The fact that an inexperienced and untested young man may now have his hands on North Korea’s nuclear football, with the country’s leadership determined as ever not to suffer the fate of East Germany’s?
The near collapse of relations between the United States and Pakistan, which is making nuclear weapons faster than any other country even as it hovers on the brink of being a failed state?
No, for this blogger’s money, the scariest story of all in 2011 came at the very end of the year, with the news that the bird flu virus had been genetically modified–without a great deal of effort, evidently in just a handful of steps–so that the germ now could be transmitted from one mammal to another as an aerosol.
Back in the good old days, when it was generally assumed that those possessing weapons of mass destruction would not dare use them if their use were self-destructive, the bird flu news would not have been especially alarming.
But we no longer live in those good old days, and it’s not just a matter of Islamist suicide bombing. There have been other sects proclaiming apocalyptic visions, notably Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo. Suicidal Islamists may be misguided but their attitudes and passions are not unintelligible. Aum Shinrikyo was truly irrational–and yet it attracted highly skilled technologists into its ranks, it sought weapons of mass destruction, and it did not shy away from self-destructive acts.
The bird flu news was scary enough to prompt Science magazine to reluctantly depart from its normal policy and seriously consider, at governmental urging, withholding some of the details of how exactly the virus was genetically modified. “Editors at the journal Science are taking very seriously a request by the U.S. National Security Advisory Board,” they said
As for this humble blogger, he was immediately reminded of a noted paper the Stanford historian David Holloway published in the late 1970s about “the dogs that did not bark”: Holloway, working on a history of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program under Stalin, found that it was the decision of western scientists to stop publishing atomic research in the early 1940s that tipped Soviet scientists off to the fact that a nuclear weapons development program–the Manhattan Project–was being launched.
The scary thing about the airborne bird flu virus is not merely that it can be made and has been made, but that millenarian fanatics now know it can be done and has been done. The National Security Advisory Board’s request and Science’s reaction confirm the gravity of the bird flu development.
