hasn't shown considerable resistance to. The one they had been betting on, Tamiflu, may require 30 times its expected dose to have any effect.
The day after Iraqis voted on their constitution I passed a knot of protesters standing on three corners of a wide suburban interchange. The signs had peace symbols, and the text encouraged all to honk if we wanted peace. There was little honking. Death and fire seem to the desires of most of the minivan demographic, it seems.
I thought it was an odd thing to do, really â isnât the move towards representative democracy in the Arab world a good thing? Not according to one Fark headline submitter: Low voter turnout, intimidation of minorities, corrupt candidates. We have exported American democracy to Iraq
Thereâs a thread I didnât feel the need to read. Hipwaders at the cleaners. . . .
Go read the rest of it.
Posted by: Mike ||
10/17/2005 06:11 ||
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Fred, forgive me, I was too quick on the "send" button; please move to "Opinion -- Fifth Column."
Posted by: Mike ||
10/17/2005 6:13 Comments ||
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The adoption of a weak Iraqi federal constitution is likely to unleash an ethnic and sectarian crisis across the region
In the great settlement that followed the first world war and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, one of the Middle East's largest ethnic groups, the Kurds, were the main losers. They had been promised their own state, but, thanks to Kemal Ataturk's nationalist rebellion and abandonment of the project by the western powers, they ended up as repressed minorities in the four countries - Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria - among which their vast domains were divided.
The Kurds are set to become the greatest beneficiary of whatever new order emerges from the current western intervention in the region's affairs. This hasn't reached the scale of the earlier intervention, being mainly confined to Iraq, but, in its expanding - and unplanned - ramifications, it could well become comparable to the earlier one. After all, its chief architects, the Bush administration's pro-Israeli, neoconservative hawks, with their grandiose ideas of "creative chaos" and "regime change", always saw Iraq as the springboard of an enterprise that had to be regionwide to succeed. In this respect, if no other, they are in unison with the inhabitants of the Middle East themselves, for whom it is virtually axiomatic that what happens in Iraq profoundly affects everyone else.
At all stages in the Iraqi drama, Arab pundits and politicians have dwelt apprehensively on these wider implications. And they are doing so now with the new Iraqi constitution, which looks like it will be approved after Saturday's referendum. This is the latest and possibly the most fateful stage, enshrining as it does, under the general heading of "federation", a whole new concept of statehood and identity.
The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, the secret Anglo-French understanding that chiefly shaped the postwar settlement, drew arbitrary, colonial-style frontiers across pre-existing ethnic, sectarian, tribal or commercial links and grossly affronted the emergent, essentially Sunni-dominated pan-Arab nationalism and aspiration to unity that came with liberation from Ottoman rule. Eighty years on, Iraq now portends yet another layer of divisions that will either supplement existing ones or, some of them being undoubtedly more "natural" than the old ones, erase them altogether.
In this constitution, Iraqi Kurds don't get the state that 98% of them want, according to a recent referendum, but they do get gains - vast legislative powers, control of their own militia and authority over discoveries of oil - which in effect consecrate the quasi-independence they have enjoyed since western "humanitarian" intervention on their behalf in the 1991 Gulf war and which Kurds regard as a way station towards the real thing. The Iraqi republic is to be "independent, sovereign, federal, democratic and parliamentary"; but one thing, explicitly, it is no longer, is "Arab". For that, says its Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, would be to deny the right of Kurdish citizens to look to membership of a greater Kurdish nation, just as its Arab citizens look to the greater Arab one. Yet more shocking, and potentially rending, to Sunni Arabs everywhere, than this ethnic separatism is the new, intra-Arab, sectarian one. Not only have the Shia established political ascendancy in a single Arab country for the first time in centuries but they are doing so, like the Kurds, in the context of a constitutionally prescribed autonomy which, if Shia leaders such as Abdul Aziz Hakim mean what they say, will incorporate central and southern Iraq, more than half the country's population and the bulk of its natural assets.
The adoption of a federal formula is seen by the Arab world not as a remedy for Iraq's inherent divisiveness, but, in conditions of rising intercommunal tensions and violence, as a stimulus to it. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the veteran Saudi foreign minister and voice of the Sunni Arab establishment, told Americans that it is "part of a dynamic pushing the Iraqi people away from each other. If you allow for this - for a civil war to happen between Shias and Sunnis - Iraq is finished forever. It will be dismembered." What makes it more alarming is that, unlike the Kurds, Iraqi Shias, however ambivalently they feel about it, enjoy the strong support of a powerful neighbour. Now, under its new president, in something of a neo-Khomeinist revivalist mode, Iran is clearly accumulating all the Shia-based geopolitical assets it can, from Iraq to south Lebanon, in preparation for the grand showdown that threatens between it and the US.
Arabs have long warned of the "Lebanonisation" of Iraq, automatically mindful of the fact that virtually every western-created state in the eastern Arab world contains the latent ethnic or sectarian tensions that produced that archetype of Arab civil war. But whereas, in concert with the US, the Arabs finally managed to put out the Lebanese fire before it spread, their prospects of achieving the same amid the violence in Iraq are slight indeed. The inter-Arab state system - and its chief institution, the Arab League - has long been incapable of concerted action against what, like Iraq, are perceived as threats to the Arab "nation". Now the system itself is threatened by the growth of non-state activities, the cross-border traffic in extreme Islamist ideology - along with the jihadists and suicide bombers who act on it - or ethnic and sectarian solidarities of the kind that threaten to tear Iraq apart.
Syria, once the nub of the Sykes-Picot carve-up, is again in the frontline, alone among Arab states to be exposed to the Iraqi contagion in both its Kurdish and Shia dimensions. Thanks to the sudden, self-inflicted weakness of Iraqi Ba'athist rule, it was Iraqi Kurds who, in 1991, achieved the first great, contemporary breakthrough in the Kurdish struggle for self-determination. Syrian Kurds now sense similar weakness in their own, deeply troubled Ba'athist regime. If it collapses amid generalised chaos, many will push for secession and amalgamation with their brethren in north Iraq.
On the Shia front, if sectarian identity is to become the organising principle of Arab polities, Syria is the most vulnerable to the convulsions that it will unleash. A small minority, the Alawites, has in effect run the country for more than 40 years. It is a predominantly Sunni society, which, historically, represents an even greater anomaly than the Sunni minority rule, also in Ba'athist guise, that the majority Shias and Kurds dispensed with in Iraq. A Sunni majority restoration will become unstoppable if, with the eventual break-up of Iraq, its disempowered Sunnis turn to Syria, of which, but for Sykes-Picot, a great many would long have been citizens anyway.
In the next most vulnerable region, the Gulf, historically persecuted Shia minorities (or majority in Bahrain), inspired by the triumph of their co-religionists in Iraq, will press their claims for equality with new vigour. But nervous Sunni regimes will be loath to cede too much, not least in Saudi Arabia where, like their terrorist alter ego in Iraq, the al-Qaida boss Abdul Musab al-Zarqawi, the more hidebound of the Wahhabi religious hierarchy still regard Shia Muslims as no better than heretics.
Posted by: DanNY ||
10/17/2005 20:27 ||
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If the Arab world really wants an insight into what is going on in Iraq, in all seriousness they should read The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers.
That parallels are impressive, and while not exact are clearly analogous to Iraq today. In the US, likewise, the federalist-anti-federalist debate continued on long after the constitution was signed. And though the Articles of Confederation were drafted, and were not a bad document, by then the value of Anti-Federalism had asserted itself as effective government.
But there were years of bitter wrangling between the two sides. Even the Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr duel has its roots in the argument.
The willingness of the Shiites and the Kurds to haggle is a devastatingly clever maneuver, however. For the Sunnis to miss out on an opportunity for debate, argument, and haggle is as unnatural as to insist on a fixed price in the bazaar. It's just not cricket.
The debate and haggle can also be guaranteed to have a very different character, as the newly elected representative parliment will far more accurately represent the views of their constituents.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
