Small Security: Nanotechnology and Future Defense (2002)

Overview Scientists believe that nanotechnology will soon give humans the ability to move and combine individual atoms and molecules into microscopically tiny mechanical, electrical, and biological machines that will replace many of today's production processes and tools. Although current work is focused on materials, optics, and electronics, nanotechnology eventually will find applications throughout society. Advances in nanotechnology will feed back into conventional industry, which in turn will demand and promote further advances in nanotechnology in a cycle that is familiar from the silicon revolution of recent decades. This time, however, the cycle will operate more rapidly and produce even more far-reaching change. Computers based on nanotechnology will be smaller and more powerful and will accelerate advances in nanotechnology itself. Even without computers, nanotechnology will allow incorporation of a kind of intelligence into materials that will react to and influence their environment in complex and predictable ways, much as biological organisms do. Taken a step further, nanoscale robots, or nanobots, will be able to operate autonomously to inspect, mend, or destroy targeted substances. Biological nanobots will do the same operating on DNA instructions. Both types of nanobots will be able to replicate themselves. Such revolutionary capabilities will produce change that can be predicted only in its magnitude, not its details. The Internet already assures the nearly instantaneous and universal dispersion of information; nanotechnology will extend and ramify the Web until it becomes an encompassing fog of interconnection that will take globalization to its extreme. Today, information and pollution have no national boundaries. Before many years, the same will be true of another of humanity's constructs, nanotechnology. The Beginning of a Technological Revolution Advances in integrated electronic circuit design have yielded production processes at the microscopic level. That is, many electronic components are measured in micrometers, or millionths of a meter. Though such products may be minuscule, a visitor to a typical factory today easily can understand what is being manufactured by watching the fabricating process. Soon, however, that may not be the case. Science and technology rapidly are moving beyond microtechnology to nanotechnology, or nanotech, which deals with production in the range from 5 microns to 50 nanometers, or 50 billionths of a meter. (1) Scientists believe that the ability to move and combine individual atoms and molecules will revolutionize the production of virtually every manufactured object and usher in a new industrial revolution at least as significant as the silicon revolution of the last (2) Mihail Roco, nanotech advisor to the White House, predicts, Because of nanotechnology, we'll see more changes in the next 30 years than we saw in all of the last century. Though there is some uncertainty about when the technology will mature, (3) nanotechnology is likely to be the manufacturing wave of the future. In recognition of its importance, the National Nanotechnology Initiative pumped almost half a billion dollars into research in the year 2000 alone. (4) Industry leaders believe that in 10 to 15 years, the global market for nanotech products will exceed $1 trillion annually. Nanotech has potential implications for every area of human activity, but initial work is being concentrated in medicine, materials (and nanostructured chemical catalysts), electronics, and optics, all of which intersect with the interests of the national security community. In the nanomedicine area, nanoscale objects made of inorganic materials can serve in biomedical research, disease diagnosis, and therapy. (5) Drugs will be delivered with nanoparticles that will carry the active ingredient to just the right location in the body. Minuscule building blocks may someday repair human tissues. …