Was SARS-CoV-2 the first shot in the next world war?
Zoonosis? Gain of function laboratory accident? Potential bioweapon gone awry? Only the Chinese know, for sure, and they aren't talking. Gee, I wish we had one of those doomsday machines.
Over the weekend, I came across a very worthy op-ed piece in the Washington Post: The U.S. could soon face a threat ‘more powerful’ than nuclear weapons. In this piece, authors Ashish Jha (Dean of the Brown School of Public Health and Biden administration COVID-19 advisor), Matt Pottinger (deputy NatSec advisor to Trump), and Matthew McKnight (head of biosecurity at Ginkgo Bioworks and fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School) lay out a case for SARS-CoV-2 as potentially the first bullet in the initial global conflict of the 21st century.
There is a great deal of uncommon nuance and a lot of solid information in this piece, which is why I wholeheartedly recommend it as a good use of your time. And while Jha, Pottinger, and McKnight are hardly the first in their respective fields to make the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have been enhanced via gain of function for other than completely benevolent reasons, they may have made one of the better arguments for it.
The recent developments of relatively low-cost gene-editing techniques coupled with the ubiquitous emerging power of artificial intelligence have made the potential for deadly biological weapons a more potent threat than at any time since the days of the Cold War (and then some). While I personally know very little about designing and producing bioweapons, I do know something about nuclear weapons. If it’s as easy to manufacture deadly biological agents as I think that it’s becoming, forget about nukes. The most potent WMD threat that we face from here moving forward is, hands down, from bioweapons.
I have long favored the argument that nuclear weapons have made the world a much safer place for the last eighty years. The amount of devastation wrought in even a limited nuclear conflict between nuclear-armed nations would have been immense, lasting, and, in many ways, unthinkable. There’s a strong case to be made that mutually assured destruction has worked, at least as far as raising the bar for all-out conflicts between nations. And as much as it seems to be every jihadist’s and fledgling Marxists’ wet dream to gain control of a nuke, I’ve never personally considered nuclear terrorism that much of a threat (though certainly not for lack of trying). That’s simply because nukes are difficult. It’s one area of the human condition where the great wheel in the sky seems to have our back. That and very short-wavelength lasers (Einstein coefficients are a bear).
Nuclear weapons fall into three broad categories: fission weapons (atomic bombs), fission/fusion weapons (hydrogen bombs), and dirty bombs (low-explosive, high residual radiation). All three of these are sufficiently difficult to design, source, deploy, and detonate as to be generally available only to nations possessing advanced scientific and technical capabilities and therefore a lot to lose in any nuclear conflict. To own nukes is to not want to use them.
Fission bombs, like the one detonated over Hiroshima, work by forcing subcritical (highly radioactive but non-explosive) masses of some fissile material, e.g., uranium or plutonium, into close enough proximity as to form a supercritical (explosive) mass. All initial nuclear weapons were of this type. A-bombs are characterized by a big bang, lots of blast radiation, and lots of residual radiation.
Fission/fusion weapons use implosion techniques, typically by way of an initial fission event, to fuse hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, into helium, creating explosive energy. Fusion or thermonuclear bombs are more sophisticated than fission bombs and generally have much higher explosive yields along with radiation.
Dirty bombs are easier to create than either of the above. A dirty bomb could be in the form of a barely critical fission explosion from a low-grade fission weapon or could be in the form of conventional explosives imbedded with radioactive materials. There is some evidence that North Korea faked a number of its early nuclear tests in this manner so as to appear to be a potent nuclear power that they were probably not.
For either fission or fusion bombs, some of the mass of the nuclear materials is converted into energy at a rate of:
where m is mass and c is the speed of light in free space—a very large number, squared. The latter term makes the right side of this, Einstein’s famous mass-energy equation, of enormous magnitude even when the mass is relatively small. The conversion of as little as a kilogram of mass to energy, for example, releases:
a very large amount of energy.
In a fission event, the mass of the elements formed after the fission of the heavier element into lighter elements (and accompanying explosion) is less than the mass of the initial element. In a fusion event, the mass of the helium formed during the fusion event is less than the mass of the deuterium, tritium, and other particles that were used to create it. Either way, the amount of energy release is several orders of magnitude greater than that created by the rearrangement of chemical bonds in conventional explosives and is accompanied by a significant release of radiation.
Though nukes yield a big bang for the buck, you may rest assured that if you lob one at a nuclear-capable state, they are going to lob one back at you if they can. Most civilized societies possess very little in terms of sense of humor when it comes to nuclear conflict. I think that a strong case may be made for this being the origin of FAFO, which sounds as if it could have been nose art on the Enola Gay.
Another problem with nukes is that, try as you might, it’s difficult to cover your tracks should you attempt to convertly deploy one. Nuclear weapons leave behind radioactive fingerprints. The less sophisticated the weapon, the easier it is to discern from where the nuclear materials originated.
Within a few hours of a terrorist group or rogue nation detonating a low-yield nuke or dirty bomb that they got from somebody else, the rest of the world would know the probable source of the nuclear materials in those weapons. At that point, the likelihood of some preening nuclear broker having a great deal of real estate involuntarily redeveloped into a series of self-lighting, glass parking lots with decades of glowing in the dark becomes something to consider.
But not so with biological weapons. With tools and techniques currently available, we are on the threshold of a relatively low bar for producing virulent biological weapons. You don’t need a huge amount of engineering and technical infrastructure to modify existing viruses into something much more lethal and easier to spread than what is found in nature. You don’t need entire national laboratories full of supercomputers dedicated to ensuring that your expensive and difficult-to-maintain weapons will work if needed. You need computers, easy-to-hide small laboratories, and some human expertise.
If you want something to be worried about, forget climate change, culture wars, and the sorry state of the Spotify top-ten and spin all of this around in your noggin for a while.
We may have already encountered the first consequence of this dangerous new frontier. If you asked me four years ago, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the source of SARS-CoV-2, I maintained that it was probably a leak from a lab with inadequate biosecurity measures using gain-of-function to study coronaviruses. This for the laudable goal of getting ahead of future outbreaks. Given the available facts and evidence, this seemed, at least to me, to be the most plausible explanation for the pandemic.
I wrote off those who saw something more sinister in all of this as being out where the buses don’t run. Now, I’m not so sure.
Here’s the thing. At some level, the Chinese are probably aware that their military would have only one great advantage in going toe to toe with the USA and our allies in any future conflict: numbers. I think that, for the most part, our military technology is the best in the world because, a few twists and turns aside, it was developed in a free-market, competitive system. I think that our troops are better trained and, more importantly, battle-tested than Chinese troops. It’s one thing to fight unarmed Uyghurs in disputed areas of your own home turf. It’s quite another to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.
I think that the Chinese are right now studying what’s happened to Russia in Ukraine and thinking hard about the humiliation the CCP would suffer if something similar happened during an invasion of Taiwan. Do you think that Xi Jinping wants to stoop to importing 11,000 North Korean troops to help him invade Taiwan?
The smart thing to do when you have aspirations of world dominance but doubts about your capabilities is to keep all options open. So it makes sense that the CCP and Chinese military would take an interest in any research on biologicals that could be easily weaponized—especially if they knew they could be a step ahead of contagion with vaccines already in place. And I seriously doubt that the Chinese are going to let any current international agreements on biological weapons tie their hands. I’m quite sure that they view treaties just like they view copyright infringement.
It’s all what I would do if I were them.
This happens to coincide with persistent rumors in our intelligence community to the effect that the Chinese military has long taken a keen interest in what goes on in biosecurity labs in China. And why not? Biological weapons are increasingly easy to manufacture and spread, can have tailored targeting and virulence, and are difficult to initially detect and prevent from spreading among the targeted populations.
Even better for the aggressor, vectoring biological agents back to their source is problematic; just see COVID-19 for details on that. And if the Chinese are even the least bit worried about getting caught in some future biological conflict, I’m sure that their newfound allies in the ain’t-afraid-to-die jihadist set would be happy to earn their 72 virgins and a goat (or is it one virgin and 72 goats? I always get that confused) by taking on the Great Satan with biological weapons in their stead.
Vaccines? We don’t need no stinking vaccines.
To be clear, this is almost entirely supposition on my part. There is no evidence that the Chinese government encouraged researchers at Wuhan or anywhere else to perform investigations on coronaviruses for both public health and potential bioweapons purposes. There is, in fact, not sufficient evidence to even conclude with certainty where SARS-CoV-2 came from. It could be zoonosis, it could be an accidental lab leak, or it could be something worse. The only people who know for sure are the Chinese, and they aren’t talking or cooperating.
All I do know is that everything that I thought I understood about the world got dinged during COVID. It’s becoming difficult for me to discern between made-up crazy and actual crazy in world events, since the differences between them are becoming markedly less. So do I think that SARS-CoV-2 originated in nature? I doubt it. Accidental lab leak? That’s where I’d put my money.
Or, bioweapon gone awry? These days, I’m not ruling anything out.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
Outstanding!
I may be mistaken, but I thought it was a 72 year old virgin!