How the U.S.-China rivalry could help terrorists wipe out the human race

Terrorism is among the most volatile and unpredictable threats faced by the international community, with a wide array of non-state actors committed to carrying out widespread violence for political and ideological gain.

But a soon-to-be published report by two leading experts outlines the potential for an even more deadly scenario on a scale that could threaten the existence of humanity as a species.

Methods outlined in the report include those in which militants perpetrate or induce attacks involving biological weapons, nuclear exchanges, artificial superintelligence, and even the redirection of extraterrestrial objects.

Zachary Kallenborn, co-author of “Existential Terrorism: Can Terrorists Destroy Humanity,” set to be published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation, tells Newsweek that while the likelihood of such scenarios remains quite low, the shift of major powers such as the United States and China from counterterrorism to competition could potentially leave humanity more vulnerable.

“American national security attention is increasingly focused on the rise of China and so-called ‘strategic competition,'” said Kallenborn, a George Mason University School of Policy and Government fellow who has served as a national security consultant and contributed to the U.S. Army as part of its Mad Scientist Laboratory program.

“If that focus means terrorism gets forgotten as a risk and pressure is removed from terrorist groups,” he explained, “terrorist groups could focus on building organizations, capabilities, and acquiring, solidifying, and expanding territory where they have the capacity and desire to do so.”

When it comes to imminent and universally recognized existential threats, such as an impending “planet-killer asteroid,” Kallenborn noted it would likely take only a single capable actor to step up and deflect them. But the situation becomes far more complicated in an array of other potential scenarios emerging amid the deepening feud between Beijing and Washington, one which portends a worsening geopolitical environment.

“Consider a hot war between the United States and China that’s on the brink of going nuclear and a terrorist tries to encourage escalation,” Kallenborn said. “Historically, states have been willing to step back from the edge, but as arms control advocates like to note, they still stepped up to the edge.”

“How a terror attack might interact with those crisis dynamics is, to my knowledge, a complete unknown, and definitely scary,” he added.

Direct Existential Attacks

The 19-page report examines potential methods and motivations for terrorist groups to create existential harm. Both areas are broken down into subsets, with methods being comprised of existential attacks, existential spoilers and systemic harm.

Among the possible forms of direct existential attack are the use of genetically engineered microorganisms, which the report defines as the only existing weapons posing an existential threat to humanity “that are even plausibly within the capability of terrorists to produce and deploy on their own.”

The report notes that producing and releasing a bioweapon capable of threatening humanity requires a great deal of materials and expertise, accompanied by the failure of the international community to respond adequately. Rapid advances continue to make this method more accessible, while international disunity around the COVID-19 pandemic highlights major shortcomings in global cooperation and safeguards.

“Even if all of the obstacles are not surmountable today,” the report reads, “the rapid forward march of biotechnology suggests that at some point in the not-too-distant future terrorists might be capable of brandishing an existential-level microbe.”

The report examines other ways in which the present may define the future, citing the possibility of terrorists weaponizing “artificial superintelligence” (ASI), defined as a form of “artificial intelligence capable of performing all the cognitive tasks a human is capable of better than a human can.” Already, alarms have increasingly raised in scientific, political and military circles regarding the progress and proliferation of AI technology.

Yet another method listed under “future technology weapons” is the potential advent and subsequent weaponization of nanotechnology capable of self-replicating to a scale so devastating it would leave no room for living beings.

Indirect Existential Attacks

The report also explores so-called “indirect attacks,” through which terrorists could utilize existing means of mass destruction in the hands of others, including a nuclear option.

In this scenario, terrorists would instigate a nuclear exchange by infiltrating and acquiring control over a nation’s nuclear arsenal either for a first launch or by “spoofing” early warning systems to suggest such an attack was imminent, thus prompting a launch. The report points to cyberattacks in both cases as the most plausible means of achieving this aim. Additionally, the report notes that the recruitment of insiders within a country’s national security apparatus to overcome established protections could be vital to success.

The report also involves a space scenario that involves “redirecting a benign planetary protection system.” This would constitute taking over a nation’s means of redirecting the path of a near-Earth object such as a “planet-killing asteroid,” and instead using it to draw the object toward Earth. Here too the report said a covert insider, along with an immense level of specialized knowledge, would be necessary.

“This scenario becomes more plausible to the degree that commercial space companies develop the capability to manipulate the trajectories of near-Earth objects, such as future space mining companies,” the report said, “assuming such manipulations generate adequate force to shift a near-Earth object into a collision orbit.”

Existential Spoilers

In addition to existential attacks, the report identifies so-called existential spoilers, which it defines as “terrorist attacks aimed at sabotaging, disrupting or otherwise preventing existential risk-mitigation efforts from succeeding.” When it comes to planetary events, this would entail terrorists merely hindering efforts to deflect an incoming planet-killer asteroid rather than actively causing such a collision.

Other examples provided include terrorists attacking or disrupting society over a wide array of human activity, including super-volcano cooling measures, astro-engineering constructs or sanctuaries, climate change talks or geo-engineering efforts, pandemic responses, safeguards around AI or ASI, social resilience, peace talks between warring nuclear powers, and mitigation measures to counter nanorobotics.

While the means to do so may be relatively accessible for well-equipped terrorist organizations, the reports notes that the probability of any of these scenarios resulting in existential destruction is “highly contingent.” Bringing about the end of humanity on this path is only accessible when an “existential risk is on the verge of manifesting or the risk-mitigation effort cannot just be rescheduled or modified,” according to the report.

Systemic Harm

The third category of methods through which terrorists could potentially erase humanity is referred to as systemic harm. In this description, “other terrorist actions have the unintended side effect of increasing the overall level of existential threat.”

Three types of systemic harm are mentioned in the report.

The first two are impeding mitigation and opportunity cost, both of which involve the real or perceived risk of terrorism redirecting policy efforts away from measures or research that would ostensibly prevent an existential threat. The third is overreaction, through which governments, in a bid to fight terrorism, either amplify potentially existential threats such as ASI or pursue methods sufficiently destabilizing to wreak global havoc to the degree of causing existential harm to humanity.

Motivations

While most individuals and organizations defined as terrorist commit violence to send a message that more often than not requires some survivors to receive, belief systems exist that do not view this as an obstacle.

The rise of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) a decade ago demonstrated how a group of committed individuals could spawn a massive standing army capable of seizing transnational territory complete with chemical weapons and drones. The report makes reference to such apocalyptic jihadi ideology, but goes even further to include other doomsday movements, some that have come from the U.S., to demonstrate a broad scope of malign belief systems that are potentially willing to threaten the human race.

Among the defined ideologies in the report is cathartic utopianism, adherents of which “generally believe that the current corrupt or corrupted world must be destroyed in order to usher in a new, better one.” Examples of followers include “the more extreme interpretations of most major religious traditions,” including far-right Christian and both Sunni and Shiite jihadi strains, as well as new religious movements commonly defined as cults, and even UFO-inspired organizations.

In Japan, the apocalyptic Aum Shinrikyo, also referred to as Aleph, managed to manufacture a chemical weapon similar to sarin gas that acolytes released in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, killing 13 people and seriously injuring dozens more.

In the U.S., examples provided in the report include a white supremacist group—The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord—which was dissolved after a successful law enforcement siege on the group’s Arkansas compound in 1985, and the Christian millenarian Heaven’s Gate, whose members committed mass suicide at their California headquarters in 1997.

Another ideology that tends to revere doomsday options is extreme environmentalism, which is “grounded in the belief that it is humankind (or at least human civilization) that must be extinguished, in order that non-human animals and the biosphere can survive and flourish,” according to the report. Supportive of this ethos is the Gaia Liberation Front, whose manifesto calls for “the extinction of the Humans as a species.”

Finally, there are the most extreme interpretations of negative utilitarianism, in which the traditional utilitarianist goal “to reduce the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number of people” actually “becomes an act of altruism to end all human life.”

The Problem of Great Power Competition

While the dawn of the 21st century saw an international focus on counterterrorism with the launch of the post 9/11 U.S.-led “War on Terror” to which even China and Russia contributed, recent years have come to be defined as a period of heightened tensions and competition among major powers.

Washington’s relationships with Moscow and Beijing have continued to sour, while tense front lines in the ongoing war in Ukraine and the disputed island of Taiwan serve as potential flashpoints. But as all three powers emphasize that they seek to avoid any armed conflict, the report demonstrates how malevolent actors could take advantage of a highly charged geopolitical environment.

The message was by reinforced by the armed insurrection staged over the weekend by the Wagner private military company against the Russian Defense Ministry.

“As we enter a period of enhanced great power competition, it might be more difficult to come together in some areas, especially countering terrorism,” Gary Ackerman, co-author of “Existential Terrorism: Can Terrorists Destroy Humanity,” told Newsweek.

Ackerman, an associate professor and associate dean at the University of Albany who founded the Unconventional Weapons and Technology Division at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and has led various government-sponsored projects on counterterrorism, pointed out that past eras of geopolitical competition have actually served to foster cooperation in key fields, but he noted that this was far from guaranteed in the current climate.

“One would hope that the geopolitics can be managed to allow for collaboration on areas of common interest/threat—as we did with the USSR even during the height of the Cold War)—but it remains to be seen, since each strategic competition has its own dynamics and character,” Ackerman said. “There is always the possibility of defectors or non-joiners to any international control regime. The extent to which this matters will vary.”

He warned that the U.S., for its part, does not have a positive track record in monitoring long-term threats.

“It is notoriously difficult for people, at least in the U.S., to think long-term, and even more difficult to act to mitigate long-term risks,” Ackerman said. “Here it is difficult to get people to think beyond the next season of their favorite show or for politicians to think beyond the next election.”

“In other countries and cultures there can be less short-termism—for example, places like China and Norway—who tend to have more generational outlooks,” he explained. “So, getting folks in the U.S. to not only pay attention to long-term risks, whether existential or not, but also to sacrifice resources today to devote to mitigating those future risks, is a real uphill battle.”