The militarization of neuroscience

We’ve seen this story before: The Pentagon takes an interest in a rapidly changing area of scientific knowledge, and the world is forever changed. And not for the better.

During World War II, the scientific field was atomic physics. Afraid that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, the U.S. government mounted its own crash project to get there first. The Manhattan Project was so secret that Congress did not know what it was funding and Vice President Harry S. Truman did not learn about it until FDR’s death made him president. In this situation of extreme secrecy, there was almost no ethical or political debate about the Bomb before it was dropped on two cities by a bureaucratic apparatus on autopilot.

Despite J. Robert Oppenheimer’s objections, a few Manhattan Project scientists organized a discussion on the implications of the “Gadget” for civilization shortly before the bomb was tested. Another handful issued the Franck Report, advising against dropping the bomb on cities without a prior demonstration and warning of the dangers of an atomic arms race. Neither initiative had any discernible effect. We ended up in a world where the United States had two incinerated cities on its conscience, and its pursuit of nuclear dominance created a world of nuclear overkill and mutually assured destruction
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This time we have a chance to do better. The science in question now is not physics, but neuroscience, and the question is whether we can control its militarization.
According to Jonathan Moreno’s fascinating and frightening new book, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense (Dana Press 2006), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding research in the following areas:

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• Mind-machine interfaces (“neural prosthetics”) that will enable pilots and soldiers to control high-tech weapons by thought alone.
• “Living robots” whose movements could be controlled via brain implants. This technology has already been tested successfully on “roborats” and could lead to animals remotely directed for mine clearance, or even to remotely controlled soldiers.
• “Cognitive feedback helmets” that allow remote monitoring of soldiers’ mental state.
• MRI technologies (“brain fingerprinting”) for use in interrogation or airport screening for terrorists. Quite apart from questions about their error rate, such technologies would raise the issue of whether involuntary brain scans violate the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
• Pulse weapons or other neurodisruptors that play havoc with enemy soldiers’ thought processes.
• “Neuroweapons” that use biological agents to excite the release of neurotoxins. (The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention bans the stockpiling of such weapons for offensive purposes, but not “defensive” research into their mechanisms of action.)
• New drugs that would enable soldiers to go without sleep for days, to excise traumatic memories, to suppress fear, or to repress psychological inhibitions against killing.