Nanotechnology and Homeland Security: New Weapons for New Wars by Daniel Ratner, Mark A. Ratner, James Murday (Foreword by)

From the Publisher

Nanotechnology offers immense potential for fighting terrorism without sacrificing our open, free, and democratic society. This book covers the significant opportunity to use nanotechnology to prevent terrorism and other threats to security as well as to mitigate their impact. Co-authored by one of the field's pioneers and featuring remarks from other nanoscience researchers and industry leaders, Nanotechnology and Homeland Security is written for every educated citizen who wants to understand the weapons of choice in the battle of our generation. Daniel and Mark A. Ratner tell you what's real today -- and what it'll take to transform tomorrow's applications from science fiction to reality. Along the way, they debunk the myths of nanotechnology and offer new insight into its profound ethical, political, and social implications.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

Preface

Neither life, liberty, nor the pursuit of happiness can be assured without security. So assuring national security is one of the chief obligations of any form of government. The history of the United States has been almost blissfully free of invading armies--the oceans and the naval "wooden walls" of John Adams have kept this country strong and secure. Except for bandits in the southwest and a few German saboteurs in Maine, the United States has had no foreign invaders for more than a century.

During this time, homeland security issues were largely concerned with domestic, natural, and exotic threats. After a series of terrorist incidents, culminating in the events of September 11th, this freedom from invasion and sabotage can no longer be assured. After September 11th, many things changed. The Department of Homeland Security was established, some pretty draconian steps to assure security were taken, a large number of dollars were spent, and traditional civil liberties were endangered--all for the purpose of security enhancement.

The years since September 11th have been times of international and economic stress, but they have been largely free from any terrorist incidents in the United States. Therefore, it is probably time to examine more calmly how to "do" homeland security--how do we use the abilities of our people and our nation to guarantee the security without which civilization isn't civilization.

We face a wide variety of threats. These include the usual suspects: earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, fires, explosions, and spills of toxic materials and pollutants. But threats to homeland security now include terrorism and terrorist acts, perhapsinvolving biological, chemical, or nuclear agents (often called weapons of mass destruction). Other threats, including computer software security issues, economic threats, and international issues such as global warming and climate change, as well as the need for adequate and secure energy supplies, are all aspects of assuring security for the people. To do this, the very first requirement is clearly to have the right people in place, including police officers, firefighters, doctors, scientists, engineers, water purification experts, computer security professionals, and all the other specially trained folks who help assure the continuation of our domestic systems in the event of disaster, natural or man-made.

In addition to people, we also need programs. Duct tape and plastic sheets are fine in their way, but they are not substantive responses to real security threats. In addition to the traditional capabilities, we need new weapons for this war on insecurity. Some of these new weapons are offered by nanoscience and nanotechnology. These are new scientific and technological areas that deal with structures the size of large individual molecules. These structures, roughly 50,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, cannot be seen or felt. Yet even though they are invisible, they are remarkably potent and useful. Because they exist at the ultimate design scale at which nature works, nanomaterials and nanotechnology can help in dealing with threats old and new.

This book is about nanotechnology and homeland security. It discusses first, in everyday terms, nanotechnology and nanoscience (Chapter 2). The bulk of the book has been devoted to some of the threats in the battle space (Chapter 3) and how to deal with them. It also considers some of the threats and protective mechanisms for homeland defense (Chapter 4).

But homeland security involves more than dealing just with toxins, tornadoes, and terrorism. It also involves providing economic, environmental, and educational security--these are discussed in Chapter 5, where their close relationship to nanotechnology is stressed. Finally, Chapter 6 deals with larger issues, including policy considerations and ethical ones. The photos and images that are throughout the book (and particularly in the color insert) are included to show that this is not just the technology of tomorrow--nanotechnology applications are already reality.

Science, technology, and society evolve together. Science never exists in a vacuum. While the traditional view is that science pursues the understanding of nature in a fashion totally separated from societal concerns, the facts are quite different: from Archimedes and Pythagoras through Leonardo da Vinci to Pasteur and Einstein, scientists have engaged in issues of importance in the society. In the contemporary world, this linkage has become tighter. It is driven both by economic issues of productivity and of support for scientific research, and by the fact that science and technology are uniquely capable of addressing huge societal needs from energy supply to food safety to new materials to diagnosis and conquest of disease.

This directing of science and of technology toward issues of importance in the society is an important trend. Society now both needs and expects technological advances. Lewis Branscomb has perceptively discussed these ideas under the name of "Jeffersonian Science." While this book does not directly discuss these aspects, they are the basis for the entire topic of Nanotechnology and Homeland Security.

This is not a scholarly book--there are very few citations, although a great deal of information can be found both in our previous book, Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea, and on many websites.

No advanced training in science, engineering, law, or military affairs is needed to read this book. We've written it because both nanoscience and homeland security are very significant components of the current American and world scenes. We hope to enlist our readers' experience and interest. These are important issues, and we hope this book will help contribute to an understanding of them.