Nanotechnology and International Security
by
Mark
Avrum Gubrud
Center for
Superconductivity Research
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-4111
gubrud@squid.umd.edu
This is a draft paper
for a talk at the
Fifth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
This paper is available
on the web at
http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Papers/Gubrud/index.html
Updated versions and additional material available at
http://squid.umd.edu/~gubrud/
Abstract
Recent U.S. planning and policy documents foretell "how
wars will be fought in the future," and warn of new or
re-emergent "global peer competitors" in the 2005-2025
time frame. It is generally appreciated that this period will be
characterized by rapid progress in many areas of technology.
However, assembler-based nanotechnology and artificial general
intelligence have implications far beyond the Pentagon's current
vision of a "revolution in military affairs."
Whereas the perfection of nuclear explosives established a
strategic stalemate, advanced molecular manufacturing based on
self-replicating systems, or any military production system fully
automated by advanced artificial intelligence, would lead to
instability in a confrontation between rough equals. Rivals would
feel pressured to preempt, if possible, in initiating a
full-scale military buildup, and certainly not to be caught
behind. As the rearmament reached high levels, close contact
between forces at sea and in space would give an advantage to the
first to strike.
The greatest danger coincides with the emergence of these
powerful technologies: A quickening succession of
"revolutions" may spark a new arms race involving a
number of potential competitors. Older systems, including nuclear
weapons, would become vulnerable to novel forms of attack or
neutralization. Rapidly evolving, untested, secret, and even
"virtual" arsenals would undermine confidence in the
ability to retaliate or resist aggression. Warning and decision
times would shrink. Covert infiltration of intelligence and
sabotage devices would blur the distinction between confrontation
and war. Overt deployment of ultramodern weapons, perhaps on a
massive scale, would alarm technological laggards. Actual and
perceived power balances would shift dramatically and abruptly.
Accompanied by economic upheaval, general uncertainty and
disputes over the future of major resources and of humanity
itself, such a runaway crisis would likely erupt into large-scale
rearmament and warfare well before another technological plateau
was reached.
International regimes combining arms control, verification and
transparency, collective security and limited military
capabilities, can be proposed in order to maintain stability.
However, these would require unprecedented levels of cooperation
and restraint, and would be prone to collapse if nations persist
in challenging each other with threats of force.
If we believe that assemblers are feasible, perhaps the most
important implication is this: Ultimately, we will need an
integrated international security system. For the present,
failure to consider alternatives to unilateral "peace
through strength" puts us on a course toward the next world
war.
Introduction: the setting
Among the world's leading industrial and military powers,
essentially no current official thinking envisions, within the
near future, any alternative to a world system in which the
ability to bring violent force to bear in international conflicts
[1] remains a key component of national
power, and in which sovereign states still feel compelled to
deploy independent means of countering credible threats to their
security and interests.
Indeed, recent United States military planning and policy
documents enthusiastically attempt to envision "how wars
will be fought in the future," and propose an open-ended
pursuit of military technological superiority in order to
maintain global hegemony (Shalikashvili 1996). While U.S.
diplomatic policy and doctrine projects the image of a world
almost devoid of serious potential threats (apart from a short
list of "rogue states," along with criminals,
terrorists, small-time warlords and social disorder), the United
States military has begun to look forward to the possible
emergence or re-emergence of one or more "global peer
competitors" who could challenge the U.S. in its assumed
role as "the sole remaining superpower" sometime in the
not-too-distant future (Cohen 1997).
Overview: the spectre
The possibility that assembler-based molecular nanotechnology
(Drexler 1986, 1992) and advanced artificial general intelligence
may be developed within the first few decades of the 21st century
presages a potential for disruption and chaos in the world
system. The key areas of concern are:
- The prospect of revolutionary advances in military
capabilities will stimulate competition to develop and
apply the new technologies toward war preparations, as
falling behind would imply an intolerable security risk.
Indeed, it is plausible that a nation which gained a
sufficient lead in molecular nanotechnology would at some
point be in a position to simply disarm any potential
competitors.
- If two or more technologically advanced nations or blocs
exist in de facto confrontation, regardless of political
differences or other substantial conflicts of interest,
then competition to apply the advanced technologies could
segue directly into an uncontrolled arms race —
unless restraints have been put in place before the new
technologies can be applied.
- A race to develop early military applications of
molecular manufacturing could yield sudden breakthroughs,
leading to the abrupt emergence of new and unfamiliar
threats, and provoking political and military reactions
which further reinforce a cycle of competition and
confrontation.
- With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both
raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by
decentralized production for local consumption, using
locally available materials. The decline of international
trade will undermine a powerful source of common
interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace
skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based
on wage labor, transnational capitalism and global
markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a
golden age is possible, but we don't know how to organize
one. As global capitalism retreats, it will leave behind
a world dominated by politics, and possibly feudal
concentrations of wealth and power. Economic insecurity,
and fears for the material and moral future of humankind
may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate
national leaders.
- With almost two hundred sovereign nations, each
struggling to create a new economic and social order,
perhaps the most predictable outcome is chaos: shifting
alignments, displaced populations, power struggles,
ethnic conflicts inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts,
land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will
be more than ever dependent on the major powers for
access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable to
sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to
outright domination. Competition among the leading
technological powers for the political loyalty of clients
might imply reversion to some form of nationalistic
imperialism.
- Competition for control of newly-exploitable resources on
Earth and in space may generate dissension and hostility
even between democracies, erstwhile friends and allies,
while providing an overt rationale for deploying
competitive military forces.
- If nuclear weapons remain limited in number, advanced
nanotechnology could facilitate extensive civil defense
construction, and provide active defense and counterforce
weapons, undermining the nuclear "balance of
terror" and creating the appearance of a possibility
of victory in a war between major powers.
- From a purely military perspective, in the absence of a
"balance of terror," a confrontation between
more or less equally advanced terrestrial nanotechnology
powers could be unstable to preemption — in both of
the traditional senses:
- Arms race instability. A large imbalance
in deployed hardware could allow one side to
strike with impunity, and even a few-to-one
imbalance could be enough to provide assurance of
victory. If military production is based on a
self-replicating capital base with a short
generation time, the danger of falling behind on
an exponential curve, or the opportunity to
trump, would create unprecedentedly strong
pressures to initiate or join and to maintain or
gain the lead in a quantitative arms race.
Unprecedentedly large masses of military hardware
could be produced in an unprecedentedly short
time.
- First strike instability. Even if two
sides are evenly matched, high levels of deployed
armaments may be militarily unstable, in that a
surprise attack could perhaps decimate the
opposing force before it could respond. This is
especially likely in co-occupied environments,
i.e. space, the oceans, and along land lines of
confrontation. Forces based in protected areas
may remain survivable, but serious competitors
would not cede vast stretches of "no man's
land" to enemy control in advance of a
fight, and whoever strikes first in the
co-occupied environments may gain an irreversible
advantage. The greater the density of
interpenetrating forces, the shorter the strike
time. Thus a crisis becomes progressively less
stable as a buildup proceeds.
A perfect balance of technical and material resources is
unrealistic in any case, which leads to a new type of
strategic instability:
- Early advantage instability. If one has an early
lead in a replicator-based crisis arms buildup, the fact
that a competitor may have somewhat faster replicators or
superior weaponry, or may have access to a larger primary
resource base, provides another strong stimulus to an
early first strike. Moreover, it is unlikely that one
actually knows the performance of an enemy's weapons or
production base, particularly after a long peace.
Thus, a runaway nanotechnic arms race may be a race to
nowhere; there may be no further island of stable military
balance out there, even if we could manage to avoid war along
the way.
- A very rapid pace of technological change destabilizes
the political-military balance. Revolutionary new types
of weaponry, fear of what a competitor may be doing in
secret, tense nerves and worst-case analyses, the
complexity of technical issues, the unfamiliarity of new
circumstances and resistance to the demands they make,
may overwhelm the cumbersome processes of diplomacy and
arms control, or even of intelligence gathering and
assessment, formulation of measured responses and
establishment of political consensus behind them. A
runaway military technological revolution must at some
point escape the grasp of even wise decisionmakers.
- An increase of nuclear arsenals, deployment in more
secure, covert basing modes, and development of new
delivery systems designed to penetrate defenses, would
prolong the reign of nuclear deterrence and postpone the
day of possible vulnerability to nanotechnic aggression.
Thus a nuclear power or potential nuclear power,
especially one that was behind in the technology race,
might want to retain its nuclear options or even expand
its nuclear arsenal. Advanced nanotechnology should also
facilitate a possible nuclear rearmament to levels
manyfold higher than those of the Cold War. Thus it is
possible that the result of a nanotechnic arms race will
be rampant nuclear proliferation and the expansion of
major nuclear arsenals to warhead counts in the hundred
thousands or millions — A new "balance of
terror," but note that a balance is not necessarily
stable.
Cool new weapons
The possible applications of nanotechnology to advanced
weaponry are fertile ground for fantasy. It is obvious that
three-dimensional assembly of nanostructures in bulk can yield
much better versions of most conventional (nonnuclear) weapons;
e.g., guns can be lighter, carry more ammunition, fire
self-guided bullets, incorporate multispectral gunsights or even
fire themselves when an enemy is detected. Science fiction
writers can and do have a lot of fun imagining such things.
Certainly, nanotechnology offers many colorful possibilities
for creative mass murder. For example, for some reason one of the
most frequent flights of fancy is the programmable genocide germ
that replicates freely and kills people who have certain DNA
patterns. Such a weapon is possible, but it is dangerous to its
creators, probably easy to defend against, and is of no use in
attacking and overcoming a nanotechnic foe who doesn't depend on
people to run his war machine anyway.
It is easy to kill. What is hard is to kill with impunity when
your enemy is well armed and numerous. War is a contest to
suppress your enemy's capabilities before he can suppress yours.
This doesn't leave much room for fancy swordplay or gothic
revenge scenarios in serious combat. An actual nanotechnic war,
if one ever occurs, is likely to be inhumanly fast and enormously
destructive. Clever tactics and nifty gadgets are irrelevant if
your enemy can simply blow you up.
Talking about a revolution
Of course, as the US and its allies demonstrated in 1991, if
you enjoy technological and numerical superiority, you can have a
one-sided "turkey shoot." Pentagon propaganda during
and after the Kuwait war focused on a new generation of weaponry
that had been demonstrated under nearly ideal conditions.
Precision-guided long-range munitions, night vision and advanced
sensors, satellite reconnaissance, stealth aircraft,
high-mobility, rapid-fire tanks, flexible maneuver tactics,
computerization of intelligence and logistics, were said to
constitute a "revolution in military affairs" that
could guarantee swift victories with minimal losses. What was
overlooked was that we were fighting a third-world country.
Heavily armed, but still outnumbered, with technology that was a
generation behind, and with few indigenous resources and no
allies to call upon, Iraq was no model of a "peer
competitor," and the US victory there provides no clue as to
the result if the same high-tech arsenal were to confront a
roughly equally-constituted force.
Pentagon visionaries paint a picture of future battlefields in
which the US military seems to possess unrivaled technological
omnipotence. For example, Joint Vision 2010, a sketchy
1996 pamphlet widely touted as outlining a futuristic doctrine,
speaks of "...dominant maneuver, precision engagement, full
dimensional protection, and focused logistics... Full Spectrum
Dominance... dominant battlespace awareness... information
superiority... [which] will enable us to dominate the full range
of military operations... into the highest intensity
conflict." The assumption of unilateral advantage seems to
be a common fallacy afflicting those who fantasize about the uses
of future technology in warfare (Franklin 1988). Your fantasy
superweapons will work without a hitch, the enemy will behave as
expected, he will not attack you at your weakest point, will not
take simple measures to defend himself, and won't be able to
match your technology. 1980s cartoons of Soviet missiles rising
gracefully into the path of American interceptors, as though
nuclear war would be a friendly game of catch, provide the most
lurid example in recent memory, but anyone who assumes that
America can remain the global hegemon by staying ahead in the
technology race makes essentially the same mistake.
The current world situation feeds this illusion. Coming out of
a half-century of global confrontation, the post-Cold War United
States has inherited a military establishment whose power dwarfs
that of any potential rival. While Russia has been forced to
slash military spending, the United States continues to spend
nearly as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.
No other nation is eager to take such a burden upon itself.
Resistance to global capitalism has evaporated; everywhere the
powerful and the ambitious are interested first in making money.
Most nations seem content to follow the US lead on intervention
in places like Bosnia and Central Africa. Ironically, one of the
few remaining sources of dissension with American leadership is
the US insistence on drastic measures to isolate the few states
it considers as "rogues," a policy that seems to be
driven in part by the need to identify enemies worthy of a huge
military budget (Klare 1995).
But it is chiefly the cost, as well as the lack of motivation,
that keeps other nations complaining about the US running out
ahead, instead of taking up the challenge to race. In the
industrial technology base which underlies military technological
capability, the US has at most a few-year lead over its nearest
rivals, and even that is doubtful. Other countries may not wish
to match American spending, but they are still very unlikely to
freeze their arsenals indefinitely while the United States
continues to modernize. Surely, if relatively slowly, they will
replace and upgrade with current technology.
Revolution 2
With the advent of nanotechnology, the qualitative advances in
weapons technology will be enormous and compelling; no country
will want to maintain armies that are effectively impotent
against a potential threat. Molecular manufacturing based on
self-replicating systems, and superautomation by artificial
intelligence, will also profoundly alter the issue of cost. A
nation's military potential will depend first on its position in
the technology race. A second factor will be its natural resource
base, but most nations have access to sufficient natural
resources to support an arsenal many times larger than any which
has ever existed on Earth.
Currently the development of nanoelectronics and
nanofabrication, biotechnology, supramolecular chemistry, and
other steps toward molecular nanotechnology is a worldwide
academic and industrial enterprise. No country can be said to
have a lead in the race to develop assemblers, because there
isn't any race and no one is even close. But when and if it
becomes clear that something like molecular manufacturing based
on self-replicating assemblers lies within reach of, say, a
five-year effort, it is likely that a race will begin. Industry
will be heavily involved, but national efforts will be stimulated
and coordinated by government and military initiatives. The
leading competitors will be those with the greatest concentration
of advanced technology: the United States, Japan and Europe.
However, the race will also be joined by countries such as
Russia, China, India, Israel, and others that have a strong
technology base, a lot of resources, or both.
A race to be the first to develop and apply assemblers could
be expensive. Such a project could probably absorb the efforts of
as many teams of designers, experimenters and theorists as could
be mustered. Practical molecular manufacturing systems will be
enormously complicated, compared with the modest accomplishments
of contemporary molecular engineering. Although there is good
reason to believe that our capabilities are expanding rapidly
enough to be able to meet this task within a few decades, it
would be foolish to think that the task is one that can be
accomplished by a small team in the near term. A serious, focused
effort to develop molecular nanotechnology would be funded at the
multi-billion dollar level, and would expand to a major industry
in the race to develop applications.
The cost of such an effort is probably a steep function of its
earliness; thus it would cost, say, the United States, quite a
large amount to gain an advantage of a few years over its closest
rivals. If the potential significance of molecular manufacturing
were well understood, a very large budget for its development
would perhaps be warranted. But in the absence of a compelling
threat, such as motivated the US atom-bomb project in its early
stages, it is likely that skepticism will rule the day, and so
nanotechnology research will have to prove its worth by providing
immediate payoffs. The size of the research effort will be tied
to the size of the industry it generates. That industry is likely
to grow up simultaneously in several countries of the world.
Another corollary of the steep cost function is that even
countries that cannot afford a "Manhattan Project" may
not be too far behind the leading powers in crossing the
threshold of molecular manufacturing.
Thus if the United States, or another nation, decides to pull
out all the stops and beat the rest of the world to advanced
nanotechnology, and is successful in that effort, it will have at
most a few years to decide whether to use its advantage to impose
a world order that prevents the rise of a competitor, or to face
the prospect of a nanotechnic confrontation.
However, it seems unlikely that any nation will ever gain such
a decisive lead. Nuclear weapons will remain a powerful deterrent
until nanosystems have reached a very refined state of
development, and even then it is doubtful whether politicians
would have the nerve to risk an attack on a large nuclear
arsenal. Even the thought of initiating a non-nuclear war with a
nuclear-disarmed but large and resourceful power, in the absence
of any immediate provocation, would probably be anathema to
decisionmakers in a democratic state. In the mean time, the
potential targets will be hurrying to catch up.
It is most reasonable to expect the more or less simultaneous
emergence of advanced nanotechnology in a number of industrial
and potential military competitors, and its more or less
simultaneous application by several states to military systems
and to their manufacture. Even if one nation gains an early lead,
it seems very likely that, under the assumption of peaceful armed
coexistence, there would soon emerge a world in which several
sovereign states or blocs possessed a molecular manufacturing
capability.
A world exploded
With the emergence of molecular manufacturing, and still more
with advanced artificial intelligence, the world economy will
experience profound upheavals. International trade in both raw
materials and finished goods will be progressively replaced by
decentralized production for local consumption, using locally
available materials. Wage labor, transnational capitalism and
global markets will evaporate as the organizing principles of the
world system. What will replace them? We don't know.
Capitalist industry has urbanized populations, concentrated
land ownership, and generated enormous inequalities in wealth and
power. The nanotechnic revolution would seem likely to freeze
these conditions in place, leaving the urban populations
stranded, without work and without a dynamic economy offering
hope of upward mobility.
How will the welfare of former wage-earners be organized? What
visions of the future will nations strive for? In democratic
countries, assuming democracy is not undermined by inequality,
the answers will be reached through mass politics. However,
economic insecurity, and fears for the material and moral future
of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogues. Undemocratic
states, or feudal concentrations of wealth in the hands of
technoindustrialists, suggest grimmer possibilities: mass
deportations, genocide, or ironhanded paternalism toward
"surplus" populations, and domination by cliques of
unbalanced egomaniacs vying for absolute power.
With almost two hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to
create a new economic and social order, perhaps the most
predictable outcome is chaos: shifting alignments, displaced
populations, power struggles, ethnic conflicts inflamed by
demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Chaos in
less-developed and smaller countries that have traditionally
relied on the value of their labor or raw materials on the world
market will provide opportunities for exploitation by the leading
powers. Countries that cannot develop advanced technology
indigenously, and that face the loss of their role in the global
economy, will be more than ever dependent on more advanced
nations for access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable
to sophisticated forms of control or subversion. If the decision
to provide technology is a political one, the price could be
political as well. Ironically, then, the successor to global
capitalism could be a partial reversion to nationalistic
imperialism, as major powers compete for the loyalty of clients
in the former "third world."
Probably the most compelling and intractable source of tension
between the leading technological powers will be competition for
control of newly-exploitable resources on Earth and in space.
Molecular manufacturing will, within a few years of its
inception, make possible large-scale resource extraction and-or
construction in the oceans, in space, and in inhospitable
environments such as Antarctica. The decline of world trade will
remove a powerful source of common interest in a stable world
order, precisely at the same time that populations idled from
productive work will be asking what they have to look forward to
in the future, and precisely at the time that large-scale
expansion into disputable territory becomes possible. Some
nations will want equitable division of the "common heritage
of mankind," others will argue that it's first-come
first-served, and may stake their claims in military hardware.
This is the one issue most likely to generate serious dissension
and hostility even between democracies, erstwhile friends and
allies, while providing an overt rationale for deploying
competitive military forces.
Perhaps it will all turn out just fine; a harmonious, golden
age of plenty would seem to be possible. But we don't know how to
organize one. If genocidal dictatorships seem an extreme
possibility, universal brotherhood, generosity and tolerance
seems equally difficult to arrange. Global capitalism, in its
twilight, may serve to diffuse technology, even nanotechnology,
worldwide, and underdeveloped countries may find their economic
independence in industries such as tourism and hand-made goods.
Advanced countries may find a way to share wealth and power
internally, and avoid conflicts with one another. But it hardly
seems likely that the transition will be smooth.
A world in arms
If economic upheaval and the creation of a new social order
poses a challenge to democratic politics even in the most
advanced nations, the potential for interstate conflict still
presents the greatest danger of the nanotechnic revolution. The
two arenas cannot be isolated, since domestic chaos can lead to
the rise of intemperate leadership, and global chaos can lead to
conflicts with other nations.
Interstate conflicts, confrontations and rivalries have a life
of their own. Military confrontation can be dynamically stable or
unstable simply with regard to possible military moves:
rearmament, mobilization, readiness, forward deployment,
preemptive seizure of territory, or full-scale attack. Military
threats interact with political processes in cycles that can be
escalatory or deescalatory. A country that is completely at the
mercy of a stronger power may seek accomodation when threatened,
yet the escalation of military threat generally leads to more
hostile attitudes when the two sides are more or less equally
matched, even when the cost of a war would be unacceptably high
to both.
The history of the Cold War provides ample evidence of both
sides of this paradox. It also shows that, in spite of intense
rivalry, hostility, and covert warfare, nuclear confronters will
be deterred from open combat and will eventually seek detente
when both are completely at the mercy of a stronger power —
nuclear weapons. But finally, the many crises of the Cold War,
particularly the 1962 crisis, and the long human history of
disastrous wars blundered into by combinations of accident,
misunderstanding, miscalculation and hubris, provides ample
warning that holocaust is possible. On the assumption of
stochasticity, given enough time and circumstances, global
holocaust is a likely eventuality, as long as nations confront
each other with arms and with threats.
Even in the total absence of political conflict or ill-will,
merely that fact that sovereign states maintain separate armed
forces under separate command, within reach of each other and
able to attack each other, contains the germ of a possible
confrontation, arms race, and war. With the advent of molecular
manufacturing, nations that possess the technology will be able
to greatly increase the size and quality of their arsenals in a
short period of time. Unless they are controlled from doing so
under some system of international agreement, it is very likely
that they will begin to build up more credible armed forces,
perhaps slowly and cautiously at first — but others will
note the development and respond with similar increases. Soon the
nanotechnic powers can be doubling and redoubling the size of the
threats they pose to non-nanotechnic neighbors while imposing
very low costs on themselves. Given the very large potential for
expansion of arsenals by the use of a self-replicating
manufacturing base, nanotechnic powers which do not engage in a
very dramatic buildup will be artificially restraining
themselves. It seems very unlikely that a large (orders of
magnitude) gap between potential (at low-cost) and actual
military production will be sustained for long.
No doubt the potential for disaster will be well foreseen, but
so was the potential for nuclear disaster, and yet a combination
of distrust, arrogance, and rapid technological progress made it
impossible to slow the nuclear arms race before it reached the
level of thousands of missiles minutes from their targets, the
geopolitical equivalent of a high-noon standoff, a "balance
of terror" which exacted a vast and unaccounted cost in
collective neurosis, and which remains in effect to this day, in
spite of the much ballyhooed Cold War "victory." The
failure of the Security Council "allies" to effect
radical nuclear disarmament at a time when no conflicts of
interest serious enough to engender a war, hot or cold, exist, is
not encouraging with respect to the prospects for avoiding a
nanotechnic arms race.
A race to develop early military applications of molecular
manufacturing could yield sudden breakthroughs, leading to the
abrupt emergence of new and unfamiliar threats, and provoking
political and military reactions which further reinforce a cycle
of competition and confrontation. A very rapid pace of
technological change destabilizes the political-military balance.
Revolutionary new types of weaponry, fear of what a competitor
may be doing in secret, tense nerves and worst-case analyses, the
complexity of technical issues, the unfamiliarity of new
circumstances and resistance to the demands they make, may
overwhelm the cumbersome processes of diplomacy and arms control,
or even of intelligence gathering and assessment, formulation of
measured responses and establishment of political consensus
behind them. A runaway military technological revolution must at
some point escape the grasp of even wise decisionmakers.
If history teaches us anything
The pace and magnitude of technological change that we expect
with the introduction of assemblers may be unprecedented in
history. But the thirteen years between the explosion of the
first Soviet atomic bomb (1949) and the Cuban Missile Crisis
(1962) may give us some warning of what to expect. Development of
nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union fed paranoia and fueled a war
mentality in the United States, including widespread repression
of political dissent and mobilization for an all-out arms race.
Throughout the 1950s, US military posture remained hinged on
preparedness to deliver a massive preemptive nuclear strike
against the Soviet Union, should it appear that a major war was
inevitable (or already underway). The US expected no less than
that the USSR would attempt to destroy its society with nuclear
weapons as well, yet the US military remained in a first-strike
posture even after it became clear that the Soviet Union
possessed a credible deterrent.
With the emergence of intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs) at the end of the decade, the technological competition
reached a fever pitch and the confrontation ascended to a
nerve-wracking level of tension. Military planners now had to
assume that a first strike would commence with a missile attack
on major air and missile bases; with only minutes of tactical
warning, it was possible that nothing would get off the ground
before being destroyed. This is why the issue of forward-deployed
intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in Cuba was
considered important enough for the US to make a direct military
challenge to the Soviet Union, and why the price for peaceful
removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba was the symmetrical
withdrawal of American missiles from forward positions in Turkey.
We now know that the 1962 crisis came within a few accidents, or
a few bad decisions, of nuclear holocaust. In particular, if
Kennedy had heeded the advice of his top military advisers and
launched an immediate assault on Cuba, the Soviet commander's
standing orders were to respond with the tactical nuclear weapons
he had on hand. In all likelihood, this would have been
interpreted on both sides as the signal that a general, nuclear,
war was underway, and both sides were prepared to execute
preemptive nuclear strikes in that situation.
There were other serious crises both before and after 1962,
but the Cuba crisis was in some sense the culmination of a more
chronic crisis associated with the move to a pushbutton,
short-time line ICBM confrontation, and simultaneously to
acceptance of the reality of mutual assured destruction (MAD),
away from the even madder logic of first-strike preemption. The
introduction of ballistic missiles was the most dramatic phase of
the technological nuclear arms race, and it generated the most
serious destabilizing effects. In the three decades that
followed, the numbers of missiles and warheads expanded, they
were made more accurate, more ready, more survivable, and then
again more lethal against each other, but the fundamental law of
strategic deterrence, MAD, became a matter of common sense.
First-strike thinking enjoyed periodic revivals, and first-strike
weapons were developed and deployed, but hardly anyone was
foolish enough to believe that a meaningful victory in nuclear
war was possible. Many were foolish enough to entertain the
notion, nonetheless.
Can nanotechnology break the nuclear
stalemate?
Currently, the world's major nuclear arsenals are stable or
declining. Three undeclared nuclear powers — India, Israel,
Pakistan — may still be building up their nuclear
inventories, and others may be working to acquire a nuclear
capability or develop their first nuclear weapons. North Korea
may have a nuclear weapons potential or even a few completed
weapons, but is not believed to be currently adding to its
capabilities. Among the five declared nuclear powers, none is
currently engaged in a nuclear buildup commensurate with its
potential, and the two largest, the US and Russia, are committed
by treaty to limits and to continuing reductions in their
strategic arsenals.
If nuclear weapons remain limited in number, advanced
nanotechnology could eventually undermine their potency as
deterrents. No material structure can survive the fireball of a
nuclear blast, and nanosystems, especially early generations of
them, are likely to be especially sensitive to ionizing
radiation. Advanced nanotechnology, could, however, provide
relatively effective means of mass civil defense against limited
nuclear threats. Shelters would probably be located underground,
in deep tunnels dug by assembler-built machinery, perhaps with
the aid of nanodevices that pre-cut neat fissures in the rock to
minimize energy consumption. Active devices could assist in the
absorption of shock-wave energy, and closed-cycle life support
systems could permit isolation of the shelters from surface
contamination. The result would be a great reduction in the
radius of lethality of nuclear explosives, and a great
improvement in the likelihood of surviving a limited nuclear
exchange. Moreover, the use of self-replicating systems as a
manufacturing base implies that such protection could be afforded
to ordinary citizens, potentially to the entire population. The
system of shelters could be sufficiently dispersed that it would
present no obvious targets for concentrated attack. A
transportation infrastructure adequate to evacuate urban
populations in a crisis (perhaps in as little as a few hours)
could also be provided.
Construction of such a system by a major nuclear power would
obviously be alarming to its potential rivals, and would perhaps
be anathema to civilians in the absence of a tense confrontation.
However, the construction could be undertaken in the context of a
crisis buildup, and should take not much longer than the number
of replicator generations required to build up a sufficient
quantity of primary assemblers — a matter of days, perhaps.
Then again, if a nation, such as Japan, should enter the
nanotechnic age without a nuclear arsenal, it would probably feel
free to construct a civil defense system whenever it liked, and
by so doing might provide an example that would prove
irresistible for nuclear-armed states to follow.
Large-scale civil defense, coupled with active defenses
against various nuclear delivery vehicles and counterforce
weapons designed to disarm a nuclear opponent in a preemptive
strike, might undermine the "balance of terror" and
create the appearance of a possibility of victory in a war
between major powers. Certainly, such a possibility would be a
very strong stimulus to a developing arms race.
Indeed, it is very plausible that a nation that gained a
sufficient lead in the development of molecular manufacturing and
its application to military preparations would at some point be
in a position to disarm any and all potential rivals, perhaps
with few casualties if nuclear weapons were not used. Even if
some nuclear weapons were used, there are plausible strategies
for victory if one side has a sufficient technological lead. What
is not plausible, from the present perspective, is that any
nation ever will have such a large unilateral advantage. But the
fact that rivals will fear it and will want to ensure that it is
not possible is ultimately the most compelling reason to expect a
nanotechnic arms race.
A nation that remained technologically stagnant, perhaps
relying on a large nuclear arsenal as a guarantee of security,
could suddenly become vulnerable to novel and unknown modes of
attack. For example, covertly infiltrated sabotage and
intelligence devices, as small as tiny insects, could be used to
coordinate and execute a disarming attack, perhaps by swarming
onto obsolete weapons at the appointed time, perhaps by quietly
disabling them at critical points. Merely sending an
expeditionary force of such mighty mites into another country's
territory would create an ambiguous zone between war and peace.
Spying in peacetime has traditionally been tolerated, or at least
not seen as provocation to launch a nuclear strike, but in the
nanotechnic era the detection of such a nanoinvasion could be the
last warning a technological laggard would have before it was
irreversibly disarmed. [2]
Active defense against nuclear attack has traditionally
suffered from a fundamental asymmetry: the defense must be nearly
perfect, since a single "leaker" can do unacceptable
damage. The enormous destructive potential of nuclear weapons can
also be directed against the defense; a weapon that cannot get
through a wall of interceptors can be "salvage fused"
to blast a hole in the wall. Nevertheless, it must be expected
that a sufficient mass of varied types of interceptors can
provide significant attrition of a limited nuclear missile
attack. Nanotechnology will make such interceptors small and
highly capable, and replicating assemblers will permit their
production in almost any required number. With the addition of
nanotechnic civil defense and counterforce weaponry, it is likely
that an advanced nanotechnic power could achieve the capability
to disarm even the present United States with assured impunity.
The problem with all these Strangelovian scenarios is, of
course, that they assume a large unilateral advantage. While one
side has forged ahead to develop and deploy extremely powerful
new technologies, the other has remained stagnant and complacent.
An increase of nuclear arsenals, deployment in more secure,
covert basing modes, and development of new delivery systems
designed to penetrate defenses, would, however, prolong the reign
of nuclear deterrence and postpone the day of possible
vulnerability to nanotechnic aggression. Thus a nuclear power or
potential nuclear power, especially one that was behind in the
technology race, might want to retain its nuclear options or even
expand its nuclear arsenal.
About 125,000 nuclear explosives have been manufactured
worldwide since 1945. Production rates peaked around 1980, and
total stockpiles peaked in the mid-1980s at close to 50,000
intact devices. It should not be thought that these numbers
represent the maximum capabilities of the world's nuclear powers
during the Cold War. Nuclear weapons production could probably
have been increased severalfold without imposing an intolerable
burden on the economies of either the United States or the Soviet
Union. But there was no reason to do so; even these high numbers
of weapons could be said to reflect the relative cheapness of
nuclear destruction, combined with a senseless obsession with
guaranteeing sufficiency against the remote possibility of a
first strike.
Any of the larger nuclear powers, including states such as
China and India, should therefore be able to expand their nuclear
arsenals to warhead counts in the tens of thousands, given a
decade or so to meet a potential threat, while a state with the
resources of the United States should be able to produce nuclear
weapons in the hundred thousands, if necessary, using only
conventional technology. Advanced nanotechnology can also be
applied to nuclear weapons production. A swift buildup to warhead
counts in the millions is easy to imagine.
"Doomsday machines," extremely large devices
designed to produce high levels of radioactivity, could also be
built. Such radiological weapons need not be deployed only as
mutual suicide devices, but could be designed to blanket
particular regions with highly radioactive materials. Nanosystems
may be particularly susceptible to disablement by radiation
damage. Advanced nanosystems could be designed to be more
radiation-tolerant, but only at a substantial penalty in
performance, and probably only up to levels well below what can
be delivered by drastic radiological weapons.
Thus it is possible that the result of a nanotechnic arms race
will be rampant nuclear proliferation and the expansion of major
nuclear arsenals to warhead counts in the hundred thousands or
millions — possibly including radiological weapons designed
to poison environments against hardy nanotech and incidentally,
life. A new "balance of terror," incomprehensibly more
terrifying, and yet still perhaps unstable.
Can a nanotechnic confrontation be stable?
From a purely military perspective, in the absence of a
"balance of terror" which inhibits action in spite of
military logic that compels it, a confrontation between more or
less equally advanced terrestrial nanotechnology powers could be
unstable to preemption as a result of the special dynamics of
production based on self-replicating systems, and the high levels
of armament that it would be capable of producing. It might be
impossible to maintain an armed peace at low levels of armament
without a very strong arms control regime, including highly
intrusive verification provisions; further, it might be
impossible to constrain a runaway arms race from breaking out
into a general war.
Strategic stability theory, as developed during the Cold War
and applied particularly to discussions of the nuclear
confrontation, has traditionally focused on two levels of
stability in confrontation: arms race stability and crisis
stability. Both relate to the presence or absence of incentives
or compelling reasons for escalation in a confrontation or
conflict. Briefly, an arms race is unstable if there is reason to
think that surging ahead of a competitor in a quantitative
buildup, or making a more aggressive pursuit of next-generation
technology in a qualitative arms race, can yield a significant
advantage. In contrast, if any increase in effort will only be
matched by a competitor, and if the relative balance of power is
not a sensitive function of relative position in the race, then
there is little incentive to push beyond reasonable expectations
of what the opposition may be able to do, and no compelling
reason to fear the consequences of a slight miscalculation.
Similarly, a crisis is unstable if preemptive moves such as
mobilization, forward deployment, seizure of particular
objectives, or wholesale attack is likely to give the preempter a
significant advantage in any subsequent fighting. If first moves
can be answered by the opposition in such a way as to neutralize
any advantage gained by the aggressor, then a crisis or conflict
is theoretically stable.
Molecular manufacturing based on self-replicating assemblers
virtually guarantees quantitative arms race instability in a
confrontation in which two or more competitors possess a roughly
equal technology and resource base.
In a typical conceptual picture of molecular manufacturing,
self-replicating primary systems could have a very short
replication time, perhaps as little as fifteen minutes or so.
Masses of such systems could be raised to resource-limited levels
in a matter of as little as hours, assuming that any required
special facilities were already available. The primary systems
would be used to manufacture secondary production systems, again
in resource-limited quantities and in a matter of minutes to
hours. The secondary systems would self-assemble into finished
products or would be used to carry out more specialized synthetic
operations in production of the final products, again requiring
only minutes to hours to complete their task. A buildup to
quantities of finished product limited only by the total
available quantities of primary resources (mainly first-row
elements and energy) could require as little as a day to
complete. Early systems would probably be slower and require
special facilities, such as vats of fluid or some other
controlled environment, as well as consuming more specialized
feedstocks and larger energy inputs. More advanced systems would
converge towards astonishingly fast speeds and high energy
efficiency, would draw material feedstocks directly from the
environment, and would construct any special facilities as
needed. With the addition of advanced computation, say,
equivalent to humanoid artificial intelligence, the process could
be entirely automated.
If at least the first stage of molecular manufacturing would
be an exponential process based on self-replication, a nation
could not afford to lose any time if a potentially hostile rival
had initiated an arms buildup by such means. Each lost generation
of replicators would roughly correspond to a two-to-one
quantitative disadvantage in force levels. A large imbalance in
deployed hardware might allow one side to strike with impunity,
and even a few-to-one imbalance might be enough to provide
assurance of success in a preemptive strike. The danger of
falling behind on an exponential curve, or the opportunity to
trump, would create umprecedentedly strong pressures to initiate
or join and to maintain or gain the lead in a quantitative arms
race. The race would slow down only when each competitor had
begun to exhaust the available supplies of matter and energy, and
that limit might be approached in as little as a few hours.
Unprecedentedly large masses of military hardware could be
produced in an unprecedentedly short time.
The arms race probably would not end with resource exhaustion,
assuming it did not immediately break out in general war. Each
side would continue with dynamic rearrangement and improvement of
its force, in response to its opponents' deployments and analysis
of their technology. Each would also try to gain control of
additional mass, from and in disputed zones such as space and the
oceans, if a fixed division of such resources had not previously
been arranged and stakes claimed in some persuasive form. If
there were no resolution to the crisis, and if such a gargantuan
confrontation could exist without exploding into violence, the
rivals would continue building outward into space, inward below
the Earth's surface, and forward to an ever more finely-tuned and
lethal war machine, until...
Could such a confrontation remain "peaceful" for any
length of time? It is likely that skirmishing, or violation of
mutual respect for property rights and rights of action, would
begin early. For example, each side would want to capture and
analyze representative pieces of the others' hardware. If there
were unresolved conflicts of ownership over territory and
resources, each side would try to grab what it could and to block
the others' access (under the assumption of nonviolence). Each
would probably also probe the others capabilities to detect and
counteract covert action, and each would feel compelled to
attempt to gain strategic intelligence even if it meant a
violation of the others' sovereign territory.
The assumption of exactly matched technologies is unrealistic
to begin with. One side's replicators would reproduce more
quickly, one side's computers would be smarter, one's weapons
would be more effective, one would have sovereignty over a larger
territory and resource base. If one party to a conflict of some
type knew that its technical or natural resources were somewhat
inferior, it might try to gain an early lead by initiating its
buildup preemptively and in secret; once its enemies caught on,
it might feel compelled to use its advantage before losing it.
Alternatively, a "superpower" that had long maintained
a large arsenal might see a come-from-behind competitor building
up at a fast rate, and feel compelled to launch a preemptive
attack.
However, even under the assumption of more or less equal
technologies and equal resources, a nanotechnic arms buildup
would progress toward a confrontation that would be unstable on
critical fronts. The clearest case for first-strike instability
can be made in the case of co-occupied environments,
"no-man's land," such as the oceans, space, and any
other unowned or disputed territories, and along the front lines
of territorial division.
During the Cold War, the ability to hide a missile-carrying
submarine in vast ocean waters was considered a profoundly
stabilizing factor, while ironically, the vulnerability of
surface ships to detection, monitoring and attack from close
range was thought to constitute a likely route to rapid
escalation in the event of open combat between the superpowers
— a potential tinderbox for nuclear war. With the advent of
molecular manufacturing, it will become impossible to hide
anything as large as a Trident submarine in any environment from
which highly miniaturized and massively proliferated sensor
systems cannot be excluded, once an arms buildup has reached
saturation levels.
In the advanced stages of a nanotechnic arms race, the oceans
will be teeming with miniaturized and massively proliferated
combatants; opposing forces will be in contact throughout the
volume of the sea. They will come in a range of sizes and types
with different roles to play in the pre-war jousting and in
full-scale combat. Smaller and more numerous devices will have
advantages of survivability and flexibility, but there will be
some floor on the size of a useful device, and larger systems may
have capabilities for defense against mites as well as more
potential uses in general warfare. Analysis of the tradeoffs in
designing a maximally-effective "fleet" will no doubt
absorb the life's work of many future naval strategists, not all
of them biological. But it is evident that two such
interpenetrating forces will be mutually vulnerable to
coordinated surprise attack. The order to attack can probably be
securely encrypted [3] , and transmitted
shortly in advance of "zero-microsecond." Even if the
victim's force is programmed to automatically counterattack upon
detection of an ambush, it can propagate signals at best at the
speed of light, and in practice somewhat slower due to the delay
in processing and relaying information. By attacking
simultaneously everywhere, the aggressor can gain an advantage
that grows as the characteristic strike time drops, which it will
do as a buildup proceeds and the average distance between nearest
opponents falls.
Precisely the same logic applies, even more strongly, to space
fleets co-deployed in near-Earth orbit. Space weapons will
typically have the shortest strike times of any weapons in any
arena, and in space it is even likely that some types of
directed-energy, lightspeed or near-lightspeed weapons can be
employed. Again, as the numbers of opposing systems in close
contact grows, the characteristic strike time will drop and the
danger of a preemptive attack will become more critical.
Along territorial boundaries, forward-deployed weapons will
have the shortest time to penetrate and destroy an enemy's
stronghold once an overt attack is underway. As a corollary, such
frontlines will become yet another arena for time-critical attack
and response planning; but here the characteristic time will not
drop toward zero as the buildup mounts. Nevertheless, it will
become extremely short. Missile flight times can be considerably
faster than those of current ballistic missiles, through the use
of hypersonic powered flight, facilitated by nanotechnic
materials and energy systems. Confronted by nanotechnic missile
forces deployed at its borders, a nation would face the prospect
of absorbing an enormous body-blow in the first minutes of an
attack, unless it chose itself to attack across the border
preemptively.
Even the bedrock under the land could become an arena of
combat. In the absence of any deep-earth defense, an attacker
could burrow like Guy Fawkes and attempt to blow up an enemy from
below. To prevent this, nations would probably claim the earth
below their land masses as sovereign territory and erect
subterranean lines of defense. Any attempt to cross such a line
could probably be detected and intercepted. Note also that it is
unlikely that any device could burrow directly through molten
rock.
The destructive potential of large numbers of nuclear weapons,
such as could certainly be produced with the aid of nanotechnic
systems, ought to serve as a sufficient deterrent to any
adventure that would be likely to bring on their use. And yet it
is unclear whether the vulnerability to preemption of
forward-deployed and interpenetrating forces would permit
military decisionmakers, human or otherwise, to remain cool in
facing a mounting confrontation of planetary proportions. The
fragility of any such "peace" should in any case be
obvious. Again, a true balance of power is unlikely to exist at
any time, and the possibility that advantage may be gained and
lost is a powerful incentive to preemptive action. A commander
might reason that warfare could be limited to contested zones,
avoiding direct attack on home strongholds and core values, e.g.
populations, and without triggering any "Doomsday
machines," by mutual deterrence. More likely, in such a
massive and intense confrontation, a war would find a way to
start itself.
Large-scale development of space, beyond the near-Earth
environment, would complicate the question of military
instability by possibly providing refuge for survivable forces.
It is unclear, however, whether this would fundamentally alter
the picture drawn above. In the near-term, at least, and even
after the development of molecular manufacturing, it is likely
that space development will occur under national auspices and
under claims of national sovereignty extended by otherwise
earthbound nations. From this perspective, space settlements and
space-based weapons deployments would seem only to extend an
Earth-centered confrontation, and extend it into an arena of
potentially lightspeed weapons and maximal military instability.
In the longer term, however, far-flung settlements would be
outside the reach of any reasonable first-strike order, so that
the danger of such an attack would be somewhat defused.
Long before that time, the issue of territory in space is
likely to be a powerful source of competition and conflict
between the leading technological nations of the Earth. Would-be
sooners who hope to escape into outer space before terrestrial
stick-in-the-muds blow themselves up are engaging in unrealistic
fantasy. Any attempt to seize control of an extraterrestrial
empire can only provoke a war that will not fail to pursue the
pioneer settlers; indeed, it may target them first.
Artificial intelligence as a factor
Most of the points made above in connection with
assembler-based molecular manufacturing can be drawn as
implications of advanced artificial intelligence (AI)
independently of, or in conjunction with assemblers. Information
technology alone may lead to essentially the same dilemmas, even
if molecular assemblers turn out to be unworkable or very hard to
develop. Assemblers combined with artificial general intelligence
will lead to these dilemmas with breathtaking swiftness.
By advanced artificial general intelligence, I mean AI systems
that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed,
that can acquire, manipulate and reason with general knowledge,
and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or
military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be
needed. Such systems may be modeled on the human brain, but they
do not necessarily have to be, and they do not have to be
"conscious" or possess any other competence that is not
strictly relevant to their application. What matters is that such
systems can be used to replace human brains in tasks ranging from
organizing and running a mine or a factory to piloting an
airplane, analyzing intelligence data or planning a battle.
Consider: A computer that can conceptualize a problem, apply
general knowledge and reason through to a solution, can do so
without distraction, taking breaks or getting tired, and with
immediate, direct access to number-crunching processors,
hard-fact databases, and even robotized prototyping systems and
test benches. Merely to reproduce human intelligence is thus
probably to surpass human capability. Such a machine and its
software can also be copied without a 20-year educational
process, in numbers limited only by manufacturing capabilities.
Armies of them can be networked and harnessed to large, complex
problems. Consider also, that the active elements of electronic
computers already propagate signals a million times faster than
our neurons, and can potentially be more densely packed and
numerous as well.[4] These images only serve
to suggest what may be possible. Realistically, it is likely that
AI systems will be only roughly anthropomorphic and will evolve
through varied and unexpected forms, bypassing human equivalence.
It is people, and not material resources or technology, that
determine the scale of industrial production and military
operations today, and that limited the pace of weapons
development during the Cold War. People may be highly motivated,
convinced that the enemy is evil and will come breathing fire if
they don't work around the clock to develop and manufacture
terrible weapons, yet they will still get tired and slack off,
and eventually go home to rest, and they will make mistakes, and
they will resist being herded into senseless wars or burdened
with futile arms races.
Information technology multiplies the capabilities of human
engineers, planners, commanders and fighters, and oils the wheels
of industry and of war. Luddite predictions of technological
unemployment and dystopian tales of robot soldiers have been
around a long time, but the key ingredient that has always been
missing is a general replacement for the human brain. Yet already
computers replace brains in many lines of work, and simple
extrapolations of the growth of computer power show that
computers should come to equal, and then to surpass, human
brains, on a per-cost basis, within a few decades (Moravec 1988).
At some point, even without nanotechnology, the replacement of
brains by computers will lead to a military production and war
machine that is fully automated and can be ordered into action
without delay or resistance. When the war machine can run itself,
there will still be limits to what it can do, but those limits
are likely to be well beyond those of historical experience. Note
that a fully-automated production system is by definition
potentially self-replicating, although the replication cycle for
bulk-process manufacturing systems is likely to be much slower
than that for molecular nanotechnology.
Perhaps the worst-case scenario for a runaway arms race is the
simultaneous emergence of molecular manufacturing and artificial
intelligence, or the emergence of nanotechnology at a point where
the architecture and software of advanced artificial intelligence
have already been developed. Nanosystems will be the most
complicated electromechanical systems ever devised, and the
participation of human-equivalent AI in early nanosystem
development could speed the pace of innovation and application
enormously. Conversely, the use of assemblers to manufacture
machines containing enormous numbers of active devices could
yield a sudden increase in intellectual capabilities to levels
well beyond human equivalence. If assemblers come early, the
world may have a better chance to digest the prospect of a
self-replicating capital base and understand its implications. If
they come late, the progress from breakthrough to full-scale
deployment will more likely be too swift to control. [5]
The likelihood that AI systems, once they reach
human-equivalent levels of general knowledge and reasoning
ability, can participate in their own improvement as engineers
and as technical implementers, outperforming human capabilities
and producing an explosion of intelligence that transcends our
understanding, has led to the concept of a "technological
singularity" (Vinge 1993), an acceleration of technological
progress to an essentially infinite pace [6]
, a horizon, beyond which it is impossible to see, beyond which
whatever emerges will exceed our ability to imagine or to
comprehend. It is argued that machines will inevitably escape
human control, or that humans must transcend along with the
machines into some post-human form if we wish to escape
domination by our intellectual superiors and successors. [7]
If a technological singularity lies ahead, one can argue that
we are already in its basin of attraction, and perhaps we have
been since the beginnings of technology. But certainly, if we
want to try to affect the outcome, to have a chance of surviving
a plunge into a technological black hole, the best we can do is
try to set initial conditions as we sail in. As frightening as it
is to contemplate the transcendence of technology over human
intelligence and will, an even more frightening prospect is the
transcendence of a technology committed to warfare and divided
against itself. If a transcendent technology wars against itself,
we fear we will perish in the crossfire.
Extending a metaphor, we can imagine that as we approach a
singularity, rising tidal forces tear at the economic, political
and military structure of our world, so that if we approach in a
jerry-rigged vessel it will tend to tear apart, even if, strictly
speaking, we never reach a singular point. In gravitational
physics, tidal forces arise because the freefall trajectories of
different points on an extended body diverge; so the part that
leads pulls ahead, the part to the right is thrown to the right,
and so on. Similarly, an accelerating rate of technical progress
can amplify inhomogeneities in the level of development of
different nations and even different groups and classes within
nations, upsetting haphazardly constructed military, economic and
political balances, and amplifying conflicts of interest and
ideology as well.
The single greatest weakness in the modern world order is, and
has been, the division into sovereign states which confront each
other with arms, with threats and with acts of violence. This is
the division of technology against itself, intelligence against
intelligence, purpose against purpose. How can a world crazed by
such fault lines of reason survive an encounter with a
technological singularity?
Arms control and international security
It is highly likely the world will continue to be divided into
sovereign states with competing militaries as the nanotechnic
revolution approaches, and that, certainly in the United States
at least, much of the research leading to it will be sponsored
through the military with an eye to military applications.
Therefore, if we are to have any hope of avoiding a catastrophic
arms race it is essential to consider possibilities for control
of nanotechnic arms.
It is easy to dismiss the idea of an outright ban on the use
of assemblers in weapons manufacture, the use of nanostructures
in weapons, or any similar proposal, as impractical and
unverifiable. What is often lost sight of, however, is that arms
control always involves more than treaties and "national
means of verification." Above all, it requires the will to
control dangerous and undesirable weapons, and a willingness to
cooperate in order to achieve such control. If such will is
present among the parties who need to be involved, there is much
that can be done.
The most threatening aspect of a possible nanotechnic arms
buildup is the sheer mass of weaponry that may be produced. Not
producing such masses of arms, nor preparing the facilities that
may be required for their production, is not an unverifiable
commitment. Voluntary transparency, by which nations allow their
treaty partners to maintain prescribed monitoring capabilities on
national territory, can permit asssurance that no such
large-scale buildup is taking place. Such arrangements will only
remain effective, however, as long as nations refrain from
attempting to settle disputes by violence. Even the mere threat
of violence, ordinary "peaceful" confrontation, is
likely to provoke withdrawal from a weak control regime in the
event of a serious crisis.
It should be much easier to put a control regime in place
before any large-scale confrontation develops, while nations are
at peace, than to stop an arms race in forward gear and ask for
intrusive monitoring so that it can be reversed. Unfortunately,
arms control, unlike arms acquisition, has no natural
constituency other than public anxiety about the danger of war,
and this is at its lowest precisely when the greatest progress
could and should be made towards eliminating weapons left over
from the last arms race, and erecting a structure that can hold
off the next one.
Probably the most important arms control step that could be
taken now, other than continuing the process of nuclear
disarmament, is to conclude a general and global treaty banning
the placement or testing of destructive devices in orbit, and the
targeting of objects in space by ground-based weapons. The
possibility of a rapid buildup of space weapons is the most
dangerous and destabilizing prospect of 21st century military
confrontation. The recent US test of a ground-based antisatellite
laser is appalling; let us hope it serves to demonstrate the real
continuing danger of a future space arms race.
The vexing questions of outer space and sea law, and the
division of resources that may become valuable in the future,
must be addressed before these issues become a source of
international conflict, that is, before the technology is
developed which makes what has heretofore been viewed as a
"commons" an attractive target for sovereign ownership.
In spite of the arguments made above that nuclear weapons
might serve as a stabilizing factor in a nanotechnic
confrontation, continuing and completing the job of nuclear
disarmament is an urgent priority. It is inexcusable to leave our
people and our civilization exposed to the danger of nuclear
annihilation at a time when there are few sources of tension
between the major nuclear powers and none that are considered
remotely serious enough to occasion a crisis that could lead to
war.
Nations must learn to trust one another enough to live without
massive arsenals, by surrendering some of the prerogatives of
sovereignty so as to permit intrusive verification of arms
control agreements, and by engaging in cooperative military
arrangements. Ultimately, the only way to avoid nanotechnic
confrontation and the next world war is by evolving an integrated
international security system, in effect a single global regime.
World government that could become a global tyranny may be
undesirable, but nations can evolve a system of international
laws and norms by mutual agreement, while retaining the right to
determine their own local laws and customs within their
territorial jurisdictions.
Conclusions
The nanotechnic era will be fundamentally different from the
era in which nuclear weapons were developed and came to dominate
the possibilities for global violence.
The bombed-out cities of the Second World War, and the nuclear
holocausts of our imagination, have persuaded rational minds that
there can be no expectation of a meaningful victory in total war
between states armed with hundreds of deliverable nuclear
weapons. From that point of view, war is obsolete, at least
direct and open war between great powers.
Nanotechnology will carry this evolution to the next step:
deterrence will become obsolete, as it will not be possible to
maintain a stable armed peace between nanotechnically-armed
rivals. The implications of this statement stand in sharp
contradiction to the traditions of a warrior culture and to the
assumptions that currently guide policy in the United States and
in its potential rivals.
Postscript
The history of war in the modern technological era is a
history of surprise. Time and again, technology proves its power
against our vulnerable bodies. A vast destructive potential is
kept sealed until the time of battle, and when the seals are
broken, we are surprised by how much vaster the devastation is
than even the last terrible war. Order an attack over the trench
lines... Surprise! The guns and artillery turn your brave
soldiers into hamburger as fast as you can feed them into the
grinder. Unleash a war of conquest... Surprise! Fifty million
dead, your great cities in ruin, the survivors cold and starving.
Start a nuclear exchange... Well, we were warned.
It was technology, not policy, that forced the doctrine of
deterrence on us, just as it was technology that determined the
outlines of the nuclear arms race, once the decision to pursue
nuclear confrontation had been made. The logic of military
technology produced a confrontation so complex and unmanageable,
and with such short time lines for decision and action, that it
threatened to explode in spite of "assured
destruction." Again, people were intelligent enough to
recognize realities, and to place restraints on the offensive
arms race while shelving futile dreams of defense.
If technological realities now demand that we go further, and
give up the warrior tradition, the illusion of independence and
the vanity of sovereign self-defense, will we heed these demands,
or will we try to preserve the institutions and attitudes of an
earlier epoch, until we are surprised by a disaster beyond even
our worst nuclear nightmares? If it is impossible to maintain an
armed confrontation between nanotechnology-armed and hostile
nations, then this is exactly our dilemma.
References
- Cohen W S 1996 Quadrennial Defense Review (United
States Department of Defense)
- Drexler K E 1986 Engines of Creation (New York:
Anchor Press)
- Drexler K E 1992 Nanosystems (New York:
Wiley-Interscience)
- Franklin H B 1988 War Stars (New York: Oxford
University Press)
- Klare M 1995 Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws (New
York: Hill and Wang)
- Moravec H 1988 Mind Children (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press)
- Shalikashvili J M 1997 Joint Vision 2010 (United
States Department of Defense)
- Vinge, V 1993 Technological
Singularity Whole Earth Review Winter 1993
Footnotes
- The following terms are often
used loosely or as euphemisms for war, but will be given
strict definitions here: Confrontation means the
maintenance of armed forces, assertion of control over
specific assets and assertion of specific rights, up to
mutually-recognized limits, by two or more centers of
power; Conflict means the assertion by two or more
parties of mutually incompatible positions, seriously
enough to imply the possibility of violence should they
fail to resolve the dispute by peaceful means; Warfare
means actual violence; Combat implies that the violence
is an intense and mutual effort to suppress each other's
ability or inclination to fight; War is the condition
that exists when warfare is general and uncontrolled,
although war need not escalate to the exhaustion of all
possibilities for violence.
- Other examples of novel attack
modes that could be used by a nanotechnic power to
overcome even a well-armed nuclear but non-nanotechnic
power include earth-burrowing weapons, space weapons, or
again the programmable microbe, but one programmed to
kill at a specified time. If you have a sufficiently
bloodthirsty imagination, you can keep yourself amused in
this vein from now until....
- This seems likely, but it is a
critical point and there are two reasons to doubt that
encryption of a general attack order can be kept secure.
The less persuasive one is current speculation about the
possible code-breaking potential of quantum computers,
for which no plausible physical implementation has yet
been proposed. The more persuasive argument is that the
smallest combatants may not be able to support secure
decryption, while the potential victim need only somehow
"capture" a small number of "canary"
combatants of the potential attacker in order to obtain a
functional warning system.
- It may be that evolution has had
little incentive to drastically increase the speed of
signal propagation, given the size of our bodies and the
time scale of events that affect our survival. A move to
computerlike serial algorithms is biologically
implausible. Note that while evolution has a clear
incentive to make neurons smaller and more efficient, it
might be up against hard limits for cellular processes,
while a slight increase in speed might come only at the
cost of an increase in energy consumption. One should not
underestimate the neuron. It implements a highly
nonlinear space-time integration of thousands of inputs,
and its growth and tuning is probably governed by
complicated biomolecular interactions. If one wants to
build an artificial brain, the artificial neuron is
likely to be a fairly complex cellular automaton, not a
simple linear integrator and threshold trigger. It will
be a challenge to build an artificial brain that is as
complex and compact as the original. However, the
artificial brain should easily be faster.
- Taking a best guess, it is likely
that at least a first generation of assemblers will be
developed before any computer is built that equals the
human brain in quantitative measures of complexity and
speed, let alone before artificial thinkers can replace
and surpass the skills of human engineers, planners, and
warriors. But there seems no reason to assume that
human-equivalent AI could not be achieved in machines
built from components made by top-down nanofabrication
methods, without requiring bottom-up nanoassemblers.
- "Infinite rate of
progress" means relative to a human scale. Imagine,
for example, that a transformative amount of progress
were to take place in a subjective instant.
- Note that this implies willing our
own destruction and replacement by something nonhuman.
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