From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Aug 19 2002 - 08:07:58 MDT
On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Brian Atkins wrote:
> So the real issue is how does government become able to do perfect
> prediction of threats?
By having smart people brainstorm about how they would conduct attacks.
We have more smart people than non-state terrorist groups do.
I think the terrorists have been getting their ideas from us
so we may want to be somewhat more careful of what we discuss
in public.
> For jetliners, no. For suitcase nukes, maybe no, although I still haven't
> heard a complete theory of interlacing defenses that will prevent them.
You may never completely prevent them. But you should be able to reduce
the probability of their occurrence. Perhaps enough that we get to
the point where technology advancement uplifts potential terrorists
sufficently that terrorism doesn't seem like such a good career choice.
The difficult part will be developing a coherent international framework
for what to do about states, with more resources than terrorists, that
conduct programs aimed at behaving belligerantly.
> For designer biowarfare, nanotech, etc. YES. And the defenses for those
> have to be in place and able to deal with/anticipate everything that
> will get thrown at them before it happens.
General purpose anti-bioweapons are being developed now based on natural
bioweapons (after all the green goo has been operating for a very long
time). Actually there are some fairly general nanodefenses that are
quite capable of dealing with a wide array of possible "nanoweapons",
e.g. Microbiovores, the forthcoming Chromalocyte (for general purpose
chromosome replacement therapy), and the Vasculoid organ system).
And then of course, heat and radiation are perfectly good defenses
at the macroscale for bio/nano-bugs as well as larger nanotech enabled
weapons.
Robert
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