Nanotechnology: The Weapon of the Future

Let us suppose that in 1933, when Hitler came to power, the United States didn't have a single soldier or a single weapon.

In 1933, Einstein and his family were living outside Germany and he came to the United States, biding time, when there was an anti-Semitic looting in Germany, but The New York Times printed the statements of members of the newly formed Nazi government who condemned the looting and promised law and order.

Einstein was inclined to return to Germany, but their home was also looted. So he stayed in the United States.

In an Aug. 2, 1939 letter to President Roosevelt about the possibility of development of nuclear weapons, Einstein mentioned "Joliot in France." Joliot was married to a daughter of Marie Curie, who had received for her "work on radioactivity" two Nobel prizes — in 1903 and 1911! With the help of Einstein and other émigré scientists, nuclear weapons could perhaps have been developed in the United States not between 1939 and 1945, but between 1934 and 1940, and Germany would have accepted unconditional surrender as did Japan in 1945.

It should be recalled that in Japan any official who showed cowardice was to commit suicide by cutting open his stomach, and suicidal soldiers were part of the armed forces. So the surrender of Japan was not easy.

In 1945, the United States made a crucial geostrategic discovery: it is possible to defeat a country such as Japan just with a singular weapon. That weapon soon became obsolete in this role, since it could not find an attacked country's secret repository of nuclear weapons able to destroy the attacking country. That is, nuclear weapons could not circumvent Mutual Assured Destruction.

So the geostrategic goal of today is to find a weapon that would be as unexpected as were U.S. nuclear bombs for Japan in 1945, but that would be able to circumvent Mutual Assured Destruction.

Having forced Japan to surrender unconditionally, the United States had not converted it into its colony or part of its territory. But the annihilation of the West as an independent entity is China's goal. Why?

Millennia or even centuries ago, the population of China knew nothing about the outside world except that its inhabitants were savages, unable to make even porcelain (which they still call "china") or silk. These savages outside China discovered the gas for warming the food and for lighting 21 centuries after it was used in China.

Today? In our age of radio and the Internet, it is impossible to insulate the Chinese from the West. Hence many Chinese believe that in the West there is freedom (recall the Tiananmen Square movement). Now, freedom has magic overtones: a Chinese can think: "If we had freedom in China, I would . . ."

Another vulnerability of a dictatorship is its lack of legitimacy. An emperor or a monarch was legitimate if he/she was the oldest son/daughter of a previous emperor or a monarch. In the United States, statesmen are elected by a majority.

Dictators have no legitimacy, and to preserve their dictatorial power, they have to annihilate the free West or to force its surrender unconditionally.

"I know what has happened," a day-dreamer may say. "Eric Drexler, the Einstein of nanotechnology, sent a letter to President Bush to warn him of the possibility of the development of nano weapons in China, just as Einstein warned President Roosevelt of the possibility (no, not of certainty) of the development of nuclear weapons in Germany. Accordingly, Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project. The fatal nano danger of China was thus averted, just as was the fatal nuclear danger of Germany and Japan."

The reality? Drexler published his major study in 1986, and recently, 20 years later, I received by the Internet its edited version. The book is entitled optimistically "Engines of Creation," but contains one chapter, entitled "Engines of Destruction," about nano weapons. That chapter ruined Drexler's scientific career — in the West. Said Drexler about nano weapons that the U.S. "refusal to develop them" is "the equivalent of unilateral disarmament," and the outcome could be nothing less than "the destruction of the United States."

On the other hand, the photographs of Drexler could be seen at research centers of China, and all of his books and articles are on the Chinese Internet in English with Chinese explications. Another scientist of genius instead of Drexler could go to China to live and work there for a fabulous pay that only a pop dancer or a TV host may get in the United States. But Drexler loves freedom and is a political thinker. So let's see how low he has been socially falling in the United States.

First take the year of 1992. Drexler had published his 556-page volume, as a mathematical basis of "Nanosystems." He presented his theories in Congress before the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space. Al Gore, the chairman of the Subcommittee, expressed his enthusiasm and vowed to fund the "Nanhattan Project," based on Drexler's Foresight Institute.

Now take the year 2007. In an e-mail I received on June 12, 2007 as a member of the Foresight Institute, it is said that the Institute was founded in 1986, but Drexler is not even mentioned as though he, the founder of nanotechnology, let alone the Foresight Institute, had never existed.

Yes, Congress began to allocate billions of dollars every year on nanotechnology — yet not a penny on molecular nano weapons research, but on the production of commercial "nanotech" goods such as suntan lotion, ski wax, or paint.

The producers of such "nanotech" goods fear that Congress might allocate part of those annual billions of dollars for military nano research, and hence some of them smear Drexler as much as their imagination can go. Thus the "nanotech venture capitalist" E. Mark Modzelewski said that Drexler's theories are "a wino's claims on skid row [flophouses frequented by bums and drunks] that bugs are crawling under his skin."

In his e-mail to me, Modzelewski wrote something similar when I wrote in my column that he is one of those Western money-makers who are ready, for the sake of their bad temper, to annihilate the West and themselves, along with all of their money.

You can e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net.