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Vox
5 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Is it possible to 'win' a nuclear war?
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, US President Joe Biden, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lay flower wreaths at the Cenotaph for Atomic Bomb Victims in the Peace Memorial Park as part of the G7 Leaders' Summit in Hiroshima on May 19, 2023. Susan Walsh/Pool/AFP via Getty Images Following their first meeting in Geneva in 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issued a historic joint statement stating their shared belief that 'a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.' The maxim lived on. The Geneva summit turned out to be a key milestone in the beginning of the end of the Cold War arms race. Nearly four decades later in 2022, leaders of the world's five main nuclear powers — the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK — issued another joint statement, affirming that 'a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought' and that their arsenals are meant to 'serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war.' The thinking behind the phrase is that these weapons are so destructive — with potential consequences that include the literal destruction of human civilization — that it makes no sense to talk about 'victory' in a nuclear war. It's a powerful idea. But do the nuclear powers really believe it? As the world marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week, it's clear that the world is entering a new nuclear age, characterized by increasing tension between superpowers, China's growing arsenal, and the rising possibility that more countries will acquire the bomb. And judging from the nations' actions and strategy documents — as opposed to their declarations at summits — we are also in an era in which nuclear powers do believe they can win a nuclear war and want to be prepared to do so. Recent years have seen threats of Russia using a 'tactical' nuclear weapon in Ukraine and a military conflict between India and Pakistan that US officials believed could have gone nuclear. The governments making these threats aren't suicidal; if they were contemplating nuclear use, it's because they thought it would help them win. In response to growing threats, the United States has been updating its own doctrine and arsenals to provide more options for a so-called limited nuclear war. Looming over it all is the danger of war between the US and China, a conflict that would be fought under the nuclear shadow. The idea that there can be a winner in a nuclear exchange rests on several assumptions: that the conflict can be contained, that it won't inevitably escalate into an all-out exchange that sees whole cities or countries wiped out, and that there will be anyone left alive to claim victory. Some experts claim that as long as the potential for nuclear war exists, we'd be foolish not to plan for how to win one as quickly and with as little destruction to ourselves as possible. Others say the idea that a nuclear war could be kept 'limited' is a dangerous notion that only makes such a war — and the risk that it could escalate to something not so limited — more likely. A long-running debate: MAD vs. NUTS The bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people, depending on estimates, but both cities are once again thriving metropolises today. Despite the fears of some of the scientists involved in developing the bombs, they did not ignite the atmosphere and kill all life on Earth. They did play a significant role — though there continues to be a debate about just how significant it was — in ending World War II. The only time nuclear weapons were used in war, the side that used them won the war. But the difference then was that only one country had the weapons. Today, there are nine nuclear-armed countries with more than 12,000 nuclear weapons between them, and most of those are far more powerful than the ones used on Japan in 1945. The W76 warhead, the most common nuclear weapon in the US arsenal, is about five times more powerful than 'Fat Man,' dropped on Nagasaki. When most people imagine what a war using these weapons would look like, images of armageddon — annihilated cities, radiation fallout, nuclear winter — come to mind. Popular depictions of nuclear war, from Dr. Strangelove to the Terminator movies to last year's chilling quasi-novel Nuclear War: A Scenario, soon to be adapted into a film, tend to focus on the worst-case scenarios. The apocalyptic possibilities have, for decades, motivated global campaigns to ban nuclear weapons and haunted many of the world leaders who would have to make the decisions that would set them in motion. That includes Donald Trump, who has described what he calls 'nuclear warming' as the 'biggest problem we have in the whole world.' If there could be a silver lining to the fact that humanity has built weapons capable of destroying itself, it's that this fear has made those weapons much less likely to be used. 'Mutually Assured Destruction' (MAD) has never actually been officially US policy — the RAND Corporation analyst who popularized the term back in the 1960s meant it as a critique — but nonetheless, the idea that nuclear war would be suicidal for both sides is arguably what kept the Cold War from getting hot. The logic continues to operate today: Joe Biden preemptively ruled out responding with direct military force to Russia's invasion of Ukraine because of the potential consequences of war between the two countries that account for 90 percent of the world's nukes. But from the earliest days of the nuclear era, there have been prominent voices arguing that nuclear war could be kept within limited boundaries, and that it's worth preparing to win one. In the mid-1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower's administration operated under a nuclear strategy that emphasized 'massive retaliation,' meaning the US would respond to any Soviet attack with overwhelming nuclear force against Soviet territory. But Henry Kissinger — who at the time was a Harvard professor and up-and-coming security analyst, and later went on to become secretary of state and national security adviser — argued against 'massive retaliation,' lamenting that 'far from giving us freedom of action, the very power of modern weapons seems to inhibit it.' He wanted options between refraining from nuclear use at all and all-out annihilation. In 1956, Kissinger argued that the US should instead plan for fighting a 'limited' nuclear war by emphasizing the development of lower-yield weapons and devising 'tactics for their utilization on the battlefield.' Herman Kahn, the RAND Corporation nuclear strategist who was one of the inspirations for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove character, envisioned a 44-rung escalation ladder for nuclear conflict, with what he called 'barely nuclear war' kicking in at rung 15 and getting more serious from there. If MAD stood for the idea that the only two options were avoiding nuclear war or global annihilation, the view that nuclear weapons could be used selectively with devastating but limited consequences came to be known as NUTS, or Nuclear Utilization Target Selection. The debate never really went away, but it faded somewhat with the end of the Cold War when both the US and Russia substantially reduced their arsenals, and the risk of confrontation appeared to fade. Recently, however, the topic of limited nuclear war has been making a comeback. Concern over limited nuclear war is growing 'We have nine nuclear powers in the world today that are building nuclear weapons, not to put in museums, but for military and political use, and developing plans for their use,' Matthew Kroenig, a national security analyst at the Atlantic Council and Georgetown University, told Vox. The United States is no exception. The 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, issued under the first Trump administration, called for 'expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options.' The 2022 review, issued under the Biden administration, included similar language. To provide those options, the US has begun production of a number of new lower-yield nuclear warheads, such as the 5-kiloton W76-2, which has been deployed on nuclear submarines. For reference, that's about a third as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but more than a 1,000 times more powerful than the 'massive ordinance penetrator' bomb the US recently used on Iran's nuclear facilities. Advocates for limited nuclear war planning are on the ascendance as well. Elbridge Colby, the current undersecretary of defense for policy, has attracted attention for advocating a shift in military priorities away from Europe and the Middle East toward what he sees as the more pressing threat from China. He's also a leading advocate for preparing for limited nuclear war. In a 2018 article for Foreign Affairs, Colby argued that deterring Russia or China from using force against US allies requires developing the 'right strategy and weapons to fight a limited nuclear war and come out on top.' These advocates say that recent actions by America's adversaries make it necessary to plan for fighting a limited nuclear war. US officials believe that Russia's military doctrine includes a so-called escalate to de-escalate strategy, in which it would use a nuclear strike or the threat of one to force surrender, to compensate for disadvantages on the battlefield or to avoid an imminent defeat. Russia's war plans are classified, and some analysts are skeptical that such a strategy exists, but an example of the kind of thinking that keeps American strategists up at night is laid out in a 2023 article by Sergei Karaganov, a one-time adviser to President Vladimir Putin and one of Russia's leading foreign policy commentators. Karaganov argues that Russia has 'set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons,' and that in order to prevent further US meddling in Ukraine, Russia needs to demonstrate its willingness to use a nuclear weapon. He reassures readers that nuclear retaliation by the US to protect a faraway ally is unlikely, and that 'if we correctly build a strategy of intimidation and deterrence and even use of nuclear weapons, the risk of a 'retaliatory' nuclear or any other strike on our territory can be reduced to an absolute minimum.' Obviously, Putin hasn't done this yet in Ukraine, though he has made repeated threatening references to his country's arsenal, and at one point, in 2022, Biden administration officials reportedly believed there was a 50-50 chance Russia would use a nuke. Russia is believed to have an arsenal of more than 1,000 'tactical' or 'nonstrategic warheads.' (The distinction between 'tactical' and 'strategic' nuclear weapons is a little vague. The former refers to weapons meant to destroy military targets on the battlefield rather than target an enemy's cities and society. Tactical nukes are generally smaller and shorter range, though some are larger than the bombs dropped on Japan, and some observers — including former Secretary of Defense James Mattis — have argued that there is no difference between the two.) The US has also accused Russia of developing capabilities to deploy a nuclear weapon in space, which could be used to destroy communications satellites in orbit. This would be a less catastrophic scenario than a detonation on Earth, to be sure, but still a dangerous new form of nuclear escalation. (Russia has denied the American allegations.) Unlike Russia and the United States, China has an official 'no-first use' policy on nuclear weapons. But the country's arsenal is growing rapidly, and many experts suspect that in an all-out military conflict, particularly if the war were going badly for China and its conventional forces were threatened, its threshold for nuclear use might be lower than official statements suggest. The argument from some strategists is that ruling out nuclear use entirely gives China an incentive to escalate to the point where the US backs down. 'If we are completely convinced that a limited war is impossible, and the Chinese believe that it is possible, then they will checkmate us every time,' Colby told me in a 2022 interview for Grid. 'At some point, we have to be willing to fight a war under the nuclear shadow. My view is [that] the best way to avoid testing that proposition, which I absolutely don't want to do, is to be visibly prepared for it.' On the other hand, Chinese planners can think this way too. Lyle Goldstein, a professor at Brown University who studies Chinese military strategy, says that 'Chinese scholars are talking openly about limited nuclear war now,' which they have not in the past. But when confronted about this shift by Americans, they tend to make the argument, 'We're discussing it because you're discussing it.' It's not only the world's top three nuclear powers that engage in this sort of thinking. Pakistan's nuclear doctrine, also classified, is thought to emphasize 'calibrated escalation' to deter strategic surprise by its rival, India. During the recent military conflict between the two countries in May, fears of nuclear escalation are reportedly what prompted the Trump administration to intervene diplomatically, after initially suggesting it was not a core US interest. Since acquiring nuclear weapons, the two South Asian adversaries have proven adept at managing military escalation and de-escalation without letting things spiral out of control. But this was the most intense conflict between the two in years, and after it ended, Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed that India would no longer succumb to Pakistan's 'nuclear blackmail,' suggesting that his country's tolerance for nuclear risk was growing higher. What will it take to keep a nuclear war limited? Advocates for preparing for limited nuclear war say the attention devoted to full-scale global thermonuclear war distracts us from the sort of war that we're much more likely to get into. 'Any use of nuclear weapons in the future will be limited. There's virtually no prospect whatsoever of a global thermonuclear conflagration,' said Kerry Kartchner, a former State Department and Pentagon official and coauthor of a book on limited nuclear war. The most likely way a war would stay limited is if one side simply decided not to fight. 'There is a very, very strong, very powerful incentive not to use nuclear weapons,' even when the other side uses them first, Kartchner told Vox. In his book The Bomb, journalist Fred Kaplan reports that during the Obama administration, the National Security Council held a series of war games simulating the response to a hypothetical use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia during an invasion of the Baltic countries. Officials differed sharply over whether the US should respond with a nuclear strike of its own or keep its response limited to conventional military and economic means in order to 'rally the entire world against Russia.' Years later, when President Biden believed a real-world version of this scenario could be imminent, he declined to say how he would respond. Kroenig, of the Atlantic Council, has argued that the US should respond to Russian nuclear use with conventional force. But he also believes that even if the US used nuclear weapons to respond, it could keep the conflict limited. 'You can signal through the use of military force,' he said. 'I think Russia understands the difference between a low-yield battlefield nuclear weapon going off on the battlefield versus a big ICBM heading towards Moscow.' He concedes that this type of signaling wouldn't work with a 'true madman,' but argues, 'in most real-world cases, leaders don't rise to run major countries without having some kind of ability to think rationally and to preserve their own survival.' The world's biggest gamble Others aren't so sure. 'Whenever somebody says, 'we can control escalation,' they immediately assume a whole bunch of things that seem unrealistic to me, like perfect information, calm, rational decision makers,' says Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nonproliferation at Middlebury Institute of International Studies. From Napoleon to Hitler, history is rife with examples of leaders making military decisions that led to the destruction of their regimes. Putin believed the war in Ukraine could be won in a matter of weeks and that the international response would be far more limited than it turned out to be. There's also no guarantee that adversaries would be able to communicate effectively during a nuclear crisis. During the 2023 incident in which the US downed a Chinese spy balloon that had drifted over US territory, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, to explain US attentions and calm tensions, but Wei didn't pick up the phone. An infamous 1983 Pentagon war game known as Proud Prophet, simulating a US-Soviet nuclear war in Europe, provides a sobering warning: As the strikes between the two sides escalated, they were unable to communicate their intention to keep the conflict limited. 'When we hit the Soviets, they hadn't the slightest idea of what our limitations were,' one participant recalled. By the end of the game, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Brussels — and every major German city — were destroyed. Including tests, there have been more than 2,000 nuclear detonations since 1945. One, or even a few more, will not literally be the end of the world, but there's limited margin for error. In a 2007 study, a group of physicists estimated that a limited regional nuclear exchange 'involving 100 15-kiloton explosions (less than 0.1% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal)' could 'produce direct fatalities comparable to all of those worldwide in World War II' as well as causing enough smoke to rise into the atmosphere causing 'significant climatic anomalies on global scales.' When it comes to nuclear wars, even limited ones, 'You might be able to survive the first one or two,' said Manpreet Sethi, a nonproliferation expert at India's Centre for Air Power Studies. 'But after that, we'll be pushing the envelope. It can't be business as usual after you've done a 'little bit' of nuclear war.' Does planning for a nuclear war make it more likely? Advocates for limited nuclear war planning argue that by ruling it out entirely, the US is inviting adversaries like Russia and China to use their nukes without fear of retaliation. Sethi's concern is that 'If you start preparing for a limited nuclear war, you increase the likelihood of fighting a war like that because you get into the idea that escalation management is possible.' For now, the example of Ukraine and Putin's failure to follow through on his threats suggests that the taboo against nuclear use — no matter how 'tactical' or 'limited' — remains in place. 'The important lesson from this war is that nobody really has confidence that escalation can be contained, said Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia's nuclear forces at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. Encouragingly, Biden administration officials say they believe China may have warned Russia against using its weapons, suggesting this may be a red line even for Moscow's backers. This year's Hiroshima anniversary is a moment for somber reflection on the risks humanity has put itself under. But a more optimistic view is that the world is also marking 80 years without any other country actually using these weapons, something many leaders would not have predicted at the dawn of the nuclear age. As armed conflicts continue to proliferate, longstanding arms control treaties fall by the wayside, and the number of nuclear-armed powers continues to grow, getting to the 100th anniversary with that record intact may prove even more challenging.
Vox
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
How Gaza's hunger crisis reached its 'worst-case scenario'
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. The 'worst-case scenario' is unfolding in Gaza. Though there are larger hunger crises in the world in terms of sheer numbers, Gaza is, in many ways, the most intense. By September, leading humanitarian groups predict, 100 percent of the population will face acute food insecurity, meaning they will be forced to routinely skip meals. Half a million people will be facing starvation, destitution, and death. There's little agriculture in today's Gaza, next to no commercial trade with the outside world, and no opportunity for people to flee. The situation has deteriorated sharply in recent weeks: Of the 74 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza in 2025, 63 occurred in July — including 24 children under 5, according to the World Health Organization. 'The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,' the world's leading hunger watchdog declared on Tuesday. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the consortium of humanitarian groups that monitors and classifies global hunger crises, warned that 'widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths.' Israel has been waging war in Gaza since Hamas's deadly attack in October 2023, but the territory's suffering this month has grown even more severe, more suddenly, for more people than at any other turn in the conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to claim this week, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there is 'no starvation in Gaza.' That stance has gotten harder to maintain amid increasing media attention, with photos of emaciated children spread across the covers of newspapers around the world. The Israeli government has made some policy changes, including instituting daily 10-hour 'humanitarian pauses' in some areas, air-dropping some additional aid, and allowing in more food trucks. But aid groups say these measures don't come close to meeting the scale of the problem. So how did the situation get this bad, and what can be done, at this point, to keep it from getting worse? How a problem became a crisis Some human rights groups have accused Israel of deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, which is illegal under international law. Netanyahu has denied that this is the policy, though some politicians in Israel, and some supporters abroad, have suggested that Gaza shouldn't receive any aid until the hostages Hamas took on October 7, 2023, are released. Israeli officials have charged that Gaza's hunger crisis is either exaggerated or the result of theft by Hamas. Malnutrition was an issue in Gaza even before the war. Israel has restricted the movement of goods and people in the Gaza Strip for decades. This, in addition to taxation and stockpiling by Hamas authorities, has made vital items hard to come by, and a majority of Gazans were already dependent on food assistance before 2023. The war made this situation exponentially worse. More than a year ago, the IPC and Biden administration officials were warning that parts of Gaza were close to famine or already there. In April 2024, under pressure from the US, Israel allowed hundreds more aid trucks into the Gaza Strip, though this did not resolve the issue entirely, and access to aid fluctuated for the rest of the year. When the war stopped with a ceasefire agreement in January of this year, food briefly flooded into the territory. The situation reached a breaking point in March, though, when the 42-day ceasefire between Hamas and Israel ended. Israeli authorities cut off all aid to Gaza for two months. When Israel began allowing aid across the border in May, far less than was being delivered before. Israeli authorities have consistently derided the UN aid system in Gaza, claiming that a significant portion of aid is stolen by Hamas, though the New York Times recently reported that senior Israeli military officials say there is no evidence of aid being 'systematically' stolen. The aid is now being delivered by two competing mechanisms: the United Nations as well as the newly formed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US- and Israeli-backed entity operating four distribution sites in southern and central Gaza. The GHF's advocates say it prevents Hamas from siphoning off aid, and the group claims to have distributed more than 97 million meals in its two months of operation, but critics are skeptical about how many people are actually receiving these meals. They also say the small number of sites means Gazans have to travel long distances on foot through war zones to get to them, and that the sites have inconsistent operating hours, leading to a situation where the most vulnerable civilians are the ones least likely to be helped. 'There is no way that a pregnant woman can walk 5 miles and manage to pick up a box that weighs 22 kilos,' said Or Elrom, a former senior officer with the branch of the Israeli military that oversees humanitarian issues in the Palestinian territories. Distribution sites have frequently been overwhelmed, and soldiers have fired on crowds trying to get food: hundreds of people have been killed in the vicinity of GHF sites. Palestinian GHF workers have also been killed by gunmen, reportedly affiliated with Hamas. UN-distributed shipments, located at different sites from the GHF aid, have also been overwhelmed by crowds. Officials say all 55 UN aid trucks that entered Gaza last Sunday were unloaded by crowds before reaching their destinations. Elrom described the mob scenes — both at the UN convoys and at the GHF distribution sites — as a 'chicken and egg' problem. When not enough aid is coming in, and it's only coming in via one or two locations, it's more likely to be overwhelmed by desperate people, Elrom said during a panel hosted by the Israel Policy Forum on Tuesday. The risk of looting then makes it harder to distribute aid. The UN-Israel blame game Israel's government blamed the UN for the failure to get more aid into Gaza, with officials posting videos of hundreds of trucks' worth of food sitting in a fenced-off area near the Kerem Shalom border crossing into southern Gaza that the Israeli officials say the UN is not delivering. The UN retorted: 'Kerem Shalom is not a McDonald's drive-through where we just pull up and pick up what we've ordered, right?' spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told reporters. 'There are tremendous bureaucratic impediments. There are tremendous security impediments. And, frankly, I think there's a lack of willingness to allow us to do our work.' The UN and other aid groups have called for the GHF to be shut down, describing it as an inefficient and dangerous method of aid distribution with little hope of addressing the severity of Gaza's crisis. The blame game is just the latest chapter in a long history of recrimination and mistrust between Israel and the United Nations. Israel has long claimed to be unfairly singled out for criticism at the UN, and the relationship has only gotten more toxic since the start of the war in Gaza. High-ranking UN officials have accused Israel of genocide, and Israel has alleged that employees of the UN's organization for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, participated in the October 7 attacks. (The UN found the claim credible; it said nine of UNWRA's 14,000 employees 'may have' participated, and no longer work for UNWRA. UNRWA is not the UN agency coordinating food aid delivery.) What changed? Recent weeks have seen a major shift not only in the severity of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but in the public debate around it. Netanyahu may deny that anyone is starving in Gaza, but President Donald Trump does not, telling reporters in Scotland on Monday, 'Some of those kids are — that's real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can't fake that.' Trump pledged to work with allies to set up more 'food centers' in Gaza and make them more accessible. The European Union has found Israel to be in violation of its human rights obligations under their trade deal, and is debating suspending a major science research program over the situation in Gaza. France and Britain are planning to recognize Palestinian statehood in September. Even Germany's government, which has been very reluctant to criticize Israeli policy, may be shifting its stance. Some prominent academics and human rights groups within Israel are now describing their government's actions as 'genocide,' after long resisting the label. While that's far from a mainstream position within Israel, a number of prominent Israeli journalists who have consistently defended the war in Gaza are now sounding the alarm about the hunger crisis. Not all Israelis are likely to see this as a problem. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has called the airdrops of food a 'disgrace' and posted on X, 'I support starving Hamas in Gaza.' Netanyahu reportedly made the decision to boost aid last weekend without informing Ben Gvir and his other far-right coalition partners. The terms of the debate may be shifting, but Bob Kitchen, director of emergency response of the International Rescue Committee, told Vox that the additional aid being provided is still 'literally nothing compared to what's required.' He singled out the air drops of aid by the IDF, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan for particular scorn, calling them 'the most expensive, least effective way of delivering aid, and it's almost farcical that on such a small piece of land where we're having to resort to air drops when all this food is waiting to be driven across in trucks.' What can be done to help Gaza? Kitchen said the most immediate step that could be taken is for Israel and Egypt to open the crossings into Gaza and allow unimpeded humanitarian assistance. 'The NGO and the UN community have proven over the last several years that we can deliver aid at scale from within an active war zone,' he added. 'It's dangerous, high risk, but we have proven that we can do it.' At a bare minimum, it would probably also help for the IDF, GHF, and UN agencies to cooperate in facilitating safe and efficient aid deliveries rather than continuing the current blame game. But these are all stopgap measures. Actually addressing Gaza's humanitarian crisis will require an end to the war that is causing it — and that seems to be getting less likely. Last week, the US and Israel pulled their negotiating teams out of ongoing talks in Doha, blaming Hamas for a 'lack of desire to reach a ceasefire.' Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff said the US would 'consider alternative options' to end the war and bring home the remaining hostages, though it's not clear what those are. The fighting that resumed in March does not appear to have moved the needle in getting Hamas to agree to Israel's terms. And Hamas's leaders certainly don't appear to be motivated to compromise by the increasing suffering of Gaza's people. For all that Trump is disturbed by the images of starving children and frustrated with Netanyahu on multiple fronts, he has also urged Israel, in the absence of a ceasefire deal, to 'finish the job' against Hamas. He does not appear inclined to pressure Netanyahu to agree to end the war in exchange for the release of the hostages. Such a deal would be favored by a majority of Israelis but would likely bring down Netanyahu's government, which relies on far-right coalition partners who have threatened to leave his government if a ceasefire is signed. As long as the war continues, measures to address the hunger crisis — needed as they are — are likely only stopgaps.
Vox
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Trump and Netanyahu weren't on the same page for long
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. One month ago, while announcing US airstrikes targeting Iran's nuclear program, President Donald Trump said that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had worked together as a team 'like perhaps no team has ever worked before.' This was notable because Trump had just publicly discouraged Israeli strikes against Iran almost up until the moment that they began, and because — as I wrote in May — in the first few months of his administration, the US and Israel often did not appear to be on the same page about regional conflict. In May, the administration cut a deal with Hamas — without Israel's involvement — to secure the release of an American hostage in Gaza. Then, the US reached a ceasefire agreement with the Houthis, in which the Yemeni rebel group pledged to stop attacking American ships but notably made no mention of its ongoing attacks against Israel. And then there was the ongoing effort, in the face of heavy Israeli skepticism, to reach a new nuclear enrichment deal with Iran — an effort that came to an end, at least for now, with the Israeli and American bombing campaign. This story was first featured in the Today, Explained newsletter Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Sign up here. But if the '12-Day War' with Iran ushered in a new era of US-Israel regional cooperation, it was a short-lived one. In general, the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward Trump and Netanyahu not getting along. Last week, Israel's bombing of Gaza's only Catholic church prompted an angry call from Trump. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, arguably the most staunchly pro-Israel high-ranking Trump official, has been uncharacteristically critical after the killing of a US citizen and an attack on a different Palestinian church in the West Bank, both allegedly by Israeli settlers. And now, the Trump and Netanyahu administrations are also plainly at odds over Israel's latest intervention in Syria. Israel has been periodically launching airstrikes in Syria for years, but the latest clash began last week when Syria's government sent troops into its southern Sweida province to put down clashes between Bedouin tribes and armed groups from the local Druze community, a religious minority group. The troops were accused of carrying out summary executions against the Druze and attacking civilians. This prompted Israel to launch strikes against the Syrian forces and against the defense ministry in Damascus. Israel wants to keep Syrian forces out of areas close to its borders; it also has an interest in protecting the Druze, who have a substantial community in Israel and are heavily represented in its armed forces. This is all very awkward for the Trump administration. At the urging of allies in the Gulf, the US has gone all in on normalizing relations with Syria's new government, including the once-unthinkable meeting between Trump and President Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former rebel leader who was once a member of al-Qaeda, in May. Trump has expressed hopes for diplomatic normalization between Syria and Israel, though the Israelis have been less enthusiastic. Netanyahu urged Trump not to lift sanctions on the Syrian government. Related Israel is taking its old Gaza model abroad The tensions between the two positions are now on full display. Reuters reported that the Syrian government had sent its troops into Sweida believing that it had a green light from the US, which has urged the new leaders to take full security control of the fractured and war-torn country. Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey who is also special envoy to Syria, criticized the Israeli strikes as 'poorly timed,' and said there was no alternative to working with Syria's current government. Speaking on background, administration officials are even more peeved, with one telling Axios, 'Bibi acted like a madman. He bombs everything all the time. … This could undermine what Trump is trying to do.' 'Bombing everything all the time' isn't far off. Since the Iran strikes ended, Israel has carried out military operations in Lebanon and Yemen and made clear it reserves the right to hit Iran again. As I recently noted, this is a kind of region-wide version of the 'mowing the grass' strategy Israel employed in Gaza before the October 7, 2023, attacks: periodically striking its adversaries to degrade them and keep them off balance while avoiding long, costly engagements.
Vox
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Israel is taking its old Gaza model abroad
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. During an Oval Office meeting on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he had nominated President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize and praised him for 'forging peace, as we speak, in one country, in one region after the other.' Both US and Israeli officials have been quite open about their hopes that we are now looking at a transformed Middle East. Netanyahu has suggested that the US-Israeli strikes against Iran last month 'opens an opportunity for a dramatic expansion of the peace agreements' that Israel has signed with other Arab countries over the years. But in fact, the weeks since the '12-Day War' ended have been marked by even more war. On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced it had conducted its first ground incursion in months into Lebanon. Israel had already been conducting nearly daily airstrikes targeting Hezbollah in recent weeks, despite a 2024 truce that Israel claims the Iranian-backed proxy group has been violating by keeping armed fighters in southern Lebanon. The IDF has also carried out airstrikes against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, responding to the group's ongoing missile and drone attacks against Israel. IDF troops remain in southern Syria and in recent days have carried out raids targeting Iran-backed groups there. Nor is the Israel-Iran conflict necessarily over. Defense Minister Israel Katz has put forward a plan involving 'maintaining Israel's air superiority, preventing nuclear advancement and missile production, and responding to Iran for supporting terrorist activities against the State of Israel.' In other words, if Israel says there are malign and dangerous activities happening in Iran, there may be more airstrikes. Then, of course, there's the ongoing devastation of the war in Gaza, where the death toll has now exceeded 56,000 according to local authorities, and where locals as well as the UN accuse the IDF of killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians trying to reach food distribution centers in recent weeks. Five IDF troops were killed by roadside bombs planted by militants earlier this week. While there had been hopes that Israel's military success against Iran, a major backer of Hamas, could make a ceasefire more likely, the chances of an immediate deal with the militant group appear to be waning, despite pressure from Trump to ink one. Even if there were a ceasefire now, Israel appears very unlikely to withdraw its troops from Gaza entirely. The 'new Middle East' that Netanyahu praised Trump for helping to bring about seems to be one in which Israel is continually fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously. The return of 'mowing the grass' Following Israel's six-week war in Gaza in 2014, known as 'Operation Protective Edge,' the defense analysts Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir wrote an influential article describing how Israel could handle Hamas going forward. The IDF need not get embroiled in an Iraq War-style counterinsurgency campaign to eliminate the group entirely, or simply accommodate it. Instead, they wrote, 'Against an implacable, well-entrenched, non-state enemy like the Hamas, Israel simply needs to 'mow the grass' once in a while in order to degrade enemy capabilities.' They continued: 'A war of attrition against Hamas is probably Israel's fate for the long term. Keeping the enemy off balance and reducing its capabilities requires Israeli military readiness and a willingness to use force intermittingly.' The fatalistic phrase 'mowing the grass' caught on, and in the years that followed, Israel fought a number of limited engagements against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. But limits of the strategy were made horrifically evident in the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, after which Israel shifted to a still-unfulfilled goal of eradicating Hamas outright. Now, however, Israel appears to be taking the 'mowing the grass' approach region-wide, using periodic military action to degrade and disrupt its foes, including Iran itself. 'There's been a major change in the level of risk that Israel is willing to take,' said Mairav Zonszein, an Israel-based analyst at the International Crisis Group. She described this new approach as 'We don't trust the intentions of our adversaries, only our own capabilities.' And they're now much more willing to use those capabilities. How many forever wars can Israel fight? Is this possibly sustainable? Can Israel really fight low-grade, episodic military conflicts in perpetuity, in as many as four different countries, even as the war on its borders continues? 'A country of just 10m is not big enough to act as a permanent hegemon in the Middle East,' the Economist suggested, skeptically. But it's also not hard to see why Israeli leaders think they can. Iran spent years building up a network of regional proxies and a missile program that could supposedly rain down destruction on Israel if it were ever attacked. Today, Hezbollah is a shell of its former self, Hamas is on the back foot, and Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime has fallen. Of the more than 500 missiles Iran fired at Israel during the 12-day war, only around 40 got through, killing 28 people — not an insignificant number, but far fewer than many feared before the war began. Israel has shown it can infiltrate its enemies' defenses and decimate their ranks, all with only manageable military backlash. It's also clear that Israel's regional conflicts are different from the war in Gaza. Polls show Israelis are fatigued by that conflict, favor a deal to end the fighting and bring hostages home, and believe Netanyahu is continuing the conflict largely for the sake of his own political survival. The humanitarian toll inflicted on Gazan civilians has deepened Israel's international isolation. It's also put strain on the country's conscript military: the IDF is short on manpower, and the large number of reservists being called up is hindering the nation's economy while exacerbating long-running political tensions over whether ultra-Orthodox Israelis should be exempt from military service. Military commanders have warned that the ongoing operation may not be sustainable at current troop levels. By contrast, the strikes on Iran were wildly popular, and supported by Israel's opposition parties. They were relatively popular internationally as well. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz likely spoke for many of his European peers when he praised Israel for doing the 'dirty work' for other countries. In contrast to the grinding conflict in Gaza, Israel's regional conflicts have been conducted either from the air, or in the case of Lebanon and Syria, with relatively small ground operations, putting far less manpower strain on the IDF. However it is fought, though, war is expensive. The 12-day war with Iran may cost around $6 billion, or 1 percent of Israel's GDP. Israel spent close to 9 percent of its GDP on defense last year, with the largest increases since the 1960s — and that was before the war with Iran. Economists have warned that level of spending threatens the country's fiscal stability and ability to provide social services. For the moment, however, the economy is weathering the storm better than many expected with modest growth and low unemployment. Israel is burning through munitions at a rapid clip, but the Trump administration seems willing for the moment to continue providing them. How does this end? The better question than whether Israel can fight all these conflicts — for the moment, it seems like it can, or at least its leaders think it can — is what it all will lead to. It's an open question what impact an endless series of 'forever wars' will have on Netanyahu's ability to see through his other main regional priority: continuing the process of normalizing relations with other Arab governments. Trump is pushing a deal between Israel and Syria's new government, as well as the perennial goal of Saudi-Israeli normalization. But the carnage in Gaza has deepened the political costs of Arab governments engaging diplomatically with Israel, and while those leaders once pushed a hard line in Iran, most were opposed to last month's war, fearing its impact on regional stability and investment. Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the US-based Israel Policy Forum, said that the prime minister likely doesn't believe there's a trade-off. 'Netanyahu believes that everything stems from Iran and anything else is a sideshow,' he said. 'The idea is that the more that Israel projects strength, the easier it will be for Israel to normalize relations with other countries. I think we're going to see that proposition tested.' Israel's multi-front war also only works if the United States keeps providing arms and political support. While Trump belatedly embraced the Israeli strikes on Iran and ultimately joined in, he has also run hot and cold on Netanyahu and shown a surprising willingness at times to act independently of Israeli interests in the region. Trump's frustrated outburst in the early hours of the ceasefire that Israel and Iran are 'two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing,' was an indication that his support for Israel's larger regional ambitions should not be taken for granted. Then, of course, there's the question of whether 'mowing the grass' will actually work. 'The risks are that you just are in an endless series of military strikes and you don't actually achieve your goal,' said Crisis Group's Zonszein. 'There are those in Israel, in the security establishment or elsewhere, who believe that that's the best you can get.' While most of Iran's proxies may be deterred for now, the Houthis, who have recently resumed their attacks on shipping through the Red Sea and actually sank two cargo ships in the past week, certainly don't appear ready to back down in the face of Israel's strikes. At the moment, the degree to which Iran's nuclear weapons program was set back by the bombing is still unclear, but there's a strong possibility that if any capabilities remain, Iranian leaders' desire to actually build a bomb has only been increased by the war. And while Iran's once-feared military and proxy militias look a bit like a paper tiger right now, there's no guarantee they will stay that way. The October 7 attacks were just the latest example of the fact that governments have a consistently terrible record when it comes to predicting the will and ability of extremist groups to strike. That's not the lesson Israel's political and military leaders appear to have taken, however.
Vox
08-07-2025
- Health
- Vox
Will we know if the next plague is human-made?
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. In October 1979, a top-secret CIA intelligence report featured the first inklings in the West that something unusual and disturbing had allegedly taken place in the Soviet Union several months earlier. In April of that year, patients started appearing at hospitals in the industrial city of Sverdlovsk, now known as Yekaterinburg, in the Ural region of the Soviet Union. They were showing symptoms of what doctors first thought to be an unusually virulent and deadly form of pneumonia. It wasn't. The outbreak that ultimately killed more than 60 people was in fact caused by anthrax spores that had been accidentally released from a Soviet biological weapons facility. How exactly this happened is still unknown. Officially, neither the facility nor the Soviet bioweapons program was supposed to exist; a few years earlier, Moscow, along with Washington, had ratified a landmark international treaty prohibiting biowarfare work. When US officials publicly raised questions about the incident at Sverdlovsk, the Soviet government denied any biological weapons research was taking place, blaming the outbreak on contaminated meat. It wasn't until 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that Russian President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged that the incident was the result of a covert bioweapons program. How is it possible that a bioweapons accident that killed dozens was kept secret for decades, even in the Soviet Union? As the Washington Post reporter David E. Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand, his history of the Cold War arms race, the answer lay in the nature of the weapons themselves: 'Biological weapons were the ultimate challenge for spies, soldiers and scientists.' Unlike a missile silo, easily distinguishable from the air, a laboratory where bioweapons are being developed doesn't look that different from a benign medical laboratory. Unlike nuclear warheads, which leave clear radiological traces in their silos and are unmistakable in their use, a weaponized pathogen and the outbreak it would cause could be difficult to discern from a naturally occurring one, giving any attacker plausible deniability. The mystery surrounding these weapons is just as much a problem today as it was during the Cold War. Putting aside the still politically fraught question of whether Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese lab or, like most outbreaks, jumped from animals to humans naturally, the bigger problem is the simple fact that we may never know for certain. 'What the pandemic tells us is that nobody can do attribution,' said Drew Endy, professor of biological engineering at Stanford. Intelligence agencies have determined that Covid was not a deliberately engineered bioweapon, but the confusion about its origins does suggest that if an even more virulent, intentionally designed pathogen were to be unleashed, it might be very difficult to say for certain who was behind the attack, or even whether it was an attack at all. This kind of plausible deniability could make using such a weapon more attractive to attackers. Biowarfare is only set to become a bigger threat in the coming years if, as many experts predict, artificial intelligence makes it easier, cheaper, and faster to develop new biological compounds, including weaponized pathogens far more sophisticated and deadly than the anthrax that killed dozens in Sverdlovsk 46 years ago. That's why Endy, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology — the construction of new biological systems or deliberate alteration of existing ones through genetic manipulation — argues that new forms of detection are desperately needed for this new threat landscape. 'When the Iron Curtain came down, we found it useful to have geospatial intelligence to see what was happening on the other side regarding nuclear weapons,' he told Vox. 'Today, there's a molecular curtain. The stuff that's invisible, that we can't see, is all around us and could be harmful. And we don't really do that kind of intelligence.' The technologies that could allow adversaries to create ever more dangerous bioweapons are advancing at a much faster clip than defensive measures. But at the moment when AI might be amplifying the risks of this type of weapon, it may also be emerging as the key for detecting and stopping them. Germ war is nothing new, but the threat is changing Biological warfare dates back at least as far as the 14th century BC, far before anyone knew that germs caused disease, when the Hittites sent diseased rams to their enemies to infect them with the dangerous bacterial infection tularemia. Every major combatant in World War II had a biological weapons research program — including the US — and Japan even deliberately unleashed germs in China. A history of germ violence Warfare and disease have always gone together; until the 20th century, illness was responsible for killing more soldiers than weapons in many conflicts. Even today, bullet and shrapnel wounds in the war in Ukraine have become breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria. The deliberate use of illness as a weapon also has a long history. In the 14th century BC, the Hittites sent diseased rams to their enemies to infect them with tularemia, a dangerous bacterial infection still classified as a potential bioweapon by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today. British soldiers infamously gave blankets infected with smallpox to American Indian tribes in the 18th century. During World War II, Japan's military tested pathogens on prisoners of war in China and dropped ceramic bombs containing plague-infested fleas and grain on Chinese cities. The United States had its own biowarfare research program starting in World War II, and testing of potential weapons, especially anthrax, expanded dramatically in the early years of the Cold War. In 1969, President Richard Nixon, facing increasing public pressure — and believing that biological agents weren't particularly useful in a world of thermonuclear weapons — ordered the program shut down. Six years later, the Biological Weapons Convention, an international treaty banning their use, went into effect. It's not only states that have used bioweapons. In 1984, the Rajneeshees, a religious cult in Oregon, sickened hundreds by infecting salad bars with salmonella — the first recorded bioterror attack in US history. In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a lone wolf perpetrator mailed anthrax to media and congressional offices, killing five people and sickening more than a dozen. Terrorist organizations including ISIS and al-Qaida have also sought unsuccessfully to acquire bioweapons. Fear over the use of biological weapons eventually led to the ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1975, banning the use and development of bioweapons globally — though the Soviet program continued in secret for years later, despite Moscow having signed onto the treaty. But even more than the treaty, biowarfare has been held back by the fact that biological weapons have been difficult to develop, deploy, and — should they be used — control. But that may be changing. New gene editing tools like CRISPR have brought down the cost and difficulty of tinkering with DNA. But the same kind of tools also can make it easier for malign actors to create designer diseases for use in warfare or terrorism. AI is already revolutionizing the field of synthetic biology: The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to researchers who used AI to predict and design new proteins. This is likely to have positive effects, like dramatically accelerating drug development. But, says Matt McKnight, head of biosecurity at the synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, past periods of rapid scientific advancement, from chemicals in the early 1900s (poison gas), to physics in the 1930s (nuclear weapons), to computer science in the later 20th century (cyber offensives), suggest that the new confluence of AI and gene editing is almost certain to be put to violent ends. 'My assumption is that bioweapons will be used by a bad actor in this century because that would be the baseline expectation given all of human actions throughout history,' McKnight said. 'And I want to reduce the likelihood that that happens.' A recent report from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) suggested several worrying scenarios for how AI could be used to optimize pathogens for warfare. Entirely new viruses could be designed, or modifications could be made to existing viruses to make them more resistant to existing treatments. Kevin Esvelt, a synthetic biology researcher and director of the Sculpting Evolution group at MIT, said one of his greatest concerns was that large language models could facilitate 'not just the replication of an existing natural pathogen, but building something entirely new that doesn't occur in nature.' This means that both our natural immunological defenses and existing vaccines would be entirely unprepared for it. How bad could it be? Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, has warned that the combination of AI and synthetic biology could allow the creation of a pathogen with the death rate of Ebola but the transmissibility of seasonal flu, causing 'more than a billion deaths in a matter of months.' This wouldn't be a very practical weapon for anyone but a doomsday cult. But AI-enhanced engineering could also allow for viruses to be made more controllable by adapting them to only work in particular locations. More disturbingly, viruses could be tailored to attack particular populations. The CNAS report quotes Zhang Shibo, former president of China's National Defense University and a one-time general in the Chinese military, who has speculated that new technology would allow for the development of diseases for 'specific ethnic genetic attacks.' Beyond these nightmare scenarios, AI may simply make it easier to produce existing dangerous viruses. In a 2023 experiment, a group of students at MIT used commercially available AI chatbots to generate suggestions for assembling several deadly viruses — including smallpox, which currently exists only in ultra-secure labs in the US and Russia — from their genetic material. The chatbots also suggested the supplies needed and listed several companies and labs that might print the genetic material without screening. Concerns about scenarios like these have prompted some AI companies to incorporate new safeguards into their models — though the intense commercial and geopolitical competition to reach artificial general intelligence may erode those safeguards over time. These advances don't mean just anyone can grow their own smallpox today. The technical obstacles to actually constructing a disease are still formidable, even if you have the instruction manual and a very patient AI to walk you through it. But it suggests the barriers to entry are coming down. In the past, nonstate actors like ISIS or the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, have tried to acquire biological weapons, but inevitably hit up against talent and supply limits. But advances in both AI and synthetic biology means actors with limited means will now have more tools at their disposal. As a method of warfare, synthetic biology 'just seems to favor offense,' said Esvelt, who led the MIT experiment on the use of chatbots in virus design. 'There's just a lot of ways you can attack, and it's much cheaper to build a virus than it is to develop and distribute a vaccine.' That's why defense needs to start catching up to offense. When it comes to the risk of this technology being misused, Ginkgo's McKnight argues, 'You can't regulate your way out of it. You have to be better at it. You have to be as good as the adversaries at making countermeasures.' His company is working to build one. Peeking behind the molecular curtain One vision of what the future of biowarfare defense might look like can be found in a tucked-away corner of a busy, sprawling lab overlooking Boston Harbor. That's where Ginkgo Bioworks is based, and where the company, founded by former MIT scientists in 2008, designs custom microorganisms for industrial use. Through that work, Ginkgo has developed advanced testing capability to determine whether the microscopic organisms they built work as intended. During Covid, Ginkgo's 'foundry,' as it refers to its main lab, was pressed into service processing nasal swabs and surveilling wastewater to help governments monitor community-level spread of the coronavirus and the emergence of new variants. A lab at Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston, in 2022. Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg via Getty Images That work has evolved into an ongoing monitoring operation at eight international airports in the US, as well as airports in the Middle East and Africa, for evidence of potentially dangerous pathogens crossing international borders. Nasal swabs from arriving passenger volunteers as well as wastewater samples are collected from planes and sent to Ginkgo for analysis. That means the next time you use the airplane lavatory, you may be contributing to a vast database of the genetic material moving around the world During a recent visit to Ginkgo's foundry, I was shown a rack of thermocyclers — each resembling oversized George Foreman grills — where these wastewater samples were being subjected to a process known as polymerase chain reaction. (That's the 'PCR' that was in PCR tests during the pandemic.) The process involves heating and cooling DNA samples in order to replicate them for analysis, allowing scientists to identify genetic abnormalities that would otherwise be difficult to detect. This process can track how certain pathogens — Covid or the flu, for instance — are migrating around the world, and how they are evolving, which can help guide any public health response. Such work would be important enough given the documented rise in naturally emerging new pathogens. But Ginkgo is no longer only looking at biological threats that emerge from nature. With the support of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the US intelligence community's research arm, Ginkgo has developed a tool known as ENDAR, or engineered nucleotide detection and ranking, which is specifically designed to detect artificially engineered genetic material. This is where AI comes in. Through its cell engineering business, Ginkgo has accumulated a vast library of engineered genomes. 'We engineer microbes all day, every day. And we actually use [tools] to validate that our engineering worked,' said Casandra Philipson, director of bioinformatics at Ginkgo. Just as AI tools like ChatGPT train on vast amounts of written material or images to be able to answer user prompts with uncanny accuracy, ENDAR was trained on a vast library of engineered genomes. This enables ENDAR to detect when something doesn't look quite right. 'You can get really specific and start looking at what's called the base pair, like very specifically every ATCG,' said Philipson, referring to the basic nucleotides that bond together to form DNA. These structures tend to evolve in predictable patterns, and the system can detect anomalies. 'You can actually calculate a molecular clock and say, 'Does its ancestry match what we would expect, given the evolutionary history?'' If it doesn't, this could be a sign that genetic engineering has taken place. If so, this could go a long way toward addressing the attribution problem Endy referred to. If a new virus as bad or even worse than Covid emerges, we should have a pretty good idea if it was designed that way. That can help policymakers plan a public health response, and if necessary, a political or military one. Why we need a better bioradar Given that its purpose is making synthetic biology easier and cheaper at scale, one could argue that Ginkgo is itself part of the problem, simply by producing the kind of tools that could, say, make designer smallpox more feasible. Still, that dichotomy is one Ginkgo appears to embrace — the foundry is decorated with Jurassic Park memorabilia, a reminder of the potential, and perhaps also the risks, of the kind of DNA tinkering the company is engaged in. (One wonders what Professor Ian Malcolm would make of the company's confidence.) The government has tried to reduce those risks — former President Joe Biden's executive order on artificial intelligence in 2023 included restrictions on the purchases of synthetic DNA. But Ginkgo's McKnight argues that given the speed of biotech innovation in multiple countries, and the benefits it can bring, 'there's no choice you can make to clamp down on all the technology.' When it comes to the risk of this technology being misused, he says, 'You can't regulate your way out of it. You have to be better at it. You have to be as good as the adversaries at making countermeasures.' The State Department has assessed that Russia and North Korea both maintain active offensive biological weapons programs, even though both countries have signed on to the Biological Weapons Convention. But the bigger concern, given its increasingly dominant position in global biotech innovation, heavy investments in frontier AI, and its scientists' often controversial approach to genetic research, is China. When it comes to China, the State Department assesses more vaguely that the country has 'continued to engage in biological activities with potential [bioweapon] applications' and has failed to supply sufficient information on a 'diverse families of potent toxins with dual-use applications.' The writings of a number of prominent defense scholars in China, including a textbook published by the People's Liberation Army, have identified biotechnology as a 'new domain of warfare.' Fighting an infopandemic amid a real one McKnight believes the main takeaway from the experience of the Covid pandemic was that 'America is not a biosecure nation today.' And as bad as Covid was, what's coming could be far worse. Epidemic control workers wearing protective suits take swabs from residents for nucleic acid testing in 2022, in he said, cost the US economy trillions of dollars and 'was probably the biggest factor in creating the chaos we're seeing in our political system. [But] it wasn't really even that bad compared to some of the potential things that are out there.' Esvelt believes that the pandemic showed the importance of stockpiling preventive equipment like respirators, likely to be a far more effective first line of defense than vaccines — and that it should be viewed as a military priority as well as a public health one. 'We're going to lose a hot war in which our civilian support personnel are taken out by a pandemic and the adversaries are not,' he said. AI could come into play here in a different way. We're already seeing generative AI's potential as a tool for creating and spreading misinformation as effectively as a virus. Epidemiologist Jay Varma recently warned of the risk of 'a rogue actor using existing AI tools to simulate a bioterrorism attack that would destabilize a region or the world.' For example, Varma imagines a scenario in which an extremist group uses faked evidence of a biological attack, spread on social media, to foment a security crisis between nuclear rivals China and India. Even without AI, rumors and misinformation ran rampant in the pandemic, eroding public trust in vaccines. And despite the intelligence community's assessment that Covid was not a deliberate bioweapon, some politicians have continued to insinuate that it was. (The uncertainty around this is probably not helped by the ongoing confusion over whether Covid was inadvertently released from a lab doing benign research, which several intelligence agencies consider a real possibility.) Likewise, the Russian government has spread unsubstantiated rumors that Ukraine is running labs where bioweapons are being developed with the support of the US government, a campaign that was picked up and spread by prominent US media figures, including Tucker Carlson. All this suggests that determining a bioweapons attack is not taking place during an outbreak may be just as important an application for Gingko's ENDAR technology as determining one is. Despite the increasing attention being devoted to biosecurity at the government level, there's also reason to be concerned about whether the US is moving toward becoming a more biosecure nation. The Trump administration recently canceled a $12 million grant to Harvard University for biosecurity research, despite the warnings of Pentagon officials that this would pose national security risks. Data as disinfectant As Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand, many of the leading Soviet biologists who worked on the country's bioweapons program did so under the sincere impression that their counterparts in the US were doing exactly the same thing. Once the Cold War ended, they were stunned to learn that the Americans had halted their offensive program decades before. But that only shows how the distrust and competition of an arms race can obscure reality. With the rapid pace of advances of both synthetic biology and AI today, Endy worries about a new arms race mentality taking hold. Whereas nuclear competition has, since the dawn of the Cold War, been governed by the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD), he worries that the dynamic of biosecurity will be governed by what he calls SAD — stupidly assured destruction. 'It's really important to be thoughtful and cautious about accusations,' he says. 'If we're not careful about how we are framing and talking about weapons programs, we get this type of geopolitical autoimmune response that leads to some really bad policy outcomes. We don't want to go down the deterrence path' — in other words, deterring an enemy from unleashing bioweapons by having more powerful ones of our own. Instead, Endy said, 'we want to go down the resilience path' — building societal defenses from biological threats, natural or artificial. The first step of building those defenses is knowing exactly what threats are out there.
