Consider an article in a recent issue of Military Review, a journal published by the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth that solicits strategy from a range of international sources. In it, two members of the Chinese army fantasize about what biotechnology might bring to the battlefield:
_ Supersmall bullets that don't tear at tissue, but rather target specific organs, proteins, cells or genes.
_ Substances so precisely genetically engineered that if unleashed on a village, they would harm only one person - say, Osama bin Laden.
_ The so-called ethnic bullet - biological menaces tailored to kill only members of a certain clan or race.
_ Disease-inducing weapons whose effects might be easily reversed - but with an antidote only the weapon maker would possess. A village or city could be faced with the prospect of submission and health or resistance and death.
_ Genetic damage caused by remotely fired ultraviolet, radio or electromagnetic waves.
_ Substances that can make people hopelessly clumsy, painfully forgetful or pitifully docile.
"Biotechnological weapons can cause destruction that is both more powerful and more civilized than that caused by conventional killing methods like gunpowder or nuclear weapons," wrote Guo Ji-wei and Yang Xue-sen.
"A military attack, therefore, might wound an enemy's genes, proteins, cells, tissues and organs, causing more damage than conventional weapons could," wrote the two men, one assigned to the Chinese Third Military Medical University and the other to Southwest Hospital in Chongqing. "However, such devastating nonlethal effects will require us to pacify the enemy through postwar reconstruction efforts and hatred control."
They argue that such biotechnology is not outlawed germ warfare, because it would not unleash random, wide-scale carnage. Rather, they said it would focus on a specific enemy or behavior. The two men suggested such gee-whiz weapons would be more precise and humane.
Among weapons and biotechnology experts, the Chinese authors' predictions of specific breakthroughs seem fanciful for the near future.
Take the ethnic weapons, for example. Geneticists find greater difference from one Frenchman to the next than between Frenchmen in general and Egyptians or Japanese. So singling out an ethnic group might simply prove too complex.
Yet their general theories are not new, nor seen as wildly radical.
