New Armageddon weapons
'Military history teaches us an important lesson,' warns statistician Peter Lewis: 'If a particular weapon system is to be stopped, it needs to be stopped early. The further advanced a weapon system becomes, the more difficult is its suppression. Once a programme has been funded, jobs and careers become linked to it. Bureaucratic inertia takes over. The best time to tackle a weapon is almost before it has left the inventor's mind.'
In a paper, 'The Road from Armageddon', Lewis describes a number of horrifying possible future weapons, about which military speculation has already begun. Some are for the distant future and require assembly in outer space, for instance anti-matter bombs ('the force of the explosion would be equivalent to 43 MT per kilogram of anti-matter destroyed, an efficiency far in excess of uranium or any other nuclear explosive') or black hole bombs ('military theorists have started to speculate about the possibility of using small black holes as weapons, by cutting off their supply of fresh material electrically').
'Ethnic weapons designed to exploit naturally occurring differences in vulnerability among specific population groups'
More readily feasible are transuranic weapons, the use of the isotope californium-252 to produce a nuclear bullet with a force of between one ton and 700 tons of TNT. There has been a fifty-year programme of research into genetic weapons or race bombs by scientists, and with the development of genetic engineering techniques in the last two decades, there is a danger that someone may make a breakthrough which could lead to these weapons becoming feasible - an American military manual describes the possibility of 'ethnic weapons designed to exploit naturally occurring differences in vulnerability among specific population groups.' And for thirty years already there have been experiments with infrasonic radiation weapons, with at least two experimenters suffering severe injuries (the Hungarian government reported that 'calculations have shown that the destruction of human beings would require considerably less expenditure by infrasound weapons than by any existing type of weapon of mass destruction').
Lewis urges the need for groups such as Scientists Against Nuclear Arms to broaden their perspective so as to help ward off the grave threat posed by new weapon systems. Then, as soon as research developed to a point where scientists became aware of possible weaponry applications, draft international agreements and conventions could be prepared to help restrain future military development.
Peter Lewis, Romneya, St Chad's Avenue, Midsomer Norton, Bath, Avon BA3 2HG (tel 0761 413316).
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