The Speculist

The Technology Solution

The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

I quote these words from The Lord of the Rings in reference to the horrifying terrorist attacks that occurred last week in Spain, although they could be applied equally well to any number of atrocities that have been perpetrated by Al Qaeda and their ilk. The movie version of Theoden’s rhetorical question may be even more to the point: “What can men do against such reckless hate?” What, indeed? Stephen Green, starting with the (increasingly likely) assumption that it was Al Qaeda who carried out the Madrid bombings, has proposed an answer — kick ass and take names, and never mind about the taking names.

But there is no appeasing people who kill because they think the blood of infidels looks prettier splattered on a wall. There is no negotiating with people who think you're less than human. We cannot show even a hint of weakness, when our self-declared enemies think our liberal natures make us weak.

VodkaPundit reader John Cunningham amplifies these comments and comes to a conclusion that Stephen never intended:

It's way past time to take Islamofascism seriously. We have to drain the swamp where the vermin breed—nuke Mecca, Media, Riyadh, non-nuke wipeouts of all govt areas in Damascus, Teheran, Cairo, raise a foreign legion mass army, officered by Americans for a long-term reeducation in the Mideast, a no-bullshit war to the knife. Foreign muslims out of the US, without exception. Citizen muslims get a free ticket and $$ to leave, or onto reservations, with serious fences around them.

Stephen rejects this idea out of hand as being the “the nuke 'em all and don't let even God sort 'em out” approach, which he describes as being as reprehensible as the one we’re fighting. But several readers take issue with his objections:

We have to also admit, and probably should proclaim loudly, that Cunningham's plan is Plan B. Either the middle east transforms itself into freedom loving and peaceful democracies. Or else it will be wiped off the face of the earth. Yes that would mean killing a lot of innocent Muslims.

—-

To publicly denounce the "final solution" is to go to a street fight with boxing gloves. The laws of Darwin have not been suspended because we have the UN and cheese in aerosol cans. MAD, highly modified, still has merit in a world of "stateless" mass destruction, in that it rekindles the sensibilities of the rational majority within which the terrorists hide - eliminating aid and comfort to the enemy.

—-

If, at some point a line is crossed and your response becomes to make islam a religion as dead as that of the Maya than what do we save by waiting? I submit that after first use of nuclear weapons by islamofascists extinction of islam should be a real possibility because that way at least some will be saved that would be killed by them otherwise.

Our friend Karl Gallagher comments that he can visualize scenarios in which he would approve of such an approach, but that he would rather we didn’t “get our souls that dirty.”

I think he’s right to be so concerned. Personally, I’m with Stephen.

First off, I consider any talk of a concentration camps or a “final solution” to be utterly beyond the pale. Whatever the right course of action is — and I don’t pretend to be an expert — we don’t need to go borrowing tactics or language from the freaking Nazis. Another commenter wrote that we should emulate Rome in its war against Carthage. Granted, the Roman Empire may not have been quite as monstrous as Nazi Germany, but that isn't saying much, now is it?

The question of whether, when, and how to use nukes is a tricky one. Again, I don’t claim any particular expertise in military strategy or tactics. But I don’t mind going on the record saying that I think massive pre-emptive or retaliatory strikes against the entire Muslim world is a Very Bad Idea. Which doesn’t mean that we should rule out ever using them. We may be left with no alternative.

That’s really the problem: lack of alternatives. All the choices we have are 20th century vintage (or older). Putting all moral considerations aside for a moment, nukes, concentration camps, and Final Solutions are out of date. They are yesterday’s answers. And they weren’t — to put it mildly — particularly good answers even then.

All this talk of concentration camps and massive use of nukes comes from a desire to achieve two basic aims: neutralize the terrorists and eliminate their infrastructure. President Bush’s War on Terror, as it is currently conceived and is being prosecuted, is working towards those two aims. The more extreme approaches are raised out of frustration by those fearing that the current effort may be brought to an unsuccessful conclusion, or that it may not be enough. What can we do, they ask, to ensure that our aims will be met?

Well, I won’t deny that unleashing our own brand of reckless hate could be one way of making sure the terrorists are neutralized and their infrastructure is eliminated. But I wonder if technology couldn’t provide us some less morally compromising means of achieving the same ends. Here are the options that I would like to see us add to our arsenal, options that could be ours in a few years to a few decades if we were to put the appropriate resources behind nanotechnology and related research.

Neutralize the Terrorists

We could make the US virtually terror-proof. It would require a couple of things we don’t currently have:

Truly Secure Borders
First off, we would need to plug any gaps we currently have in aircraft or boats arriving illegally in this country. I don’t know how big a problem that currently is, but we presumably have the capability to fix it now. It would just be a matter of allocating resources. All cargo, luggage, and personal effects entering the country would come through channels, meaning they would be subject to a quick and fool-proof scan — down to the molecular level — which would not allow the tiniest trace of questionable nuclear, biological, or chemical material past. An array of billions of nanoscale machines would literally pass through each item, providing an inside view of a thoroughness that no X-ray or ultrasound could ever approach. The procedure would be quick and completely non-intrusive. People would never even know that they and their items were being scanned.

Truly Secure Public Places
The bad news is that we’re going to lose what shreds of personal privacy now remain. (If it makes you feel any better, we probably never had as much as we thought, anyway.) The good news is that the scanning technology mentioned above will be just about everywhere. So if sleeper cells are currently sitting on nasty stuff already in the country, or even if they get ambitious and start manufacturing WMDs, they’ll never get anywhere with them. Today, a murderous psychopath in Spain or Israel can strap some explosives to his chest and hop onto the train or bus (or into the pizza parlor) of his choice. Nano-scale machines will operate ubiquitously in every public place, set to detect the slightest indication of danger and relay intelligence of it either to the cops or mechanized agents who can step in and shut down the would-be perpetrator. In later implementations, the detection and neutralization functions will both be handled by nanomachines — meaning that the terrorist’s weapon will be deactivated before he even know what’s happening. A terrorist will have less chance of getting a bomb (or other weapon) onto public transportation or into a shopping mall than a criminal today would have of wheeling a Spanish-Armada-era cannon into a police station and loading and firing the thing. Airplane cockpits will be truly impenetrable, not that a would-be hijacker will be able to get a box-cutter, much less a pair of explosive shoes, on board in the first place. But even if an unarmed aggressor decided to try to do some damage to his fellow passengers, he would be taken out of action by a microscopic “anesthesiologist” before he ever knew what hit him.

I’m painting in broad strokes here. The capabilities described above will require some major breakthroughs in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. There are many things that the terrorists could do to try to work around these limitations, and many more scenarios of how we could use the technology to stop them, but you get the idea. The point is that there are plausible technological ways of rendering the weapons and tactics of terrorists useless.

Eliminate Their Infrastructure

That, however, is only half the battle. Once we make the US and such of our allies as we deem it prudent to share this technology with terror-proof, we still need to close down the infrastructure that creates terrorists. Otherwise, we’ll be in a waiting game — afraid that some Saddam or Osama clone might get his hands on military-grade nano or AI. We need to press the technological advantage while we have it.

Eliminating the jihadi terrorist infrastructure need not involving killing millions of people or trying to make Islam a dead religion. Perhaps there is a reformist option. Many have pointed out that if there truly is a peace-loving, non-aggressive core of Muslim faithful worldwide — and I for one believe that there is — then the real trick here is to get them to take responsibility for shutting down their murderous coreligionists and the system that produces them. Killing the majority of peaceful Muslims will not help in this effort, nor will destroying their religious shrines.

Rather than nuking Mecca, why not cover it with a diamondoid geodesic dome that reaches, say, a couple thousand feet or so down into the ground? We could then announce that the dome will be removed exactly ten years after free elections are held in the last Islamic country that falls into line with a list of requirements, which might include:

Freedom of religion
Equality for women
Free elections
Rule of law

Islam isn’t killed; it’s just put on hold while the Islamic world catches up with the rest of us. The ten years will be extended by one for every life lost due to terrorist action (or every life lost fighting terrorism) in the intervening period. It will also be extended by five years (a very conservative number) for every terrorist attack foiled in the interim. Muslims will demand that the reforms take place so that they can fulfill the obligations of their religion; when they have purged the jihadis from their ranks and demonstrated their ability to participate in global civil society, the dome will be removed.

Alternatively, if a few decades go by and tremendous progress is made in some countries, while others remain strongholds of repression and violence, we might tweak the strategy. Maybe we’ll take the dome off Mecca and put domes in place over the hold-out-countries.

Problem solved.

Posted by Phil at March 16, 2004 10:29 AM | TrackBack