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Nanotechnology and Homeland Security

Review: Nanotechnology and Homeland Security
Daniel Ratner, Mark Ratner, 2004

(Note: The official publication date is 2004, but I picked it up on the shelves about two weeks ago and reviews had been appearing for some weeks before that.)

Two Line Review: Hype. Potentially useful hype, if you're in to that, and interesting reading if it's telling you things you don't already know.

_Nanotechnology and Homeland Security_ has gotten at least one glowing review, foremost among them (in my mind, at least) at Howard Lovy's "Nanobot" blog, which points to another longer review at the electronic version of the print magazine, "Small Times."

I'm not quite sure why.

I like reading popularized science type books, truth be told. They're almost as easy to read as a novel or a biography, even if I keep my engineering and science BS and oversimplification detectors on. If I'm lucky, they'll give me a decent bibliography to go with the broad overview of the subject I'm reading about, so I can dig in with greater detail if I want.

Unfortunately, a lot of nanotech popular books contain an awful lot of hype, since nanotechnology is so nascent a field, so much more theoretical than applied, and so much in the public eye. It can't possibly be difficult to get published writing about nanotechnology, right now. (Any publishers who would like to prove me right, please drop me an e-mail.) This is, in my opinion, one of those books-- a lot of hype, because it can sell.

It's a thin little book, to begin with-- one hundred forty or so pages, which themselves are fairly small without even the benefit of a small typeface. There are some nice color plates in the center of the book, but they're not used to good advantage. As far as I can tell at a glance, each color image is a duplication of something already in the book in black-and-white elsewhere, and even some of the images chosen mystified me-- a graph with a simgle line on it, for instance, is not helped by a color image. Why bother?

The book is technically divided into six chapters, but the first is an introduction of only a few pages, and so is barely worth mentioning. The first broad black mark against the book comes in chapter two when Ratner and Ratner repeat Smalley's critique against strong molecular manufacturing almost verbatim. They even mention the phrases "sticky fingers" and "fat fingers" in order to describe Smalley's basic critique-- that atoms are too small to be manipulated individually, and that the "fingers" needed to do so are both too sticky and too large to do so. They raise similar critiques about command, control, and communication structures, power sources, etc.

Hard core believers in mechanosynthesis would probably froth at the mouth at this. I am not going to spend the space of this review arguing with or supporting their points. However, it is impossible for me to believe that Ratner and Ratner are ignorant of the semi-controversy over these claims, and it annoys me to no end to see even a popular book put down the authors' definitions without even presenting the other side. I think Drexler and Merkle have done a more than adequate job making and making public their case. Omitting it entirely makes the Ratner brothers look like they're hiding from the issue.

They would have done far better to present both sides of the argument, which at a popular level takes no more than three pages, or so, and then said, "We're now going to talk about nanostructures and advanced microbiology applications-- that other stuff is for some other book."

Chapters three through five are essentially application based chapters: conventional battlefield, terrorist defense, and economics/ecologics, respectively. These chapters aren't bad, per se, but they're also not great. They can really be summed up in the following few sentences: "We're going to have lighter, stronger materials and fuels. We're going to have better sensors, and we're going to network them. We're not going to hurt the environment as much, and we'll be able to clean up after ourselves and the evil terrorists much better. Oh, and we're going to make lots of money at it."

None of these statements is untrue. To their credit, they at least try to give some reasonably insightful examples of these ideas in action, and some of the precursor but functioning technologies that are in the pipeline, so it's not all hype. On the other hand, they do fall prey to the, "It's got nanotubes in it! It's better!" trap, more than once, and a number of their examples were so vague that I was left scratching my head when I tried to figure out what they were actually describing at a physical level, and how nanotechnology was really helping.

And, not all of these statements require nanotechnology, per se, in order to come true. While nanotechnology is going to come in very handy for making, say, very small, very cheap chemical and biological weapon sensors for battlefield use, I simply do not believe that I need to invoke nanotechnology in order to network those sensors together at a platoon or company level. I need only cheap conventional semiconductor technology to do that. Likewise, I do not need nanotechnology to develop unmanned air or ground vehicles, nor to network them together. The UAV field is doing just fine without nanotechnology, and though it will doubtlessly be aided by nanotechnology, it can still proceed without it. Likewise the unmanned ground vehicle programs, once they get rolling.

The sixth and final chapter is about ethical, societal and geopolitical concerns. (That's the chapter heading. I didn't see much about geopolitics in there, which is getting to be another vastly overused term.) Given the previous three chapters' unabashed lovefest for nanotech applications, this was probably a good chapter to have for balance, if nothing else. Pointing out that technology is amoral is a good and necessary thing, because it is not very hard at all to point out that advanced technology can be misused by our own governments as much as by the evil terrorists. I'm not sure if I agree with their prescription for some of the problems-- a suite of global organizations designed to track the technology-- but that's a political subject for another time.

Posted by John Novak at December 1, 2003 12:30 AM