Putting North Korea in perspective – Penticton Western News
Wacky dictators pose less of a threat than research into deadly virus
A mere two nuclear weapons, so primitive and clumsy that they are probably only deliverable by truck, are not usable for attack. Their only sensible purpose is to deter an attack, and North Korea’s are not very credible even in that role. All very well, the intelligence analysts say, but what if the people who control the weapons are crazy?
Well, Kim Il-sung’s understanding of the rest of the world was severely limited, and so was Kim Yong-il’s. Kim Jong-un may be no better. But for 60 years now North Korea has not attacked anybody. They can’t be all that crazy.
When the H5N1 virus first appeared in 1996, there was a global panic, for it killed about 60 per cent of the people it infected. The panic subsided when it turned out that the virus could only be spread by very close physical contact between people; you were most unlikely to catch it by sitting next to someone on a bus.
It would have been very different if the virus had been as infectious as the common cold, which is usually spread by tiny water droplets coughed out by the infected person. Since H5N1 was not a “airborne” virus, it killed only a few hundred people, not a few hundred million — but viruses can mutate. How easy would it be for H5N1 to mutate into an “airborne” global killer?
That’s the question that Dr Fouchier set out to answer. He caused deliberate mutations in the virus and then repeatedly passed it manually from one lab animal to another — and quite soon, he had what he was looking for.
That was the point of the experiment, of course. The research, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was intended to discover just how likely such a mutation of the virus was.
The U.S. government’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has just ordered key details of the research to be omitted before publication, so that terrorists cannot use the information to create their own global quick-killer virus. The exact gene sequences and the exact details of the experiments will therefore be known only to the few hundred people who have already seen them. No doubt they can all be trusted.
But this is a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. There are probably several terrorist organizations, and dozens of governments, that can duplicate Fouchier’s research now that they know how he did it. As former arms control researcher Mark Wheelis of the University of California, Davis, said: “Blocking publication may provide some small increment of safety, but it will be very modest compared to the benefits of not doing the work in the first place.”
Putting North Korea in perspective – Penticton Western News
Wacky dictators pose less of a threat than research into deadly virus
A mere two nuclear weapons, so primitive and clumsy that they are probably only deliverable by truck, are not usable for attack. Their only sensible purpose is to deter an attack, and North Korea’s are not very credible even in that role. All very well, the intelligence analysts say, but what if the people who control the weapons are crazy?
Well, Kim Il-sung’s understanding of the rest of the world was severely limited, and so was Kim Yong-il’s. Kim Jong-un may be no better. But for 60 years now North Korea has not attacked anybody. They can’t be all that crazy.
When the H5N1 virus first appeared in 1996, there was a global panic, for it killed about 60 per cent of the people it infected. The panic subsided when it turned out that the virus could only be spread by very close physical contact between people; you were most unlikely to catch it by sitting next to someone on a bus.
It would have been very different if the virus had been as infectious as the common cold, which is usually spread by tiny water droplets coughed out by the infected person. Since H5N1 was not a “airborne” virus, it killed only a few hundred people, not a few hundred million — but viruses can mutate. How easy would it be for H5N1 to mut
ate into an “airborne” global killer?
That’s the question that Dr Fouchier set out to answer. He caused deliberate mutations in the virus and then repeatedly passed it manually from one lab animal to another — and quite soon, he had what he was looking for.
That was the point of the experiment, of course. The research, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was intended to discover just how likely such a mutation of the virus was.
The U.S. government’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has just ordered key details of the research to be omitted before publication, so that terrorists cannot use the information to create their own global quick-killer virus. The exact gene sequences and the exact details of the experiments will therefore be known only to the few hundred people who have already seen them. No doubt they can all be trusted.
But this is a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. There are probably several terrorist organizations, and dozens of governments, that can duplicate Fouchier’s research now that they know how he did it. As former arms control researcher Mark Wheelis of the University of California, Davis, said: “Blocking publication may provide some small increment of safety, but it will be very modest compared to the benefits of not doing the work in the first place.”