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One unsettling prediction Del Monte’s made is that terrorists could get their hands on nanoweapons as early as the late 2020s through black market sources.

According to Del Monte, nanoweapons are much smaller than a strand of human hair and the insect-like nanobots could be programmed to perform various tasks, including injecting toxins into people or contaminating the water supply of a major city.

Another scenario he suggested the nanodrone could do in the future is fly into a room and drop a poison onto something, such as food, to presumably target a particular individual.

The federal government defines nanotechnology as the science, technology and engineering of things so small they are measured on a nanoscale, or about 1 to 100 nanometers. A single nanometer is about 10 times smaller than the width of a human’s DNA molecule.

While nanotechnology has produced major benefits for medicine, electronics and industrial applications, federal research is currently underway that could ultimately produce nanobots.

For one, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has a program called the Fast Lightweight Autonomy program for the purpose to allow autonomous drones to enter a building and avoid hitting walls or objects. DARPA announced a breakthrough last year after tests in a hangar in Massachusetts.

Frightening details about military nanotechnologies were outlined in a 2010 report from the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, including how “transgenic insects could be developed to produce and deliver protein-based biological warfare agents, and be used offensively against targets in a foreign country.”

It also forecast “microexplosives” along with “nanobots serving as [bioweapons] delivery systems or as micro-weapons themselves, and inhalable micro-particles to cripple personnel.”

In the case of nanoscale robots, Del Monte said they can be the size of a mosquito or smaller and programmed to use toxins to kill or immobilize people; what’s more, these autonomous bots ultimately could become self-replicating.

A Cambridge University conference on global catastrophic risk found a 5 percent risk of nanotech weapons causing human extinction before the year 2100.






Full article: Mini-nukes and mosquito-like robot weapons being primed for future warfare (CNBC)

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