On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:30:01 GMT, bealoid <signup@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>assume a well funded group, with staff and equipment. (For example, look
>at someone like Aum Shin Ryko cult managing to aerosolise Anthrax into
air
>for 24 hours.)
>How hard is it for them to get a bunch of virus / bacteria / fungal
spores
>and 'gene hack' them into something really vicious - spreads like
measles,
>infects about 80% of people it contacts, kills 60% of infected within 4
>weeks, leaves the rest immune from future attacks, but with severly
>compromised breathing (eg COPD) and with other weaknesses.
Virtually impossible with any existing or forseeable near-term technology.
>Obviously I don't want anything that can help real terrorists (I'm in the
>UK, and that stuff is illegal over here) but a list of dificulties
they're
>run into would be useful.
Well, you might want to look at Aum Shinrikyo. They managed to aerosolize
Anthax into air for twenty-four hours, *repeatedly*, and nobody noticed.
Then they fell back on fifty-year-old chemical technology, produced IIRC
three gallons of Sarin nerve gas, released it in a subway, and managed to
kill a whopping twelve people. Nitwit Palestinians with nitrate-and-sugar
pipe bombs have managed to do more.
And Aum Shinrikyo is the dream (=nightmare) case for this sort of thing.
A staff of trained professional scientists, megabucks of funding, years
to prepare, and essentially no police scrutiny.
The sort of problems they'll run into? To misquote Barbie, "Science Is
Hard". And Mad Science is even harder.
First off, science requires specialized tools and materials. And everyone
in the business knows what those tools and materials are good for, so if
you go out and buy the right tools and materials for the job, you might as
well take out an advertisement in the trade press explaining what you are
planning to do.
If what you're planning to do is to make nerve gas, or weaponized anthrax
or some new SuperGerm, that's a Bad Plan. So you need to make, not just
your nerve gas or whatever, but all the specialized tools and materials
that will be required. Or steal them, most likely from guarded sites.
Or buy all of them plus a much larger set of "red herring" tools and
materials from multiple suppliers through multiple front companies.
And when it comes time to actually make the nerve gas, or build the tools
to make the nerve gas, you will find that the stuff published in the
science texts and journals is not really the equivalent of a cookbook
recipe. Or, perhaps, it *is* the equivalent of a cookbook recipe, as
seen by a bachelor whose mother never introduced him to the kitchen.
How much is a "dash", and what does "simmer" mean?
Point being, there's a *huge* ammount of critical information that never
gets written down, on account of A: there's too damn much of it to write
down, and B: anyone who is legitimately going to be using the data will
be an expert in the field who's spent the past twenty years learning all
the unwritten stuff or a student working under the supervision of such an
expert, and C: the author is only a phone call away for help with any
problems that come up.
If you're trying to brew a batch of nerve gas in your bathtub, and you
try to call the guy who wrote the seminal paper on the subject back in
the '70s for advice, you are probably not going to get the answers you
are looking for. You probably are going to be getting a phone call from
the police pretty soon.
So you'd better actually be the expert with twenty years' experience in
the field, and even then it's going to be a Hard Problem. Your experience
is probably only in a somewhat-related field, and the circumstances mean
that what you are trying to do is only somewhat like what the texts and
journals describe. About half of what you're doing, you'll be inventing
from scratch.
Most inventors, especially of advanced weapons systems, fail.
And if you fail while trying to make weaponized anthrax in your garage,
you may not get to try, try again. How good is the homemade safety gear
you pieced together from the incomplete information in the textbooks?
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*John.Schilling@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
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