BioWarfare and Cyber Warfare a new Kind Of War: Biowarfare And Info warfare

7Forcing Genie Back Into The Bottle?

So the way forward must be deterrence, plus inspections that can catch cheats before they get too far.²¹ It was when UN inspectors in Iraq made routine monitoring visits on short notices to apparently innocent plants that they started noticing things were amiss. That is what the UN should do in every country under the verification regime now being negotiated.

As the nuclear arms race escalated in the early 1950s, the U.S. launched Atoms for Peace, a drive to promote the good things the atom might do. Whatever one thinks of nuclear power, it is hard to deny that nuclear physics and radioisotopes for medicine and research have brought benefits.

Recent alarm about biological weapons may now give us a similar opportunity. We could call it Germs for Peace.²² Bioweapons have yet to produce a Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. But it is real. It is happening in the U.S. postal services. It may as well be U.S. postal mortem.

Some demented people have tried bioweapons. So countries are now negotiating a long overdue verification agreement to go with the 1972 treaty banning bioweapons. If they succeed, member states will have to declare what they are doing with microbes, and allow investigators in if anyone raises serious suspicions.

But the original treaty was also about the peaceful uses of biology. It called for rich countries to help poor ones combat diseases. This was not merely altruistic. Rich countries wanted poor ones to join the treaty, but most developing countries have more pressing concerns than bioweapons. So the rich nations promised biomedical investment for those that signed.

Little of this ever materialized, but now the poor countries want action as part of the planned verification agreement. This time it may happen, in the form of a plan to help poor countries to monitor diseases.

In Germs for Peace, rich countries stand to benefit as much as poor ones, as emerging infections caused by novel pathogens are one of the 21^st century’s more egalitarian menaces. The world is now a global village and physical distances have shrunk thanks to modern transportation system. To face emerging diseases, we need to keep a close watch on infections worldwide. This requires top-quality medical laboratories for diagnosis and epidemiological analysis. These are rare. Even India could not reliably diagnose a suspected pneumonic plague outbreak in 1994. It got foreign help, but fast local action would have been more effective. Africa is especially short of laboratories, yet nearly half the potentially world-threatening, novel infections investigated by the WHO are in Africa or originate from Africa. The peaceful uses part of the bioweapons treaty may yet bring rich and poor together.

The issue is politically sensitive. To assess whether outbreaks are natural or illicit, the epidemiological background has to be ascertained, and this will require international monitors. Developing countries quite rightly want any investment in disease monitoring to be just that, and not a way in for foreign military snoopers or reconnaissance.

The investment, if it happens, will have to be purely civilian. Members of the treaty are discussing collaborating on regional epidemiological laboratories, quite separate from any formal effort to watch for biological attack. Ironically, if this comes to pass, the disease monitoring collaboration may become the biological weapons treaty’s greatest achievement. It may or may not stop biowarriors. But natural diseases are a much deadlier enemy. Any effort to even monitor its onslaught deserves support.

8Cyber Warfare – A Keyboard Is Truly Mightier Than A Gun

Beginning in World War II and continuing throughout the Cold War, the world’s major intelligence agencies - the CIA, KGB’s First Chief Directorate, MI6, etc. - employed the most state-of-the-art technologies available to assemble, communicate and analyze information from friendly and hostile countries. At the same time, counterintelligence agencies - the FBI, KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, MI5, etc. - employed other technologies in efforts to identify and eliminate foreign espionages domestically. The new global economic warfare will see these basic roles continue, but with important changes in four major areas:²³

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  The primary targets of spies for all intelligence services have shifted.
  
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  The traditional roles of “friends and foes” continue to blur.
  
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  New technologies are changing the traditional methods and techniques, the tradecraft, by which spies operate.
  
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  The traditional tradecraft of spies, if still in use, are applied in new ways.
  

8.1The Mighty Electron

The desire of foreign spies to uncover and obtain military secrets will continue, but with critical variations. We are witnessing the migration of a national defensive infrastructure that has historically been based on “bullets” for physical destruction into one based upon “information” for economic sabotage. Success by spies targeting an opponent’s information will ultimately prove more valuable, or detrimental, whichever view you choose to take.