I don’t know how Aunty let this one through:
In 1995, a doomsday cult in Japan killed 13 people and injured more than 6,000 others. They were the victims of a Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway committed during rush hour by the apocalyptic terrorist group known as Aleph (at the time called Aum Shinrikyo). Afterwards, 13 of the perpetrators were tried and executed.
One of the metro lines attacked on that day (the Marunouchi Line) leads to Shinjuku Station. Shinjuku is home to numerous sites where the Japanese government allegedly buried the bodies of the victims of wartime experiments. The corpses are purported to have been the grisly result of the actions of Unit 731: Japan’s infamous World War Two biological weapons programme.
Over more than a decade, Unit 731 was responsible for perhaps 300,000 or more deaths. The programme experimented with weaponising a host of biological agents, from botulism and bubonic plague to syphilis and smallpox. New deployment methods were trialed, including the dropping of plague-infected fleas onto Chinese cities. Unit 731 engaged in some of the worst atrocities imaginable, including the live vivisection of prisoners.
After WW2 came to an end and Japan surrendered, the scientists of Unit 731 were granted immunity by the US. In exchange for avoiding prosecution for war crimes, they handed over data from human experimentation and bioweapons research to the US (although not its allies).
The story of Aum Shinrikyo is well known and discussed among scholars who study global catastrophe and human extinction. It is frequently used as an example of the dangers if terrorists with apocalyptic motivations are well-funded and scientifically-literate.
Unit 731 is far less analysed. This is despite the fact that it illustrates the chilling lengths powerful actors can and will go to for an advantage. In addition to the harms caused to the Chinese people and others, Unit 731 could also have had terrible consequences for the global population, if its weaponised biological arsenal had been more extensively developed or widely deployed.
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Scholars of castastophic risk often point to a handful of infamous human-made global threats: artificial general intelligence (AGI), catastrophic biological threats, climate change, lethal autonomous weapons, nuclear weapons and mass surveillance. The impact of each of these threats is uncertain and some are more likely than others: we have already experienced around 1C of global warming since industrialisation, but whether AGI can or will be created is uncertain. They are best thought of as interconnected threats that could cause significant worldwide loss of life and liberty.
All of these are the product of a small group of often overlapping, powerful industries dominated by a few actors. These are primarily: military-industrial complexes, the fossil fuel industry and Big Tech. All of these are concentrated in a handful of countries, particularly the US. Let us call them the Agents of Doom.
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There are three distinct lessons here. First, the production of human-made global catastrophic hazards is highly concentrated. The US military is responsible for pioneering work in nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, LAWs, surveillance, and AI. To this day, the US plays an outsized role in endangering the world. It is the world’s largest historical emitter, possesses the second largest, and most advanced nuclear arsenal, is the leader in developing LAWs, houses the largest agencies and firms working on surveillance, and has by-far the highest number of groups working on developing AGI.
Second, the producers of such threats have frequently played an active role in suffocating action to address them. This is commonly referred to as “regulatory capture”: regulatory efforts become captured by those that they are supposed to oversee. For climate change it is the fossil fuel lobby. For nuclear weapons, the arms race was stoked by the “bomber gap” and “missile gap” myths perpetuated by the US military industrial complex. Key US military and political figures claimed that the Soviets had a swelling superiority in strategic bombers and ballistic missiles. Later U2 surveillance flights showed that these were serious overestimates. While fictitious, it was enough to justify surges in defence spending.
A similar dyanmic occurs in international negotiations, with just a few key countries blocking regulation of catastrophic hazards. For biological weapons it was the US who was the primary culprit in preventing the adoption of a global verification scheme under the Biological Weapons Convention. For LAWs, approximately five countries (Australia, Israel, Russia, South Korea and the US) have actively blocked progress on banning or strongly regulating lethal autonomous weapons.
Third, producing the worst global threats is almost always done in the shadows.
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Even if a catastrophic global terrorist incident was to occur due to futuristic dangerous dispersed technology, it would almost certainly be traced back to the Agents of Doom in developing, overproducing, and preventing the regulation of such technologies.
Rather than fearing the public, scholars of catastrophic risk should see them as a wellspring of hope. The Agents of Doom should embrace rather than evade public scrutiny if they are genuinely concerned about global catastrophe. For all of these hazards there is abundant evidence that one of the best forms of risk management would be to hand their regulation and development over to citizens.
Public opinion polls across China, the US, Australia and the EU have showed strong majority support for greater action on climate change. In a poll across 26 countries, 61% opposed the use of lethal autonomous weapons. Europeans strongly favour an international ban on nuclear weapons. Similarly, a survey of six countries including the US and Israel found that a substantial majority of citizens in each country supported eliminating all nuclear weapons through an enforceable international agreement. Most recently extensive surveys by the Global Challenges Foundation found that strong majorities across numerous countries are open to creating a new supra-national body to manage global risks.
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Ironically, the common response during crises to empower governments and the Stalker Complex through emergency powers is entirely counter-productive. This “Stomp Reflex” is largely a movement of power from citizens to the Agents of Doom.
It is hard to characterise the actions of the Agents of Dooms as an “error”, as Lord Martin Rees does. Yes, their goal is not to ruin the entire world, including themselves. But this is not about bias or motivation, it is about risk. The simple, unavoidable fact is that there are only a small number of powerful actors who produce most global catastrophic hazards and benefit from it. The motivation may not be cause global catastrophe, yet their actions are nonetheless deliberate. A drunk driver who gets behind the wheel may not intend to hit anyone, but they are still responsible for any inebriation-fuelled collision. Particularly if they are undertaking the dangerous journey to earn billions.
The citizen terror narrative is mistaken. Instead, calamity is being secretly birthed for profit and power by the Agents of Doom.