One World, Many Peaces

Math Makes Counter-Terrorism More Effective, Less Pervasive

Who would have thought that math club members in high school would have turned out to be the next counter-terrorism superheros? Anything that keeps our blossoming police state from bearing more fruit deserves widespread attention and support.

New models to dismantle terrorist networks, set to make current (and, some would say, not working) ones obsolete, have been put forth by ultra-high-level mathematicians at the New England Complex Systems Institute. Luckily for us mere mortals, no numbers are required to understand how their mathematical improvements can keep us safer, cheaper and less pervasively.

They published their breakthroughs in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, what all the cool kids are reading these days. In laymen's terms, their new counter-terrorism strategy goes something like this.

Terrorist networks today are taken on as whole through a series of short-term battles. Think of trying to go after Osama bin Laden here, then there, then there, and still never finding him while killing lots of innocent people in several host countries along the way. (Note: Apparently, this method has also been superseded by the U.S. giving $2 billion in military aid to the Pakistani so they can do it themselves.)

What these magician-mathematicians have shown is that it is much, much more effective and less resource-intensive to isolate hubs within a terrorist network rather than try to eliminate them, which goes against centuries of military strategy, including the one currently used to pursue Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups globally. This math-based counter-terrorism strategy is also much less pervasive than its predecessors.

Philip Vos Fellman, an expert in mathematical modeling and strategy, explains that "the nature of a dynamic [terrorist] network is akin to the robust Internet but contrasts starkly with the structure of the armed forces or homeland security systems, which tend to be centralized and hierarchical." His sophisticated computer simulations of real-world terrorist networks show that isolation rather than removal of terrorist cells is the key to successfully defeating terrorists networks as a whole.

Then again, those math club members in high school could also have gone on to be the next software multi-billionaire software developers. But where is the glory in that?

Photo Credit: trindade.joao

Intergalactic Peacekeepers? U.S. Military Personnel Say Thank Them

We're all familiar with conspiracy theories about UFOs and little green men in human suits controlling the world, like in the cutesy movie Men in Black. Seriously though, according to a group of U.S. military airmen who recently held a press conference in Washington D.C., not only are the otherworldly protagonists of these seemingly far-fetched stories true, they have had an incalculably positive impact on humanity by preventing us from annihilating ourselves and our planet with nuclear weapons.

"The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it," they affirmed. According to over 120 military personal, by renowned researcher (or total crackpot, depending on your perspective) Robert Hastings' count, since 1948 extraterrestrials in spaceships have not only been visiting Earth but hovering over British and American nuclear missile sites and temporarily deactivating the nuclear weapons, as LiveScience reports.

Strangely, the U.S. Air Force's response did not deny their intergalactic peacekeeping and nuclear disarmament theory. Officials simply referred to the Air Force Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings between 1947 and 1969. The passage most pertinent to the military personnel's claims reads: "No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.” This statement still leaves open the possibility that national security, and global security for that matter, could have been aided thereby. But I have a different theory.

For me, whether or not aliens exist and exert influence on our planet, as a metaphor for the absolute other in whose face humanity unites and solves our common problems or face their judgment, they reign supreme. They can also stand for the actual tens of thousands of peace and nuclear disarmament activists worldwide who have genuinely been considered aliens by their antagonists despite what they have helped achieve, namely the survival of humanity and all life on earth. That the debt the world owes them remains widely unrecognized is truly out of this world. The universal peacebuilding mission of the Federation of Planets in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek never seemed so (im)plausible.

In the words of science writer, not science fiction writer, Benjamin Radford, "UFO folklore and reports - especially from the 1960s and 1970s - often contained supposed messages from our peace-loving and ecologically aware space brothers warning us quarrelsome and destructive earthlings to treat the planet better and seek world peace. That is undoubtedly good advice (regardless of whether its origin is terrestrial or extraterrestrial) though if Hastings and his colleagues are right, the aliens - if they exist - may have everything under control." How about getting everything under control ourselves?

Photo Credit: [F]oxymoron

The Nile Treaty, Water Security and the Future of Peace in Africa

The Nile Cooperative Framework Agreement (or Nile Treaty, under the auspices of the Nile Basin Initiative, NBI) seeks the establishment of a permanent Nile River Basin Commission through which member countries will act together to manage and develop the resources of the Nile, the world's longest river. To many who visit, the Nile and its fertile valleys are a beautiful backdrop for a cruise or vacation. But for those who live around and depend upon the river, it is that and the source of their physical survival and cultural heritage.

Formally launched in February 1999, the NBI provides an institutional mechanism, a shared vision, and a set of agreed policy guidelines to provide a basinwide framework for cooperative action, according to the Nile Basin Initiative website. The initiative's policy guidelines define the following as the primary objectives of the NBI:

•To develop the Nile Basin water resources in a sustainable and equitable way to ensure
•Prosperity, security, and peace for all its peoples
•To ensure efficient water management and the optimal use of the resources
•To ensure cooperation and joint action between the riparian countries, seeking win-win gains
•To target poverty eradication and promote economic integration
•To ensure that the program results in a move from planning to action.

The NBI's Strategic Action Program represents Nile riparian concerted approach to achieving sustainable socioeconomic development in the basin through “equitable utilization of, and benefit from, the common Nile Basin water resources.” The Strategic Action Program provides the means for translating this shared vision into concrete activities through a two-fold, complementary approach:

•Lay the groundwork for cooperative action through a regional program to build confidence and capacity throughout the basin (the Shared Vision Program)
•Pursue, simultaneously, cooperative development opportunities to realize physical investments and tangible results through sub-basin activities (Subsidiary action programs) in the Eastern Nile and the Nile Equatorial Lakes regions.

So far, five countries have signed the Nile Treaty: Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and most recently, Kenya. However, two countries key to the viability of the whole project, Egypt and Sudan, have so far vehemently opposed the Nile Treaty on the grounds that it will detract from their economic interests in the river. 

Nonetheless, Egypt, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda belonged to the Technical Co-operation Committee for the Promotion of the Development and Environmental Protection of the Nile Basin (TECCONILE), founded in 1992, a forerunner to the NBI.

As the African population grows with the rise of industrialism, and bigger cities replacing villages, water security and agriculture will be of paramount importance. The Nile Treaty gives reason to hope that these potential conflicts will not turn violent, but no guarantee.

The Nile remains a current event after thousands of years of human dependency on it, and will create a future of peace only if humans can work their problems out before they become violent. 

Dissenting Against the Nobel Peace Prize Committee

So the Nobel Peace Prize Committee members have a thing for dissenters like laureates Liu Xiaobo (2010), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), Lech Walesa (1983), Andrei Sakharov (1975) and Carl von Ossietzky (1935), eh? Here's some dissent against them: Your recent award choices do more harm than good as far as furthering peace is concerned, your membership should be revoked immediately, and you should be replaced by people who can carry out their legal duties adequately, at least. Here’s why.

To be clear, I am not dissenting against the Nobel Peace Prize itself, though its domination of the global popular imagination when it comes to peace is debilitating, nor am I downplaying the dissenters they have honored, who though icons limit social change as such. What I am saying is that its members and all those worldwide who look up to  their choices (to say nothing of the nominators, who in-breed bad decisions as former laureates) would do well to take an extra-large dose of their own medicine when it comes to dissent. There are two main reasons why I am calling for the impeachment of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

First, they have betrayed the legally-binding intent of Alfred Nobel (inventor of dynamite and an arms manufacturer) in his will and testatment, which created the Nobel Peace Prize, and so should be class-action sued by his heirs and estate, not to mention honest fans of the award worldwide and rejected (worthy) awardees. Second, they have and continue to ill-advisedly reinforce peace work as the amorphous enterprise it already is in the minds of most people globally, to its severe detriment. Then there's China's reaction to this year's laureate, but I will leave that for last.

“The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows... one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” That's what Mr. Nobel wanted done with his money, what the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is legally bound to do because it's his will, and what they have not been doing in their recent choices.

Mr. Nobel's definition of peace is as limited as it was for most members of his class, culture and historical moment. It is equally unfortunate that this definition still dominates how peace is thought about and acted upon worldwide, in large part thanks to the Nobel Peace Prize itself. But in trying to expand this definition, Nobel Peace Prize Committee members have not only negligently not carried out their legal duties, they have confused and confounded what peace means beyond Nobel's narrow-minded definition without ever explicitly tying their choices to it. Might as well give Heinz the Chemistry Prize for inventing ketchup.

Take just two recent examples of the Nobel Peace Prize being wrongly awarded. One is to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) for their environmental work, the other to Muhammad Yunus for his microlending work. In the case of Gore, he should have received one of the science Prizes; in the case of Yunus, the Economics Prize; in the case of neither the Peace Prize. Why? Not because their transformational work isn't important and doesn't contribute to peace, but simply because neither of them meet the criteria that Alfred Nobel set for the Nobel Peace Prize, which the Committee's and commentators' attempts to rationalize the choices in itself makes clear.

The same self-evidently goes for this year's laureate, Liu Xiaobo (who should have received the Literature Prize, not that this year's choice of Mario Vargas Llosa wasn't fully worthy), which brings me to my response to China's response. Political statements poor Nobel Peace Prize laureates make, just think back to last year's disastrous choice of Barack Obama, who has since carried out the largest weapons deal in U.S. history and stationed some 100,000 troops in Afghanistan in an imperial war now entering it's tenth year. Oh, and certinaly no one in the world did more for peace according to Nobel's terms before he won the Prize, as even President Obama himself less sarcastically admitted.

And instead of giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a dissenter against these international travesties, which would at least have had some vague relation to Nobel's dying wishes and bring them into a light from which they are systematically hidden, the Committee members give it to a dissenter against a dometic travesty that is already globally acknowledged, effectively covering the tracks of (or at best creating a distraction tactic away from) their choice of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is our early century's biggest warmonger after his predecessor.

Unfortunately for eligible laureates, Obama's America generally doesn't yet throw dissenters in jail like China does, so they don't become living martyrs easily glorified by lazy ga-ga journalists and activists abroad; rather, Obama's officials just raid such dissenters' houses, and prevent them from steering terrorists towards peace. China's response was appropriately furious, if also for reasons we like Liu Xiaobo should all dissent to in our own backyards, and not expect a Nobel Peace Prize because doing so is called thinking.

Photo Credit: Rankingranqueen

Selenium Cells: The Secrets of Next-Generation Solar Energy Revealed

By Rosalind Sanders

Scientists at the American Institute of Physics are seeking to identify superior light-catching substances in order to better transform more of the sun's power into carbon-free electric power. And their learned labors are now bearing fruit that could change the way the world gets its energy forever: cheaper, faster and less harmfully to the environment.
 
A new study in Applied Physics Letters (published by the American Institute of Physics) describes how solar energy could potentially be collected by using oxide materials that have the element selenium. A team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, inserted selenium in zinc oxide, a relatively low-priced component that could make more cost-efficient use of the sun's power.
 
The research team determined that even a relatively small level of selenium, just nine per-cent of the mostly zinc-oxide base, dramatically enhanced the material's performance in absorbing light.
 
The principal author of this analysis, Marie Mayer (a fourth-year College of California, Berkeley doctoral student) says that photo-electrochemical water splitting, that signifies employing energy from the sun to cleave water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, could potentially be the most revolutionary future application for her work. Using this reaction is key to the eventual creation of zero-emission hydrogen powered automobiles, which hypothetically will run only on water and sunlight.

The conversion effectiveness of a PV cell is the proportion of sunlight energy that the solar cell converts to electricity. This is very important when discussing Photovoltaic products, because boosting this efficiency is vital to making Pv electricity competitive with more standard sources of energy (e.g., fossil fuels).
 
For comparison, the very first Photovoltaic products converted about 1%-2% of sunlight power into electric energy. Today's Pv devices convert 7%-17% of light energy into electric power. Of course, the other side of the equation is the dollars it costs to make the PV devices. This has been reduced over the years as well. In fact, today's PV systems generate electricity at a fraction of the cost of first PV systems.
 
In the 1990s, when silicon cells were twice as thick, efficiencies were much smaller than today and lifetimes were reduced, it may well have cost more energy to produce a cell than it could generate in a lifetime. In the meantime, the technological know-how has progressed significantly, and the energy repayment time (defined as the recovery time required for generating the energy spent to produce the respective technical energy systems) of a modern photovoltaic module is normally from 1 to 4 years depending on the module type and location.
 
Normally, thin-film technologies - despite having comparatively low conversion efficiencies - obtain considerably shorter energy repayment times than standard systems (often < 1 year). With a normal lifetime of 20 to 30 years, this signifies that current solar cells are net energy producers, i.e. they generate significantly more energy over their lifetime than the energy expended in producing them.
 
Rosalind Sanders is the publisher of, and writes for, The Solar Panel Review, which focuses on helping homeowners reduce expenses with solar energy.

What Do Violent Dreams Mean? Future Brain Damage, Says Neuroscience

We've all had dreams we never want to wake up from, and nightmares we couldn't wake up fast enough from. But what about violent dreams, whether ones that satisfy our darkest desires we didn't even know existed, or make us wonder if there some secret evil inside us? New brain science research indicates that violent dreams could be a sign of brain damage to come. Here's an overview of the groundbreaking study and a few worrisome implications of what this research can lead to.

There is a mysterious sleep-state condition called "Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep Behavior Disorder," or RBD for short. People with this condition, according to the doctors who published their research in the most recent issue of Neurology, show that the first signs of neurological diseases can appear decades before a person is diagnosed. They hope that recognizing these warning signs may allow  better monitoring and treatment patients before brain damage occurs. And one of those signs are violent dreams. What would Sigmund Freud say about that?

The dreams of people with RBD tend to get progressively more violent and more frequent, often involving murder scenes. The usual bodily stillness associated with sleeping disappear, and they often act out the scenes, including punching and yelling. Males are much more likely to develop RBD than females, and there is a danger for sharing beds to be injured by them.

“The consensus among all RBD researchers is that it’s not a matter of if, but when,” says sleep expert Carlos Schenck of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who was one of the first researchers to describe RBD. “Basically, the longer you follow these men, the more they will convert to a neurodegenerative disorder.” “In the neurodegenerative realm, we just don’t know any other clinical manifestations that can start so far in advance,” another research said. “There are so few other illnesses that can have a window of decades from one clinical manifestation to another.” Violent dreams can appear up to fifty years in advance of brain damage.

There are serious ethical implications to this study. Are people who enact these violent dreams in waking life to be excused for their crimes? Can or should this knowledge be used by police forces as well as doctors to prevent dangerous possibilities from becoming reality? What can this tell us about historical violent people, from Genghis Kahn to Hitler? But one thing this study leaves out is that if violent dreams point to brain damage, what do peaceful ones point to?

First, Do No Harm: Lessons from the BP Gulf Oil Spill Ecocatastrophe

By Robert Koehler

As Planet Earth continues to hemorrhage crude oil from its wound — with a worst-case estimate of as much as 100,000 barrels a day — we grope, beyond our anger and guilt, simply to imagine what damage we have done in the pursuit of human empowerment.

This is bigger than BP, blameworthy though the company may be. This is bigger than any sort of “us vs. them” scenario we can think of. It’s a crisis of civilization, which means all of us.

If we drive, use energy, buy products wrapped in absurd, throwaway plastic — if we live at all — it cuts across our lives. The roots of this disaster, and, God help us, the ones to come, are political and corporate and governmental, and they are also intensely personal. We all collude in society’s “addiction” to oil, or what I would call its sense of entitlement: This is our planet. We’re the boss.

What we’re truly addicted to, or at least inextricably caught up in, is what my friend Jim Oberg calls “doomsday capitalism” and its need for reckless, unlimited economic growth. With this system operative, we trend toward war, empire and exploitation.

Maybe, as we look at the graphics of this disaster — pelicans, for instance, covered in black goo — we begin to grasp our immaturity as a species. Let’s say we do survive ourselves and create a sustainable, eco-harmonious way to live and prosper: What we’re presently churning up in our clumsiness and techno-entitlement is a warning to the future of how not to be. We’re scaring up a whole new mythology, and new definitions of sacrilege.

I know nowhere to start except here. And I know of nothing less to reach for than . . . salvation.

I use this language not to promote existing religions, which far too often collude in the problem, but to reach deep into the human core, into the raw material of existence, to find new commonality with one another and to discover new — or perhaps I mean to rediscover ancient, uncompromised and uncorrupted — principles to live by.

The rebuilding of human society cannot be superficial. It must begin with a realization that those in power mostly have no idea what they’re doing; they operate with crippling short-sightedness, in a context of eerily limited self-interest. (“History, we don't know,” George Bush said to Bob Woodward, regarding future assessments of the Iraq war. “We’ll all be dead.”) We’re, like, on our own here.

Knowledge that this is the case leads either to despair and cynicism or translates into a deeper, more profound sense of personal responsibility. I opt for the latter, understanding that present-day U.S. democracy is comfortable with a spectator citizenry: entertained, isolated and disengaged. We don’t pursue the sort of awareness that would propel us into troubled discontent, and we’re not supposed to. But it’s our only choice. And while this sort of awareness doesn’t translate into easy or obvious action, maybe that’s OK.

First, do no harm.

What if that phrase, which is the byword of many professions, became a sort of operating principle with which to proceed, individually and collectively, into the future? Even if it’s an impossible standard, wouldn’t we be far better off attempting to live by its implications, or at least reflecting on them and debating them, than by mockingly dismissing them?

Our most destructive enterprises all depend on moral relativism and a suspension of this value, allegedly in service to a greater good, which generally fails to materialize. I submit that the “greater good” argument is a convenient scam, pulled out of a hat time and again by those intent on gaming the system for limited, self-serving ends.

Yet it springs eternal — certainly as the ultimate argument for war, but also for anything that might generate a profit.

Harvey Wasserman, for instance, writing about the resurgence of the nuclear power industry and its backing by the Obama administration, notes that, “Like BP, their builders would enjoy financial liability limits dwarfed by damage they could do.”

Nuclear power has been able to recast itself as a green alternative to coal and oil only by minimizing or dismissing the problem of radioactive waste and the dangers of meltdown. “If the White House has a reliable plan for deploying and funding a credible response to a disaster at a reactor that’s superior to the one we’ve seen at the Deepwater Horizon, we’d sure like to see it,” Wasserman writes.

As I read this, my thought is that the forces that ultimately determine the future of this industry will be responding to something more short-sighted and “pragmatic” than my proposed operating principle: First, do no harm.

The United States is both an aggressive empire and a throwaway society. We wage open-ended wars that are mostly for the sake of resource control, and we package our groceries in “disposable” plastic bags, given away by the billions, which are made from the primary resource we seek to control.

The crisis is upon us. Our paradoxes have come home to roost, and they’re covered with oil.

Photo Credit: The National Guard

U.S., Europe Two-Timed by Ukraine: 'Double Accord' Sealed with Russia on Gas Prices and Navy Bases

How is the Ukraine getting away with playing the two main sides in one of the world's major ongoing power struggles? Or is this an early sign of new era of power sharing? As previously reported on One World, Many Peaces and by Antony Adolf on Change.org, the Ukraine remains buddy-buddy with the U.S. largely thanks to missile sites President Obama promised to scrap in his campaign, then went ahead with anyways after taking office. However, what became clear today is that Ukrainian leaders are proving expertly adept at attracting more than one major power into their sphere of influence. A coup de grace?

Viktor Ianoukovitch, President of the Ukraine, and Russian Premier Dmitri Medvedev have just concluded what France's La Presse is calling a "double accord." First, to avoid any more gas shutoffs that kept large parts of Europe in the cold last year, the two countries agreed that gas coming from Russia and passed through Ukraine would be purchased by the Ukraine at a significantly lower rate so that it can make higher profits as the European distributor of Russian gas. Since coming to power, Ianoukovitch has sought closer ties with Russia, and the so-called "blue gold" deal proved to be the surest and most beneficial means to bring the two countries into their closest ties since the Cold War. Europe stands to gain little and will likely pay even more for Russian gas passed through the Ukraine now that this first part of the double accord is signed.

Second-- and the connection is altogether unambiguous-- in return Russia will be allowed to have its naval bases at the port in Sebastopol until 2042. Given that the Ukraine controls 80% of gas entering Europe, Russia understandably wants to keep its near-monopoly safe and sound, and Ukraine seems to be more than happy to outsource this task. But when it came to the U.S. missile shield to be housed on Ukrainian territory, the country's leaders also seemed more than willing to in-source military projects, again for the sake of increases in gross domestic product. Russian vehemently opposed the U.S. missile shield but has remained quiet about its latest development. At the signing of the double accord, Medvedev explicitly stated that the reduction in gas prices was to be understood as a "payment towards the rent for the navy bases." The U.S. is also paying the Ukraine for using its land for military purposes.

On May 9th, 1,400 troops from the Ukraine and Russia combined will mark the 60th anniversary of Russia's victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two. The joint exercise is mostly symbolic, but a highly potent symbolism at that. What is being signified is a rather small country's power to two-time two major world powers (the U.S. and Russia) as well as a whole continent (Europe). Should other equally-situated countries follow suit, major powers as current events will disappear under the weight of deals they rush into and know nothing about until its too late, creating a future in which money can be made off militaries that aren't even one's own.

China and India Uplift Millions from Slums as U.S. Inequality Grows

Think it's impossible to lift millions of people out of desperate poverty in a matter of years? Think again. India and China have together uplifted at least 125 million people from slums since 2000, and have improved the lives of slum dwellers more than any other countries, according to a new U.N. report. Meanwhile, the U.S. is quickly securing the distinction of being the most unequal country on earth.

India has lifted 59.7 million people out of slum conditions since 2000, where slum prevalence fell from 41.5 per cent in 1990 to 28.1 per cent in 2010, according the State of the World’s Cities report. China's urban population living in slums fell from 37.3 per cent in 2000 to some 28 per cent in 2010, a relative decrease of 25 per cent.  China has made the greatest progress on this front with improvements to the daily living conditions of 65.3 million urban residents. Overall,  227 million people worldwide have moved out of slum conditions since 2000. This didn't happen accidentally, of course, but is the result of superb planning and even more notable execution on the parts of the Indian and Chinese governments.

The report outlines four major steps to uplifting people out of slums. First is to build the skills of the urban poor and encourage them starting micro-businesses of their own choosing, funded by micro-credit. Second is to improve the provision of basic services from nutrition and sanitation within slum settlements. Third is to provide land tenure security to poor families living in unauthorized settlements, improving their access to low-cost housing and subsidized housing finance. These steps correspond exactly to the first level of the Pyramid of Peace in Antony Adolf's Peace: A World History.

The US has emerged as one of the most unequal societies with cities like New York, Chicago and Washington less equal than places like Brazzaville in Congo-Brazzaville, Managua in Nicaragua and Davao City in the Phillippines. Overall, however, the U.N. report warns that the number of people living in slums has risen from 777 million in 2000 to 830 million in 2010, and unless urgent steps similar to those taken by India and China are taken that number could rise to 900 million by 2020.

Photo credit: meanestindian

A Pepper so Hot it's a Weapon (Literally): 'Ghost Chili' Grenades

Wouldn't the world be a better place if all wars were more like food fights? President Obama wants to weaponize languages and cultures, so a fierce food fight doesn’t sound so far fetched. Tomatoes would be fun, watermelon too, but weapons manufacturers in India have a different idea. Perhaps international food fights wouldn't be so fun if the world's hottest pepper according to the Guinness Book of World Records are involved. And they are about to be.

The "bhut jolokia" or "ghost chili" has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili's spiciness. Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000. About a million times spicier than a pepper that can make most people cry: that's why the ghost chilies can be weaponized and others cannot. So what weapons are in the works for the world's hottest pepper?

One of them is easy to guess: pepper spray. For anyone who has come into contact with existing versions of the weaponized food, this new version is even scarier. The scientists involve also believe that the ghost chili can be made into a vaporous tear gas capable of totally immobilizing its victims with pain, at least without killing them. "This is definitely going to be an effective nontoxic weapon because its pungent smell can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs," said R. B. Srivastava, the director of the Life Sciences Department at the Indian military.

Why the weaponized chili pepper isn't a biothreat in the wrong hands was not addressed. "The chili grenade has been found fit for use after trials in Indian defense laboratories, a fact confirmed by scientists at the Defense Research and Development Organization," Col. R. Kalia, a defense spokesman in the northeastern state of Assam, told The Associated Press. Here's to the hope that one day all wars will be delicious food fights, a future only portended by the world's hottest peppers being weaponized as a current event.