by Ryan Sager
Imagine a future where the Iranian regime didn’t need to spend weeks in the streets beating, killing, and jailing protesters to put down the reform movement. Imagine in this future that the beatings would be replaced with something gentler, but ultimately more sinister: non-lethal, weaponized drugs designed to decrease aggression and increase trust.
That’s the future imagined and fretted over in an opinion piece (non-gated, samizdat version here) and editorial (PDF) in the current issue of Nature.
Currently, the Chemical Weapons Convention does not ban nonlethal, domestic uses of chemical agents for uses such as riot control. Likewise, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention states that biological agents may be used for “prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.”
At present, chemical weapons intended to change behavior — as opposed to simply incapacitate — are fairly crude. The Nature opinion piece begins with a discussion of the 2002 Russian theater hostage standoff, in which the Russian government used an “incapacitating agent” to knock out the Chechen terrorists — clumsily, as it happens, ultimately killing 124 of the hostages with the gas.
However, a future is not too far away when much more sophisticated agents could be ready for deployment.
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Related
Marketing new chemical weapons
To market these weapons as somehow separate from the chemical and biological weapons that are banned by international treaties, they are being given new, obfuscating names. In this intentional narrative (.pdf), chemical weapons become “calmatives” or “advanced riot control agents.” And they are promoted as part of a group of so-called “nonlethal” weapons. Worse yet, the semantic confusions go farther. These weapons aren’t really weapons at all but “capabilities,” “technologies,” and “techniques.” Similarly, other weapons under this umbrella lose their descriptive edge: laser weapons become “optical distractors,” acoustic weapons become “acoustic hailing devices,” and electrical weapons become “electromuscular incapacitation devices.”
