Rebellion-B-Gone: Chemical Neurowarfare

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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. As the opinion piece reports:

[A] research group from Pennsylvania State University in University Park has identified several drug classes as potential non-lethal agents or ‘calmatives’, including benzodiazepines and alpha2-adrenoreceptor agonists, as well as individual drugs such as diazepam and dexmedetomidine.

Similarly, at the 4th European Symposium on Non-Lethal Weapons in 2007, researchers from the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Charles University in Prague described the effects on macaque monkeys of combinations of drugs that produce a rapid loss of aggressive behaviour. They argued that the drugs could be “used to pacify aggressive people during … terrorist attacks”. The same researchers have also investigated methods of aerosol delivery to human volunteers.

“Rapid loss of aggressive behavior.” That’s something Ahmadinejad & Co. would have paid dearly for, say a couple months ago.

Oxytocin compounds are another item being eyed for military use. Nasal sprays of oxytocin have been found to increase trust in humans. While it’s not clear they could immediately be weaponized, or to precisely what end, it’s definitely on the military’s radar.

Now, some would argue that the use of non-lethal agents is potentially desirable. After all, the alternative is lethal measures. But the author of the opinion piece, Malcolm Dando, professor of International Security in the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University in the UK, doesn’t see it that way:

At the Nord-Ost siege, for instance, terrorists exposed to the fentanyl mixture were shot dead rather than arrested. Likewise, in Vietnam, the US military used vast quantities of CS gas — a ‘non-lethal’ riot-control agent — to increase the effectiveness of conventional weapons by flushing the Viet Cong out of their hiding places.

While we might want to believe that we would use such weapons ethically going forward, the idea of a dictator in possession of such weapons is rather chilling — moving into science-fiction-dystopia territory.

The status of such weapons is up in the air (no pun intended), at present; the debate is ongoing. The Nature editorial urges life scientists to get involved. Non-scientists ought not be ignorant or unengaged, either.

Perhaps there’s a legitimate argument to be made for the limited use of such weapons. Perhaps their development and use is inevitable, as an outgrowth of scientific progress.

But we ought not be so trusting and non-aggressive as to neglect to even ask the questions.

HT: Stanford Center for Law & the Biosciences Blog