Abstract
Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Contemporary Security Studies), by Jürgen Altmann, Routledge, 238 pages, 2006, $125.
Deeply researched and carefully worded, Military Nanotechnology is an overview of an emerging technology that could trigger a new arms race and gravely threaten international security and stability. Jurgen Altmann's academic style allows the reader to assess nanotechnology's perilous military implications in plain, dispassionate terms. What we face might sound like science fiction, but, in this book, we have the facts laid bare, and they are hair-raising enough without embellishment.
Altmann, a German physicist at Dortmund University, accomplishes three important objectives: first, an explanation of what nanotechnology is; second, an exploration of the technology's potential military applications; and third, a proposal for arms control that places possible nanotech weapons systems in the context of geopolitical realities. He identifies two kinds of nanotechnology–the first more conventional and along the lines of current chemistry and materials science, and the second more speculative but also more transformative and potentially disruptive.
Altmann appropriately separates his assessments of nanotechnology's military implications into separate categories: those relating to current or conventional nanotechnology and those concerning futuristic molecular nanotechnology (MNT). Although there is a continuum from today's nanotech work to near-future, atomically precise manufacturing, and eventually to nanoscale machinery making powerful products, the comparative impacts on society (and on the military) may not follow a smooth line. Altmann convincingly argues that the profound implications of MNT, while “necessarily general, speculative and incomplete,” must be taken into account. Moreover, MNT's fundamentally new control of physical materials and manufacturing could lead to “qualitatively new means and methods of warfare.”
For example, Altmann envisions “damaging systems on all size scales, from specially designed warfare molecules via nano-systems” to “micro-and mini-robots to large weapon systems, some inhabited, many autonomous.” These weapons could “move in all media, approaching their targets on and in the ground, on and in water, and in the air.”
But beyond the weapons themselves, MNT's greatest impact on future warfare may come from low-cost, high-volume, exponential manufacturing of weapons systems and related infrastructure. Altmann speculates that if “the production facilities for raw material, feedstock, energy, and final products as well as the transport systems are themselves produced by MNT, a very fast increase of the production and distribution of military goods is possible.” Thus, he warns, “MNT production of nearly unlimited numbers of armaments at little cost would contradict the very idea of quantitative arms control,” and would culminate in a technological arms race beyond control.
MNT's greatest impact on future warfare may come from low-cost, high-volume, exponential manufacturing of weapons systems and related infrastructure.
Given how much may be at stake, Altmann says it “is remarkable that the mainstream science community has practically ignored MNT and related ideas.”
By bringing scholarly attention to MNT, Altmann provides a valuable service. But while that effort is sure to encounter opposition from business and academic interests who prefer to discount such apocalyptic scenarios (in hopes of limiting public fears and preserving their funding streams), it is not actually the most contentious one he makes.
The book's most controversial thesis is not that MNT is plausible and should be taken seriously; it is that the only coherent response to this technology's military implications is to develop global governance structures that supersede existing national powers. “The traditional way of guaranteeing national security–namely the threat of armed force–may no longer be compatible with the advance of technology,” he argues. And since security “can no longer be reliably ensured by national armed forces,” he prescribes “strengthened international institutions and international law, in particular criminal law with prosecution of perpetrators, moving into a direction toward an international monopoly of legitimate force, strong enough to prevent or punish threats or use of illegal force.”
Even if this ambitious goal could be achieved, we would still arrive at a conundrum, which Altmann acknowledges: how to create a system that, lacking all but arbitrary limits, will not devolve into absolute global tyranny. For example, “MNT would provide chances for better treaty verification, e.g. by ubiquitous nano-robots that monitor practically everything. Of course, this would be highly ambiguous and would bring dangers to humans and society by itself.”
While neither he nor anyone else I know of can provide an ultimate answer to this quandary, Altmann does make a strong case for nations on the leading edge of new technologies, including the United States, to consider binding international agreements as a bridge to their own long-term security.
Reluctantly, I must point to two weaknesses that negatively affect the book's worth: one of these, that part of the information is outdated, is to be expected; the other, that he presents an obsolete conception of MNT, is flagrant and disappointing.
Military Nanotechnology provides a useful snapshot of the field circa 2003 (when Altmann finished his research). But considering how fast science and technology are progressing, and how rapidly world events unfold these days, the book was in many ways out-of-date well before it was published. That is unfortunate, but understandable. On the other hand, the mistake of describing and assessing MNT in terms more than a decade outmoded is less easily forgiven.
If you read the book, you'll have to make some mental adjustments to the text. Describing MNT, Altmann writes: “Nano-robots move singly and in swarms, universal molecular assemblers self-replicate and produce all kinds of goods using mainly local resources.” That idea dates from the 1980s and has not been part of serious MNT theory since the publication of Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, by engineer and nanotech theorist K. Eric Drexler, in 1992. Altmann makes no mention of more modern concepts of molecular manufacturing, such as the desktop nanofactory, nor of important predecessor technologies like 3-D rapid prototyping (in which a printer-like apparatus can produce complete parts or models from a computer design).
Despite these flaws, Military Nanotechnology makes a valuable contribution by addressing nanotechnology's military implications. Although presented in a dry academic style, Altmann's work contains a wealth of condensed research and crisp reasoning. Given its uniqueness and essential content, Military Nanotechnology deserves a wide audience.