Today one of our members asked a very interesting question which I attempted to answer.

Oh I forgot to mention, Cortana isn't available in New Zealand! Waaaaahhhh, why do Americans have to get all the good stuff?

 

The answer to that is there is some technology included that is classified as strategic or has military applications.

 

We (the US) have been badly burned in regard to many technology transfers over the years.

 

Under the Reagan administration, Iraq under Saddam Hussien in the 1980s was given billions in trade credits to charm Iraq away from Soviet influence. The US Dept of Agriculture was expected to administer this program. The Iraqis could order practically anything they could find in a catalog or e-bay. (OK, only kidding about e-bay). Anyway- they asked for stuff that had hospital applications in pathology and brewers vats. Sounds harmless right? They used that stuff to create TONS of battlefield grade anthrax (a nasty bioweapon). Other stuff they used to make nerve gas. The rest is some very ugly and controversial history.

 

In another badly botched technology transfer Red China asked the Clinton administration for the technology required to launch multiple satellites with one booster rocket. Sounds harmless right? Wrong. We just handed one of our biggest rivals the tech needed for MIRVs or Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles for nuclear weapons. Oops.

 

In another, more round about way, we got burned, a Japanese company sold high tolerance milling equipment to the Soviet Union. They originally got it from US. It allowed the Soviets to manufacture parts for their submarines that made them much quieter.

 

This has made us more than a little paranoid about what technologies we give to whom. Not that I expect New Zealand to go mustang and nuke Australia, we have to be very careful about what we do because we have a long, ugly history of being shot in the back with our own iron.

 

I mean that literally. The bomb that destroyed the Arizona at Pearl Harbor was made from scrap iron purchased from the United States.

I did my best to keep it apolitical as possible by using four examples: two each from democratic and republican presidential administrations.

Have we made mistakes in regard to the technologies that we sell? OH HECK YEAH! Many, many mistakes. They are made by businesses and at the governmental level.

They have been made by both sides of the political spectrum.

They have been made with malice and forethought on the part of both the buyer and the seller.

We've learned some very hard lessons in that regard. When a guy from jerk-water Oklahoma bought a ton of fertilizer and diesel fuel, no one gave it a second thought. Until he used it to blow up the Federal building in Oklahoma City.

When Saddam Hussien's minions asked the US Dept. of Agriculture for hospital equipment, brewers vats and oil refinery equipment, who knew they would use it to brew up anthrax and nerve gas?

When some odd cultists in Tokyo bought cleaning supplies, mason jars and mouth wash, no one was thinking sarin gas on the subways.

The technological genie is well and truly out of the bottle. It is now possible for a mad person to build or brew things in their garage that can wipe out thousands of people at a shot. Many try and fail but sooner or later, one of them is going to hurt us badly.

Even more chilling, if a person of limited resources can accomplish this, what about well organized groups or even nation states? The old rules don't apply to designer viruses or dirty bombs. They do not come with return address labels. It is now possible, and one might even argue easy, to do nightmarish things both anonymously and on a shoe string. That is the world that we live in.

There is a bottom line to all this: there really are people who have bad intentions. Their motivations are irrelevant. If they turn their genius to destruction, we are all in for serious trouble.

It has happened before and you can bet serious coin that it will happen again.