Technical University of Dortmund

Transcription

>>Jurgen Altmann: hello good morning everybody at first let me thank the organizers for inviting me i'm talking about military applications of nanotechnology and I give it a special twist today in trying to get it linked to a some fundamental questions of sorry ethics so this is what I'm going to talk about that I'll give to you some information on Just-War Theory I’ll then explain how military preparations can lead to wars talk about arms control and disarmament I have a glimpse on the role of new military technology including in shaping the international system uh... list potential military applications of nano technology have a look at military research and development in this area and then explaining the role of preventive arms control in general and what it might mean applied to military applications of nanotechnology and then I end up with final considerations uh... i should mention that i have authored a book which you can look at to many of these things and great detail and there is a report that one can download from the internet for free okay so if one thinks about ethics applied to questions of war and peace and for many people the first things that come to mind is Just-War theory the theory is very old but it has been refined over the decades and centuries the theory says not every war is just in a moral sense but there may be some wars that are moral and just and they have to fulfill certain conditions to be so so the one condition - the one set of conditions concerns when it is justified to start a war, to go to war and the legal term is the jus ad bellum the second set of conditions is about how the war is being waged and sometimes a third set of conditions is being added obligations that concern the situation after the war the first set of conditions: the Jus Ad Bellum has several conditions that need to be fulfilled simultaneously so in order for war to be just you need a just cause this must be the last resort of redressing a bad situation there must be a decision by a proper authority with the public declaration of this decision there must be the right intention there must be a probability of success of the war and the means that you choose must be proportional to the end that uh... is being looked for. concerning the second set of criteria uh... the Jus In Bello uh... it is much more refined even though I only list two general categories here they can be the various refined rules can be grouped under the criteria, of, on the one hand discrimination that is you can not attack everything civilians must not be attacked combatants are the ones that can be attacked but if they are out of combat like raising their hands or unconscious or wounded you can no longer attack them and many such rules and there is a rule of proportionality so the amount of destruction that is being inflicted must be somehow proportional to the military gain that one expects from a certain attack so and and the final word on Just-War theory is that these two groups of categories are independent the second one is much more stringent it's legal but there’s obligations and by now there's also an international criminal court so the rules of war how you wage war, the Jus In Bello hold for any party taking part in a war even though it is an unjust war even in a war of aggression which is by definition unjust the the rules of war need to be followed strictly and people can be held responsible second thing is second chapter Just-War focuses more or less on the question: when a war is justified or if it was justified and the conditions in looking at that it somehow overlooks the question that one should rather prevent war it’s somehow there and this idea of war must be the last result but it's not very explicit so I think if one looks in an ethical way at the question of war and peace one should be more explicit on this question have we used all means available before using the last resort this includes also general policies of detente and cooperation in particular there’s one specific problem which political science calls “the security dilemma” Problem is: we have an international system which is still characterized by an absence of overarching authority as we have within states which guarantees the security of individual citizens and maybe with some exception in this country but in many other countries citizens need not bear arms to be more or less secure because there’s police and jurisdiction and all kinds of things and we don't have these things in the international realm and so how do states make themselves secure from attack by others? From aggression? they buildup armed forces to defend themselves problem however there in this process they increase the threat to others if they don't take very much care to be just building defensive things most things that you build for armed forces can be used for both: offense and defense so, in the process of all countries trying to make themselves more secure against aggression they as a system look from above decrease their overall security the threats are being increased by your collective endeavor to increase security so that security is they try to increase the security but in fact it's decreased in the overall system that's what makes the Security Dilemma there are several ways out of this dilemma I’m not discussing for time reasons all of them uh... I mention at least one that is the voluntary limitations by international agreement between potential opponents of their armed forces or their armaments this is generally called arms control and I’ll explain a little more about this now in the next chapter arms control is about reducing military threats by agreed limitation of weapons or forces disarmament goes a little further which it really means reduction of armaments in the ideal case up to zero so it's a continuum from abolishing certain classes of weapons we have general sdfgds and the biological weapons convention states must not have biological weapons and they must not only not have them they must not develop them same holds for chemical weapons there is a certain class of intermediate range nuclear missiles with ranges between five hundred and five thousand five hundred kilometers which were built down, which were reduced to zero by a certain treaty, the INF treaty: Immediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty in 1987 so thats disarmament and the endgame, the end status which is in trying, in many U.N. declarations and also many arms control treaties which stems in in in the uh... preambles the treaties themselves are much more limited but and the preambles they say this all is a step towards general and complete disarmament general meaning all state's and complete meaning all armed forces okay but as long as there are armed forces around and states find themselves find find them important to feel somehow secure against aggression you have a friction the armed forces are being kept to guarantee victory in should war nevertheless occur on the other hand you want to sit down with potential enemies and agree about limitations of their capabilities and numbers so there is a certain problem here but there were instances in history when uh... states nevertheless sat down and agreed on certain limitations and with the upcoming, or of the new administration in this country things may get going uh... back again but we have to be clear that looking from an outside standpoint or from a technology assessment standpoint that there is a concept... conceptually very different contexts for technology assessment and the regulation of technology then we have in the civilian realm and the civilian realm you may have some dangerous technologies, toxic chemicals, explosives what have you then the state by its democratic processes develop certain regulation may you may need to have a license to handle something and so on but no such thing at the moment exists on the international level so what we have to do or what states have to do in order to limit military uses of technology is you have to sit down and make an international agreement which is a tedious process and not a routine one they have to decide voluntarily to take part in such negotiations and such signatures of treaties and they in doing so they try to nevertheless guarantee that the combat strength of that they find necessary for the end process is still maintained and there is a fourth problem that the military needs some forms of secrecy so you have a problem with verifying with with agreeing on verification methods the military needs some secrecy for functioning on the other hand on the one hand but on the other hand you need to be able to look into your opponents in military capabilities and whether he's really complying with the obligations of a treaty fourth section new military technology if one looks back into history qualitative superiority in military technology arms was instrumental well in conquering other countries seizing colonies and so on think of the history of this country for a moment fire weapons against axes long bows against powder guns and so on and europe and science and technology in bringing about new types of weapons have adopted a new much more prominent role since world war two and they have contributed to shaping the international system this holds in particular for the nuclear bomb obviously and so the international priorities from have changed in a sense from a state where it was kind of normal to go to war to at least try to avoid large power superpower war, nuclear war because it would have meant elimination of the respective cities states and maybe civilization as we know it nevertheless again this friction we had permanent efforts and military technology to somehow gain the upper hand not only in nuclear weapons technologies but also in many others conventional ones and maybe some unusual ones etcetera so the question I am at the moment only posing following the philosophy of for yesterday evening or yesterday afternoon will nano technology again bring marked change in military technologies that have important influence on the international system if that were so one could in fact say well yes we have a certain nanoethics for war and peace the question which was also hinted at already yesterday is there special nanoethics or is there not and at the end I tried to be a little more explicit on this question so in my study of the potential military applications of nanotechnology which by the way was funded by the german foundation for peace research couple of years ago and which led to this book which I mentioned I have found some twenty-one general areas where nano technology could find use in the military this starts at the more generic categories as such as electronics, computers, communication you might have fingernail sized very capable computer and every kind of weapon system even in some small munitions software will become much more powerful more autonomous materials will become more lightweight much stronger and maybe smart energy sources and propulsion will become smaller and more efficient propellants and explosives would gain in efficiency there will be miniature biological and chemical analysis systems there will be camouflage which changes color so adapting itself in real time to the background as it is being seen from another... the opponent uh... sensors and sensor networks will become very small and very cheap so that they might be scattered around on the battlefield in the thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands at least some improvement is to be expected in light armor and bullet proof vests I'm not so sure about heavy armor and vehicles will become lighter, faster, and more agile munitions and missiles will become more precise and smaller maybe down to this size of a missile uh... which seeks out an air craft and well in order to hit, it cannot just explode in five meters distance this would be too little effect but if it seeks out let's say the cockpit window and just crashes through it and then explodes twenty grams of explosive this would of course down the aircraft could be a military one could be a civilian one and I come to that later and miniature satellites and launchers will become possible satellites this size have already been flown uh... with limited capability would become much more capable in the future they might be launched by launchers, uh the rockets to the size two meters maybe uh... we will have macro robots and micro robots with and without weapons including biotechnical hybrids that is electro consoled insects and rats or other little animals there is already work on soldier systems which senses body status and maybe manipulate the body and there is work on the brain machine interface for somewhat faster reaction maybe by pilots or other soldiers you gain maybe half of a tenth of a second and reaction time if you bypass the nerve channel from the motor cortex through the muscle and then uh... direct the actual movement of a finger to pull the trigger whatever in nuclear weapons not much qualitative improvement is to be expected except in a very fictitious case which I have don't really want to discuss about at the moment however we will get a big problem with potentially new chemical or biological weapons uh... which will be able to to act very in a very targeted way maybe recognizing a certain d_n_a_ pattern or a certain protein pattern and only if the correct pattern is being sensed then releasing a toxin uh... either killing or incapacitating or what have you and this could be and in the future maybe i don't know ten or fifteen, twenty years you give a certain drug to eight billion people worldwide and just one would be affected if you have a saliva sample of that person beforehand to adjust right the correct d_n_a_ sequence into the agent some of these applications are five years away but most of them ten to twenty and some maybe will take even longer time and not for everything it is guaranteed that that helps that people in the research and development put into it will come true of course some things are may just remain unfeasible or too expensive to really be developed in high numbers or for for many soldiers sixth section is on actual military research and development in nano technology taking place at the moment uh... and here it is the fact is that most of such activities are taking place in the U.S. since a couple of years during its the since its foundation in the national nanotechnology initiative about one-quarter to one-third of the money has gone to the department of defense you see here the time development on the left hand side the absolute figures for the n and i in total and the lower one is the absolute figure for the department of defense and the thick curve with the scale on the right shows the percentage I'm not sure whether the slight decrease here is due to the policies of the new administration that's for them in the coming federal fiscal year or whether it's due to the economic crisis which has led to some reduction in and and and military spending for r and d and generally leave this as a question for the experts in this country this work in the u_s is mainly being done at universities and some at unprocessed laboratories and some at nuclear weapons laboratories but much of it is still at the basic levels , the basic research or maybe technology development level there is not yet real development of systems that could be painted olive green and delivered to the armed forces some flashlights on activities there is uh... one high priority of the department of defense and the u_s_ could have uninhabited combat vehicles which might uh... even become autonomous even in deciding on what to attack and whom to kill this is again maybe twenty years off and at the moment it's not explicit dealing to nanotechnology but nanotechnology will provide many means of making such vehicles more intelligent more capable to decide to uh... get, take in, and understand the context it would give better materials for have the having them lighter more agile and better energy and propulsion systems I should also mentioned the potential for Micro-robots as I did already uh... in particular there is work being done uh... on hybrid systems where instead of building uh... the small robot from scratch or artificial which is of course the difficult task you use the hardware that nature provides and using an insect or rat or small mammal and just implant electrodes in order to control its movement and put a little backpack with some intelligence-gathering device or maybe a little explosive on top of it so the hardware for traveling for energy supply uh... for orientation and so on is already there so you save uh... just take over control of the animal the other way around taking signals from uh... the brain and inputting it into the into some machine the brain machine interface I hear has been brought on in animal experiments where monkey was implanted with uh... set of monkey electrodes in the motor cortex and the researchers were able to understand the neural signals when the monkey wanted to move his arm and and then they control the robot arm with that and finally the monkey was a able to use the robot arm to get the banana uh... and then other extra research project that is being looked at here uh... with some connection to nanotechnology uh... that the idea of modifying to biochemistry of human body for soldiers so that they would be able to fight actively at high intensity for seven days and nights consecutively without sleep deprivation or to work or fight three days without calorie input short look at military nano technology in other countries there are developed all industrial countries who do something there but it's much less than in the u_s_ it's not hundreds of millions of dollars per year just a few millions of dollars per year in germany my country it's at present practically nothing and russia and china they are active in this area although there's not much known but obviously they spent much less but they are very principled they are principally capable actors in nanotechnology as the specialists can certainly attest to and so uh... cautious estimate arrives at the situation that the u_s_ is spending four to ten times the rest of the world in military research and development of nanotechnology which is eighty to ninety percent of global spending whereas in military research and development overall it's only in quotation marks two thirds of the global what the u_s_ spends we can think whether its really justified by the two thirds of the future threats in the war is directed at the U.S. so that that such a high amount of spending was was really justified but that was a side remark but this ratio of eighty to ninety percent is likely to change as the others will catch speed and will follow the u_s_ role model in going into the military field and nano technology depending of course on the success uh... that certain that such programs would have in the u_s_ as well so the u_s_ is the big precedent and role model here and I should mention here that activities have already started also in india, Brazil, south africa and Iran and it's quite obvious that many other countries take Singapore take Saudi Arabia and so on uh... with uh... become more active in military occupation if there's nothing like an international ban in place so penultimate section on preventive arms control this is the ban or the limitation on military usable technology or weapon systems before they are being acquired and deployed for the armed forces that's not completely green work it's not blue sky we have several precedents and existing arms control agreements I don't go through all of them but in many of those which are listed here who has explicit prohibitions of already development of certain things take chemical weapons biological weapons uh... and the let's say take the the last one the Blinding Laser Weapons protocol of nineteen ninety five laser weapons intentionally developed to permanently blind soldiers were banned before they were being fully developed and every country up to now has abided by this protocol preventive arms control goes in certain steps at first you have a scientific section where you do a prospective analysis of technical properties on potential military uses then you assess these the knowledge that we have brought under certain criteria and then devise possible limits and verification methods and then hopefully states will sit down and negotiate the according to the analysis that uh... arms control signs and pieces for signs has delivered but not always it goes like this unfortunately so these are the criteria as they can be grouped in three general groups first group has to do with the existing arms control and disarmament and international law of warfare efforts second group has to do with the stability between potential opponents do certain new weapon systems insight escalation in a crisis or from crisis into war or do they not and is there a danger for special arms races or is there a danger for proliferation intro lets say crisis regions and the third group has to do with military uses which may have already in peacetime certain consequences for civilian society either by toxic materials that are being released or that could be released or by providing tools that terrorists could use in criminal acts so i have applied these criteria to have been the potential uses of any of the 21 areas that uh...I’ve found of military uses of nanotechnology and i have found that several generic uh... applications don't pose the problems or are just too close to civilian uses to consider limitation think of little computers ever everybody who has a computer in the buttons of the shirt that we couldn't ban them from soldiers from soldiers using them uh... there are very few specific applications which get positive marks this applies mainly to the cheaper census for biological and chemical agents that could be used at say in public spaces in the civilian realm but said there are several applications which pose serious dangers and to see them here grouped by the kind of category that is mostly affected of the criterion so it starts at distributed small sensors which could be used for in civilian realm for invading and for privacy we had this argument yesterday already uh... and ends this new chemical and biological weapons I have thought about what could be done and i have developed certain recommendations limiting or prohibiting such systems imbedded in the general arms control process with future rules and definitions and in order to be comprehensive you have to include civilian applications details can be looked up in the book and the verification of compliance would mostly be done with traditional methods of on-site inspection which is will not hold for very long so final considerations we have the fundamental problem here we'll get the revolutionary technology how do we deal with it on the international event one approach is reduce the likelihood of war by providing an overwhelming u_s_ technological advantage it is essential to be technologically as far ahead of potential opponents as possible that's the quote from the national nanotechnology initiative seven years ago unfortunately this approach overlooks certain things interactions in the international system and the danger to the u_s_ itself that might involve from proliferation of such system the u_s_ may be able to keep and maintain a lead on monopoly but not for long and other potential opponents would be able to do the same thing after a couple of years they could use nano technology enabled weapons also in an asymmetrical fashion they could be proliferating to terrorists and used in this country as well so i think that the u_s_ needs to understand that international preventive arms control in such areas is in its enlightened national interests and again the new administration may provide some better opportunity for understanding this and putting it into a political action however in the medium to long-run we get fundamental problem limitation and verification are getting more difficult nanotechnology is quite unlike nuclear technology it will be widespread many applications will be very small it may be possible to produce nanotechnology systems in small and very cheap facilities uh... so in this sense nano technology is about biotechnology and we have a big dual use problem civilian use quite similar to military use so in the future we will need very intrusive monitoring and inspection for verification essentially anytime anywhere inspections as is legal and possible for within states for police purposes for proper protection whatever so the question here is uh... is this intrusive verifications still compatible with the military interests in secrecy secrecy is in part required for the very task of the military in the gaining victory in armed conflict and there may be the fear about did too much loss of secrecy that the potential enemy could learn about weak spots in the in the military system that could be exploited for surprise attack the general question is and I pose it as a question that it needs to be researched is the present international system capable of coping with the dangers of revolutionary technologies in the long run if not we have two alternatives increasing military and technology threats terrorist threats think of pre deployed military robots micro robots inside the military systems of deployment and ready to strike at any time or think of molecular hackers distributing unknown infectious agents that act generally or selectively or we learn to organize global security in a similar way as within states was a monopoly of legitimate violence with a democratised UNO and international criminal law with right to act within states voluntarily reduced sovereignty of course this is a long difficult path first trends we have already and i think an ethical approach should promote our steps in this direction side remark uh... I find it interesting that military applications intentional destructive uses are not yet systematically looked at in nanotechnology ethical, legal, and societal aspects research I call on you to add this to your research agendas one needs to follow-up military R&Ds and nano technology in various countries and and investigate preventive arms control so summarizing i think an ethical approach to military uses should put the highest priority on the avoidance of large scale war given political will arms control with traditional verification methods will be able to contain the most dangerous military applications for one or two decades but in the long run international security may require a fundamental change in the international system thanks for your attention