By John LaForge

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2018-19

The Pentagon has a laboratory project underway that envisions millions of insects spreading viruses to crops in order to strengthen their resilience against pests, droughts, and floods, etc.—and the prospect has critics crying foul. “Once you engineer a virus that spreads by insect, it is hard to imagine how you would ever control it,” Guy Reeves, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, told the New York Times. “You haven’t just released a transmissible virus—you’ve released a disease,” Reeves said. “The United States knows better than to return to a biological arms race,” he said. Biological weapons have been banned under international law since 1975. But the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency started Insect Allies research in 2016 to try and turn agricultural pests into “troops” that could deliver protective genes into plants. Reeves, lead author of a paper published Oct. 5, 2018 in Science, warns that such genetic modifications could also be weaponized, could not be controlled in the field, and could move hostile governments to launch similar programs. The project’s manager Blake Bextine acknowledged the critics’ concerns that unleashed swarms of infected insects could be put to dreadful uses, either destroying crops or spreading disease. “With any of these new technologies that are going to be revolutionary, there’s some inherent dual-use potential.”

—New York Times, Oct. 5, 2018; New Eastern Outlook online, Oct. 29, 2018