With the correct codes input, the doors to the missile silo open, pointing a bomb at the sky. Sweat shines on their faces. For the missile to fly, both must turn their keys. But one of them balks. He picks up the phone to call their superiors.

That’s not the procedure, says his partner. “Screw the procedure,” the dissenter says. “I want somebody on the goddamn phone before I kill 20 million people.” 

Soon, the scene — which opens the 1983 techno-thriller “WarGames” — transitions to another set deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, a military outpost buried beneath thousands of feet of Colorado granite. It exists in real life and is dramatized in the movie. 

In “WarGames,” the main room inside Cheyenne Mountain hosts a wall of screens that show the red, green and blue outlines of continents and countries, and what’s happening in the skies above them. There is not, despite what the servicemen have been led to believe, a nuclear attack incoming: The alerts were part of a test sent out to missile commanders to see whether they would carry out orders. All in all, 22% failed to launch.

“Those men in the silos know what it means to turn the keys,” says an official inside Cheyenne Mountain. “And some of them are just not up to it.” But he has an idea for how to combat that “human response,” the impulse not to kill millions of people: “I think we ought to take the men out of the loop,” he says. 

From there, an artificially intelligent computer system enters the plotline and goes on to cause nearly two hours of potentially world-ending problems. 

Discourse about the plot of “WarGames” usually focuses on the scary idea that a computer nearly launches World War III by firing off nuclear weapons on its own. But the film illustrates another problem that has become more trenchant in the 40 years since it premiered: The computer displays fake data about what’s going on in the world. The human commanders believe it to be authentic and respond accordingly.

In the real world, countries — or rogue actors — could use fake data, inserted into genuine data streams, to confuse enemies and achieve their aims. How to deal with that possibility, along with other consequences of incorporating AI into the nuclear weapons sphere, could make the coming years on Earth more complicated.

The word “deepfake” didn’t exist when “WarGames” came out, but as real-life AI grows more powerful, it may become part of the chain of analysis and decision-making in the nuclear realm of tomorrow. The idea of synthesized, deceptive data is one AI issue that today's atomic complex has to worry about.

You may have encountered the fruits of this technology in the form of Tom Cruise playing golf on TikTok, LinkedIn profiles for people who have never inhabited this world or, more seriously, a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declaring the war in his country to be over. These are deepfakes — pictures or videos of things that never happened, but which can look astonishingly real. It becomes even more vexing when AI is used to create images that attempt to depict things that are indeed happening. Adobe recently caused a stir by selling AI-generated stock photos of violence in Gaza and Israel. The proliferation of this kind of material (alongside plenty of less convincing stuff) leads to an ever-present worry any image presented as fact might actually have been fabricated or altered. 

It may not matter much whether Tom Cruise was really out on the green, but the ability to see or prove what’s happening in wartime — whether an airstrike took place at a particular location or whether troops or supplies are really amassing at a given spot — can actually affect the outcomes on the ground. 

Similar kinds of deepfake-creating technologies could be used to whip up realistic-looking data — audio, video or images — of the sort that military and intelligence sensors collect and that artificially intelligent systems are already starting to analyze. It’s a concern for Sharon Weiner, a professor of international relations at American University. “You can have someone trying to hack your system not to make it stop working, but to insert unreliable data,” she explained.

James Johnson, author of the book “AI and the Bomb,” writes that when autonomous systems are used to process and interpret imagery for military purposes, “synthetic and realistic-looking data” can make it difficult to determine, for instance, when an attack might be taking place. People could use AI to gin up data designed to deceive systems like Project Maven, a U.S. Department of Defense program that aims to autonomously process images and video and draw meaning from them about what’s happening in the world.

AI’s role in the nuclear world isn’t yet clear. In the U.S., the White House recently issued an executive order about trustworthy AI, mandating in part that government agencies address the nuclear risks that AI systems bring up. But problem scenarios like some of those conjured by “WarGames” aren’t out of the realm of possibility. 

In the film, a teenage hacker taps into the military's system and starts up a game he finds called "Global Thermonuclear War." The computer displays the game data on the screens inside Cheyenne Mountain, as if it were coming from the ground. In the Rocky Mountain war room, a siren soon blares: It looks like Soviet missiles are incoming. Luckily, an official runs into the main room in a panic. “We’re not being attacked,” he yells. “It’s a simulation!””

In the real world, someone might instead try to cloak an attack with deceptive images that portray peace and quiet.

Researchers have already shown that the general idea behind this is possible: Scientists published a paper in 2021 on “deepfake geography,” or simulated satellite images. In that milieu, officials have worried about images that might show infrastructure in the wrong location or terrain that’s not true to life, messing with military plans. Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, for instance, made satellite images that included vegetation that wasn’t real and showed evidence of drought where the water levels were fine, all for the purposes of research. You could theoretically do the same for something like troop or missile-launcher movement.

AI that creates fake data is not the only problem: AI could also be on the receiving end, tasked with analysis. That kind of automated interpretation is already ongoing in the intelligence world, although it’s unclear specifically how it will be incorporated into the nuclear sphere. For instance, AI on mobile platforms like drones could help process data in real time and “alert commanders of potentially suspicious or threatening situations such as military drills and suspicious troop or mobile missile launcher movements,” writes Johnson. That processing power could also help detect manipulation because of the ability to compare different datasets. 

But creating those sorts of capabilities can help bad actors do their fooling. “They can take the same techniques these AI researchers created, invert them to optimize deception,” said Edward Geist, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. For Geist, deception is a “trivial statistical prediction task.” But recognizing and countering that deception is where the going gets tough. It involves a “very difficult problem of reasoning under uncertainty,” he told me. Amid the generally high-stakes feel of global dynamics, and especially in conflict, countries can never be exactly sure what’s going on, who’s doing what, and what the consequences of any action may be.

There is also the potential for fakery in the form of data that’s real: Satellites may accurately display what they see, but what they see has been expressly designed to fool the automated analysis tools.

As an example, Geist pointed to Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. When they are stationary, they’re covered in camo netting, making them hard to pick out in satellite images. When the missiles are on the move, special devices attached to the vehicles that carry them shoot lasers toward detection satellites, blinding them to the movement. At the same time, decoys are deployed — fake missiles dressed up as the real deal, to distract and thwart analysis. 

“The focus on using AI outstrips or outpaces the emphasis put on countermeasures,” said Weiner.

Given that both physical and AI-based deception could interfere with analysis, it may one day become hard for officials to trust any information — even the solid stuff. “The data that you're seeing is perfectly fine. But you assume that your adversary would fake it,” said Weiner. “You then quickly get into the spiral where you can’t trust your own assessment of what you found. And so there’s no way out of that problem.” 

From there, it’s distrust all the way down. “The uncertainties about AI compound the uncertainties that are inherent in any crisis decision-making,” said Weiner. Similar situations have arisen in the media, where it can be difficult for readers to tell if a story about a given video — like an airstrike on a hospital in Gaza, for instance — is real or in the right context. Before long, even the real ones leave readers feeling dubious.

More than a century ago, Alfred von Schlieffen, a German war planner, envisioned the battlefield of the future: a person sitting at a desk with telephones splayed across it, ringing in information from afar. This idea of having a godlike overview of conflict — a fused vision of goings-on — predates both computers and AI, according to Geist.

Using computers to synthesize information in real-time goes back decades too. In the 1950s, for instance, the U.S. built the Continental Air Defense Command, which relied on massive machines (then known as computers) for awareness and response. But tests showed that a majority of Soviet bombers would have been able to slip through — often because they could fool the defense system with simple decoys. “It was the low-tech stuff that really stymied it,” said Geist. Some military and intelligence officials have concluded that next-level situational awareness will come with just a bit more technological advancement than they previously thought — although this has not historically proven to be the case. “This intuition that people have is like, ‘Oh, we’ll get all the sensors, we’ll buy a big enough computer and then we’ll know everything,’” he said. “This is never going to happen.”

This type of thinking seems to be percolating once again and might show up in attempts to integrate AI in the near future. But Geist’s research, which he details in his forthcoming book “Deterrence Under Uncertainty: Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Warfare,” shows that the military will “be lucky to maintain the degree of situational awareness we have today” if they incorporate more AI into observation and analysis in the face of AI-enhanced deception. 

“One of the key aspects of intelligence is reasoning under uncertainty,” he said. “And a conflict is a particularly pernicious form of uncertainty.” An AI-based analysis, no matter how detailed, will only ever be an approximation — and in uncertain conditions there’s no approach that “is guaranteed to get an accurate enough result to be useful.” 

In the movie, with the proclamation that the Soviet missiles are merely simulated, the crisis is temporarily averted. But the wargaming computer, unbeknownst to the authorities, is continuing to play. As it keeps making moves, it displays related information about the conflict on the big screens inside Cheyenne Mountain as if it were real and missiles were headed to the States. 

It is only when the machine’s inventor shows up that the authorities begin to think that maybe this could all be fake. “Those blips are not real missiles,” he says. “They’re phantoms.”

To rebut fake data, the inventor points to something indisputably real: The attack on the screens doesn’t make sense. Such a full-scale wipeout would immediately prompt the U.S. to total retaliation — meaning that the Soviet Union would be almost ensuring its own annihilation. 

Using his own judgment, the general calls off the U.S.’s retaliation. As he does so, the missiles onscreen hit the 2D continents, colliding with the map in circular flashes. But outside, in the real world, all is quiet. It was all a game. “Jesus H. Christ,” says an airman at one base over the comms system. “We’re still here.”

Similar nonsensical alerts have appeared on real-life screens. Once, in the U.S., alerts of incoming missiles came through due to a faulty computer chip. The system that housed the chip sent erroneous missile alerts on multiple occasions. Authorities had reason to suspect the data was likely false. But in two instances, they began to proceed as if the alerts were real. “Even though everyone seemed to realize that it’s an error, they still followed the procedure without seriously questioning what they were getting,” said Pavel Podvig, senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and a researcher at Princeton University. 

In Russia, meanwhile, operators did exercise independent thought in a similar scenario, when an erroneous preliminary launch command was sent. “Only one division command post actually went through the procedure and did what they were supposed to do,” he said. “All the rest said, ‘This has got to be an error,’” because it would have been a surprise attack not preceded by increasing tension, as expected. It goes to show, Podvig said, “people may or may not use their judgment.” 

You can imagine in the near future, Podvig continued, nuclear operators might see an AI-generated assessment saying circumstances were dire. In such a situation, there is a need “to instill a certain kind of common sense” he said, and make sure that people don’t just take whatever appears on a screen as gospel. “The basic assumptions about scenarios are important too,” he added. “Like, do you assume that the U.S. or Russia can just launch missiles out of the blue?”

People, for now, will likely continue to exercise judgment about attacks and responses — keeping, as the jargon goes, a “human in the loop.”

The idea of asking AI to make decisions about whether a country will launch nuclear missiles isn’t an appealing option, according to Geist, though it does appear in movies a lot. “Humans jealously guard these prerogatives for themselves,” Geist said. 

“It doesn't seem like there’s much demand for a Skynet,” he said, referencing another movie, “Terminator,” where an artificial general superintelligence launches a nuclear strike against humanity.

Podvig, an expert in Russian nuclear goings-on, doesn’t see much desire for autonomous nuclear operations in that country. 

“There is a culture of skepticism about all this fancy technological stuff that is sent to the military,” he said. “They like their things kind of simple.” 

Geist agreed. While he admitted that Russia is not totally transparent about its nuclear command and control, he doesn’t see much interest in handing the reins to AI.

China, of course, is generally very interested in AI, and specifically in pursuing artificial general intelligence, a type of AI which can learn to perform intellectual tasks as well as or even better than humans can.

William Hannas, lead analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, has used open-source scientific literature to trace developments and strategies in China’s AI arena. One big development is the founding of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, backed by the state and directed by former UCLA professor Song-Chun Zhu, who has received millions of dollars of funding from the Pentagon, including after his return to China. 

Hannas described how China has shown a national interest in “effecting a merger of human and artificial intelligence metaphorically, in the sense of increasing mutual dependence, and literally through brain-inspired AI algorithms and brain-computer interfaces.”

“A true physical merger of intelligence is when you're actually lashed up with the computing resources to the point where it does really become indistinguishable,” he said. 

That’s relevant to defense discussions because, in China, there’s little separation between regular research and the military. “Technological power is military power,” he said. “The one becomes the other in a very, very short time.” Hannas, though, doesn’t know of any AI applications in China’s nuclear weapons design or delivery. Recently, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met and made plans to discuss AI safety and risk, which could lead to an agreement about AI’s use in military and nuclear matters. Also, in August, regulations on generative AI developed by China’s Cyberspace Administration went into effect, making China a first mover in the global race to regulate AI.

It’s likely that the two countries would use AI to help with their vast streams of early-warning data. And just as AI can help with interpretation, countries can also use it to skew that interpretation, to deceive and obfuscate. All three tasks are age-old military tactics — now simply upgraded for a digital, unstable age.

Science fiction convinced us that a Skynet was both a likely option and closer on the horizon than it actually is, said Geist. AI will likely be used in much more banal ways. But the ideas that dominate “WarGames” and “Terminator” have endured for a long time. 

“The reason people keep telling this story is it’s a great premise,” said Geist. “But it’s also the case,” he added, “that there’s effectively no one who thinks of this as a great idea.” 

It’s probably so resonant because people tend to have a black-and-white understanding of innovation. “There’s a lot of people very convinced that technology is either going to save us or doom us,” said Nina Miller, who formerly worked at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and is currently a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The notion of an AI-induced doomsday scenario is alive and well in the popular imagination and also has made its mark in public-facing discussions about the AI industry. In May, dozens of tech CEOs signed an open letter declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority,” without saying much about what exactly that means. 

But even if AI does launch a nuclear weapon someday (or provide false information that leads to an atomic strike), humans still made the decisions that led us there. Humans created the AI systems and made choices about where to use them. 

And, besides, in the case of a hypothetical catastrophe, AI didn’t create the environment that led to a nuclear attack. “Surely the underlying political tension is the problem,” said Miller. And that is thanks to humans and their desire for dominance — or their motivation to deceive. 

Maybe the humans need to learn what the computer did at the end of “WarGames.” “The only winning move,” it concludes, “is not to play.”

The post When deepfakes go nuclear appeared first on Coda Story.

It was February 2009, and a disaster was about to occur 500 miles above Siberia: A dead Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, was on a direct collision course with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, an American company.

The orbits of the two wrapped around the globe, their paths forming a giant X. As they approached one another, it would have been clear to anyone watching that they were headed for exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. 

But no one was watching. The satellites crashed into each other, at a relative speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour.

They immediately broke into thousands of pieces.

Lisa Ruth Rand was watching the news of the dramatic breakup just as she was beginning graduate school. When the two spacecraft crashed, they formed two streams of debris that continued along the orbital paths they’d once traveled. It made Rand, who today works as an historian of technology at the California Institute of Technology, realize that Earthlings only have limited dominion over this part of the universe. 

“Human beings, yes, can design and control objects to a certain extent,” Rand told me. “Ultimately, nature plays a role as well.”

And there nature was, slinging brand new space trash around the planet.

Either Russia or the U.S. could have worked a little harder to prevent the collision: Both countries did some satellite tracking and collision warning, but the pending Cosmos-Iridium doom wasn’t on their radar.

The debris that the Cosmos-Iridium crash left in its wake has posed potential collision risks for other satellites ever since. And that garbage has plenty of company. For decades, countries and companies have launched satellites, let them live out their useful lives and then kept them in orbit long after they were “dead,” or inactive. They’ve also left behind spent rocket bodies and whirling debris from other crashes past. In low Earth orbit — the part of space where satellites are closest to the Earth itself — accumulating debris poses a crash risk but cannot, on its own, get out of the way. Alongside it are thousands of live satellites that must avoid both the debris and one another.

And the issue is only going to get worse. On August 23, an Indian spacecraft became the first to land on the moon’s south pole region. Just days before, a Russian craft attempting a similar feat crashed into the moon’s surface. The two events herald the start of a new space race, which brings with it the threat of adding even more space junk into the mix.

Just as car accidents are more likely to happen at rush hour, space collisions are bound to increase as active satellite and spacecraft traffic ramps up, littering the celestial road with trash. Crashes are more likely than ever today because there are more spacecraft in the near orbits. And even though most of us can’t see it, the picture up there isn’t pretty.

The number of active satellites in Earth’s orbit has jumped from around 1,000 in 2009, when the Cosmos-Iridium crash occurred, to nearly 7,000, thanks to satellite “constellations”: sets of dozens, hundreds or thousands of small spacecraft that work together to perform a single task. About 4,000 of the satellites currently in orbit are in constellations run by Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

When you’re on Earth’s surface, you reap the rewards of satellite infrastructure without thinking too much about what’s going on above you. But if that infrastructure, or parts of it, stopped functioning, you’d think about it a lot.

Imagine if GPS went down. Though GPS satellites don’t sit in the most crowded orbits where the big constellations are, their part of space nevertheless has its own share of crash risk, and a cascading set of events could cause them to malfunction. Without a live navigation system, aircraft couldn’t get from place to place. Weapons systems couldn’t aim at targets. Drones wouldn’t know where they were or where to go. You couldn’t find your way to the grocery store in a different neighborhood or use Tinder in any neighborhood. GPS satellites also act as ultra-precise clocks, sending out timing signals that industries across the world rely on. Without those time stamps, the electrical grid could freeze up, financial transactions couldn’t go through, and data packets flowing through the internet and mobile networks wouldn’t work right. 

Communications satellites would cause even more issues on Earth if they stopped doing their jobs. Soldiers, ships and aircraft could lose access to secure communication channels. Civilian pilots couldn’t talk to air traffic control. Cargo ships couldn’t speak to those on land. People in conflict zones would have difficulty getting information from, or providing information to, the outside.

On top of the disruptions to services that rely on communications satellites, without orbital infrastructure, humans would lose access to key weather forecasting data, leaving us relatively blind to signs of oncoming natural disasters. Lots of intelligence is gathered from above too: Without satellites, nations would lose insights into what’s happening on the ground in times of war – satellites offer key information on things like troop buildup or movement. Earth observation companies help with acquiring some of that intelligence and also collect images and data that help with climate change monitoring, agriculture, mining, piracy, illegal fishing, deforestation and disaster aid. But they can only do that if their satellites work properly.

All told, a major collision in space could spell catastrophe on the ground. The only way to avoid serious crashes and the creation of more debris is to make sure that the orbit doesn’t get too crowded — and that the crowd already up there stays safe from itself.

After the Cosmos-Iridium crash, the U.S. amped up its collision-avoidance capabilities and began issuing collision warnings to satellite operators all over the world, including to foreign governments. The number of warnings that the U.S. government sends out has increased greatly since 2009, alongside the jump in orbiting spacecraft. 

Despite the growing orbital population, though, only a patchwork of regulation and governance exists for “space traffic management.” The International Telecommunication Union governs the use of the electromagnetic spectrum — regulating the frequencies on which satellites communicate and the use of the Earth’s orbit as a resource. But it has no enforcement powers. The U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space also weighs in on space traffic issues periodically and is attempting to ramp up this work, but it does not issue enforceable standards either. While the U.S. alert system exists, it is not equipped to be the space traffic manager for the whole world.

“It’s pretty minimal,” said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for the Secure World Foundation, a think tank dedicated to safe, sustainable and peaceful uses of space. “There is no requirement for action when receiving those conjunction warnings,” she told me. “And there is no one coordinating any of it.”

No two active satellites have ever crashed into each other to date, except a spacecraft that collided with the Mir space station while trying to dock there. The Cosmos-Iridium crash involved one active satellite and one dead one. But without clear authority or protocols, mishaps inevitably occur, and as the amount of stuff floating in space increases, so does the likelihood of a major crash.

People like Samson and Lisa Ruth Rand worry that the existing regulatory system may not be comprehensive or international enough to make sure satellites stay safe in this new era. If another big crash, or a set of crashes, did happen, the results on the ground could be hugely disruptive. 

“That infrastructure is so invisible,” Rand told me. “It’s not the same thing as when the lights go out. But when the satellites go out, that’s going to be a pretty big deal.”

“There will eventually need to be a more formal coordinating mechanism,” said Samson, “rather than two-party discussions on an ad hoc basis.” 

A recent SpaceX fiasco offers a cautionary tale: In 2019, SpaceX had just 60 Starlink satellites in orbit. Predictions showed that one of those 60 had a relatively high likelihood of colliding with a European Space Agency satellite called Aeolus. The space agency saw this coming – having projected the spacecrafts’ predictable paths into the future – and reached out to SpaceX about a week in advance, asking if the company intended to move to a safer spot. SpaceX said it had no such plans: The likelihood of a crash was, at the time, about 1 in 50,000. 

But as the days went by, that probability rose, reaching around 1 in 1,000 — still not likely but not a number to play around with.

The European Space Agency repeatedly tried to reach SpaceX again as the situation evolved.

They heard nothing back. 

They sent 29 alerts to SpaceX. Still, there was no reply.

As the day of the potential collision grew closer, with no word from SpaceX, the European Space Agency decided to change its own object’s trajectory. 

SpaceX, it turns out, had a bug in its notification system, and the company was on a holiday weekend. No one was checking their email.

SpaceX doesn’t need any particular one of its Starlink satellites to continue to provide internet: It has thousands of satellites in part to make individual satellites expendable and redundant. But if it had impacted Aeolus, or any satellite that doesn’t have such redundancy, the crash could cut capabilities — and the debris from the collision could put many more spacecraft at risk.

SpaceX has so far avoided all crashes because it can propel its Starlink satellites away from danger. Nevertheless, it has been implicated in a lot of potential crashes. In 2021, with just 1,700 satellites in orbit — in contrast to today’s 4,000 — the company was already involved in half of all close-approach alerts, known as “conjunction alerts,” according to Hugh Lewis of the astronautics research group at the University of Southampton. 

And 4,000 is far from the final figure that SpaceX is aiming for. The company’s initial constellation will boast 12,000 satellites, and in its final form could involve 42,000. Today, the satellites provide internet and communication access for people in rural areas and in conflict zones like Ukraine — at least when Musk keeps the services turned on.

When the remainder of the initial set of Starlink satellites are in orbit, Musk’s enterprise could be implicated in 90% of all collision warnings, Lewis estimates.

Since 2020, Lewis has been analyzing Starlink satellites’ conjunction rates and measuring how often satellites have to maneuver around potential problems. In one recent dispatch, his data showed that the satellites have had to perform more than 50,000 moves since the end of 2020 to avoid potential crashes.

Lewis’ data indicates that as the number of Starlink satellites increases, the cumulative number of avoidance maneuvers increases at an approximately exponential rate. In other words, a few more satellites equals many more moves and a greater potential for disaster.

“On the basis of probability, something bad is going to happen,” he said.

There is a paradox here: Creating more satellite infrastructure to enable more connections and capabilities on Earth could be precisely what threatens those connections and capabilities. One way to dull that double-edged sword is to get satellite makers to coordinate — internationally and by law — to make sure their proposed constellations can play nice.

There are options for fixing the mistakes of the past. For instance, we could take the trash out now. Humans could clean up the space around our planet by removing our old debris — transporting dead satellites to “graveyard” orbits where they won’t bother anything, or “deorbiting” them by sending them to burn up in the atmosphere.

But such a proposition is tricky. The U.S. can only touch trash that the U.S. created. Russia can only touch its own trash. The same goes for China or anyone else. 

Touch someone else’s trash without permission, and you could create a full-on international incident. Sometimes, too, if you touch your own trash without telling others you plan to, you may stir global tensions. 

In 2021, China’s Shijian-21 spacecraft spent months hovering around an orbit, getting close to other satellites — with the country staying mum about its actions. Finally, Shijian-21 sidled up to a defunct Chinese navigation satellite, docked with it and towed it to a graveyard orbit. 

That’s an example of what scientists call “space debris mitigation,” and it’s technically good: That satellite was no longer a part of the traffic and no longer presented a risk to other spacecraft. But if a satellite can get that close to and physically move another spacecraft, it could do so to any spacecraft, regardless of who it belongs to. The same technology could also be weaponized to damage or deactivate a satellite. 

Brian Chow, a space policy analyst, says China shares information about its commercial activities but is “evasive about those that can enhance its military capability,” like the Shijian-21 incident. 

“China has been secretive in the development and tests of its rendezvous and proximity operations,” Chow said. And that secrecy — alongside the opacity surrounding China’s other space activities with military implications — is unlikely to change.

The lack of communication from China concerns officials from other countries because of China’s ability to potentially conduct an attack in space or cause space “situational awareness” problems. From a traffic perspective, without direct information from the country, managing potential crashes becomes more difficult: Space traffic trackers can make better predictions and give better warnings if they receive direct information from satellite operators about a spacecraft’s position or planned maneuvering. The Shijian-21 event and the silence around it, however, are typical of China’s lack of transparency. 

In another example, earlier this year, Lieutenant General DeAnna M. Burt of the U.S. Space Force said that when the U.S. sends warnings about conjunctions that could affect China’s space station, they get crickets in return.

“Many authoritarian countries that don’t share information with the populace don't share it internationally,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow for LeoLabs, a private company that performs its own space traffic tracking and management on behalf of satellite companies and space agencies. “And so I’d be concerned if China and Russia started putting up 10,000-, 13,000-satellite constellations that they would be as open about what they’re doing.”

Imagine a constellation that would add exponentially to the crash risk, like SpaceX does, but whose operators wouldn’t coordinate or share precise information that cannot be gathered from afar.

China does, actually, have a plan for such a constellation: a 13,000-spacecraft herd called Guowang that will, like Starlink, provide internet service. For Guowang to work well for the world, the country needs to become a part of space traffic dialogue and share information. 

Chow believes they will. “If China does not collaborate or share information, the U.S. would have to rely on its own warning system and ability to maneuver,” he said. “On the other hand, as this constellation will primarily be used for commercial purposes, China will likely share information to avoid these satellites from being hit so that they can perform their missions cheaper and better.”

That could lead to more formal crash-avoidance coordination that Samson, of the Secure World Foundation, sees coming. But whatever that system looks like, it can’t be the only protective mechanism in place. “There will also have to be rules of the road established,” Samson said. “If two satellites are heading toward each other, who moves?” The newer satellite? The larger one? “And continued sharing of space situational awareness data is key to have a common understanding of the orbital environment,” she said.

Making sure that space stays safe is key to protecting life on the ground too. The modern world would cease to turn without satellites, and catastrophic crashes could move us closer to that point. Regulation, cooperation and public awareness are ways to step back and keep space traffic running smoothly, without stifling the good parts of orbital infrastructure — like increased connectivity on Earth.

Cleaning up orbit and orbital behavior may seem daunting, but it’s possible: It happened, for instance, with the oceans. Until the middle of the 20th century, people thought these bodies of saltwater were so large that mere human pollution could never alter them. When it became clear that the seas could indeed get slimy, people rallied to curtail the dumping of waste into the oceans.

While those initiatives have been far from perfect (see: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), collective awareness of our ability to negatively impact the planet is much greater than it used to be.

The same could be more broadly true of space in the future. After all, environmental awareness of space is as old as environmental awareness on the planet. Earth’s environmental movement came about at the same time as the Space Age, around the 1960s, and the two shaped each other. “There’s been an almost explicitly environmental consciousness of outer space from the very beginning of the Space Age,” said Rand, the environmental historian.

That idea even shows up in what little international regulation exists in orbit. “There’s parts that are evident in the Outer Space Treaty,” Rand said, referring to the U.N. document signed by 113 nations about how to behave beyond Earth. For instance, the treaty has a provision stating that states “shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies,” things like creating debris, causing crashes and making things too crowded for comfort.

The Outer Space Treaty also treats orbit as an international place — a common resource that no one owns but for which everyone bears responsibility. A coordination system that recognizes that responsibility could keep orbit, and everything satellites help us do on Earth, safe for the future.

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It’s chilly inside the Creede Underground Mining Museum. For one thing, it’s winter. For another, the museum is located underground. That was the innovative idea of three local workers who decided to blast out the 10,000-square-foot space when the last of the town’s famous silver mines closed down. They wanted to show outsiders and younger generations alike what their lives, and the lives of their predecessors, were really like.

Heather Brophy, the facility’s director, is used to the museum’s cold: She spends all day down here. Sporting sophisticated pigtails and a nose ring on this winter day, the Creede native is 29, younger than one might expect for someone in her position. She is the keeper of information about an industry that — for all intents and purposes — died decades ago in Creede, Colorado. But growing up here, Brophy became fascinated by how mining had shaped her town.

Today, more than 30 years after the Bulldog Mountain Mine — the last stalwart — closed up shop, Creede’s long-gone industry might soon come alive and chisel a new story from its past.

Last year, the largest silver mining company in the United States, Hecla Mining, confirmed that it plans to dive back into the Bulldog mine, through its subsidiary, Rio Grande Silver. The mountain still holds plenty of metal, and the company is poised to extract it. Brophy wagers that as soon as the price of silver can guarantee a return on investment, Hecla will seek out its permits and head into production mode. “They will bring in crews,” said Brophy. 

The American government just might be ready for that moment, too. Right now, the country is largely reliant on foreign silver sources. But soon, it’s going to need a lot more of the metal than it currently consumes: The shiny stuff is a key component in solar panels, electric cars, charging stations and 5G infrastructure, along with consumer electronics. The desire to increase mineral supplies in the country, while silver demand is increasing, means the U.S. could use more stateside silver than it currently mines.

The U.S. is keen on increasing the minerals the country sources domestically so that the availability of the metal won’t be determined by whether one country invades another, the general vagaries of international trade or supply chain delays. 

Where to get it, though? 

Sometimes, it turns out, the best places to start new mines are on the backs (or in the bellies) of old ones — in this case, that can mean in the heart of old silver boom towns, like Creede, that have gone bust. There, the ground is already excavated, data on what’s beneath already exists, and companies know for sure someone struck it rich in the past. 

And so, that new work might happen in the shadows of the falling-down infrastructure of the past. Here in southern Colorado, where miners once pounded chisels — the risks to themselves and the earth largely unmitigated — a batch of hopefuls is trying to extract raw materials for the green energy economy while keeping a historically dirty business a whole lot cleaner than in the past.

Silver outwardly appears in things like jewelry, utensils or the coins your conspiratorial uncle hoards. But its physical properties make it useful, not just pretty. Silver reflects light better than any other metal and also better conducts heat and electricity. Plus, it’s antibacterial. It’s part of medical equipment and is an important ingredient in all kinds of electronics. It’s integrated into cars, cell phones, TVs. It’s in “everything that has an on-and-off switch,” said Michael DiRienzo, the executive director of the Silver Institute, an international nonprofit with members from across the silver mining industry. 

And it’s going to become even more important as energy sources transition away from fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy: Silver is integral to solar panels’ workings, and it’s also a key to the zippy cars of the future. Last year, according to DiRienzo, the automotive industry used somewhere between 60 and 65 million ounces of the metal. “The number is just going to continue to grow as electric vehicles and, down the road, autonomous driving vehicles become more prevalent,” he said, going so far as to describe silver as a “decarbonization metal.” 

According to a report from the International Energy Agency, an electric vehicle’s greenhouse emissions over its lifetime, including manufacturing and minerals, are half of those of a gasoline-powered car. There are some risks that come along with acquiring the minerals,  like loss of habitat for animals and plants, significant water usage and potential for water contamination, air pollution and noise pollution. On balance, the risks of remaining dependent on fossil fuels, or not investing in the materials that clean energy requires, seem higher — for people and for the planet. 

DiRienzo is bullish about the prospects. “The demand side in the last year was a new high,” he said. It shot up 17% from 2021. “The market was firing on all cylinders.”

Hecla, ensconced at the Bulldog Mine in Creede, agrees with the hopeful forecasting and its connection to decarbonization — or, at least, its documents agree. The parent company did not respond to my multiple requests for an interview.

In recent years, Hecla’s silver output has accounted for 40% of all silver mined in the U.S. And so, predictably, it’s hopeful about the current prospects. “We’re at an inflection point unlike anything we’ve seen in more than a century,” says a 2021 Hecla document called “Silver: The Story of Our Past, the Foundation of Our Future.” That inflection comes courtesy, the company claims, of the transition to clean energy.

The document may be company propaganda, but data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration backs up some of its key assertions. To keep up with solar panel production alone, the world will need 500 million ounces of silver by 2050. Meanwhile, American domestic silver production has stagnated. Just four mines in the U.S. produced silver as their primary output last year. The rest of the approximately 32 million ounces came from mines that primarily dig for lead, zinc, copper or gold. To be part of the potential impending boom, those numbers will have to change.

But these aspirations can get complicated: If a company wants to open a mine on federal land, for instance, there’s a lot of paperwork and waiting involved. 

“Starting a new mine is much more difficult now than it was a hundred years ago,” says Hecla’s report. “You can’t just dig a hole in the ground and start producing.”

In fact, according to DiRienzo, if you started the clock at zero when you found silver in the ground, “it would take you nearly 10 to 12 years before you finally get the permitting to go ahead.” Those permits are there for a reason, of course. “The process is to make sure everything's good,” he said. “You can’t just go in there and start destroying.”

But it can make things difficult for companies that won’t see any profit from their labor for many years. While what happens at any given site is different, and every state is different, the mining industry is in general subject to laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a detailed analysis of how a project on federal land will impact an area and its occupants. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts deal with issues like dust and other particulate pollutants, along with stormwater runoff near mines and the disposal of water used in extractive operations.

Officially, the United States still operates on a legal framework for mining on federal lands that was written in 1872, but that could change. In 2022, the Biden administration released its principles for proposed mining reform, predicated on the idea that the U.S. needs to mine more of its own goods, create jobs and do so in a way that’s environmentally and socially responsible.

The “how” part of that plan includes making sure strict standards are in place, consulting with local tribes and communities, protecting places with sensitive ecosystems or Tribal Nations’ resources, recycling material that’s already been mined and processed and cleaning up the messes of extractions past.

Oh, and companies could have to pay royalties on their spoils, if they extract silver from land owned by the government, which is effectively taxpayers’ land. That money would go in part toward mitigating or preventing environmental and social impacts of mining, which today are still no small matter. 

Mines take up space that might otherwise be used by communities, flora and fauna. They also produce more waste material than they do metal. Water near silver mining sites regularly gets contaminated. According to the Government Accountability Office, abandoned hardrock mines have “contributed to the contamination of 40% of the country’s rivers and 50% of all lakes.” Historically, people have also used mercury, a pretty toxic substance, as part of the silver extraction process.

Reforms to the regulatory system and the long timelines, when coupled with the call for more domestic mining, irk Michael Feinstein, the founder of a geologic exploration company called MineOro. Produce things within the country, the government demands. “But the next breath they tie the hands of any potential domestic production,” Feinstein said.

As the largest silver producer in the country, Hecla can untie its hands better than most. And with the company’s purchase of the rights to 21 square miles of land in the Creede Mining District, Hecla has been working to make Bulldog’s old infrastructure accessible again. The company planned an exploration campaign for 2022 to figure out what metal was left in the mountain, where it was and how best to access it.

Brophy, the Creede museum director, details these efforts as she bustles about the caved, rocky interior of the museum, sending visitors — who’ve braved the incoming, days-long winter storm — out on the audio tour. Headphones on, they’ll wind their way through a U-shaped tunnel of exhibits featuring mannequins posing as miners throughout the decades. The first little group shows how Creede’s 19th century miners, seeking silver, used hammers and iron drills to hand-pound into the rock. Later, they transitioned to using hydraulic drills, affectionately known as “Widow Makers,” named for the silica dust they kicked up that got sucked right into the miners’ lungs. Then, farther into the tunnel, the inanimate miners show how life — and pulling material out of the planet — became easier and safer, as, for instance, mechanized equipment required less backbreaking labor. The industry also figured out that if you wet the material before drilling into it, you could reduce dust. From there, ventilation improved, and cave-ins became less frequent.

“There's a ton of history here,” said Brophy, a space heater blowing air toward her desk chair. “But that's pretty much all there is right now.”

Randy McClure, the current site and safety manager for Rio Grande Silver, is a third-generation Creede resident. His grandfather homesteaded near the town in the late 1800s, and McClure himself started working in the mines when he was 18. If the industry bounces back, it wouldn’t just change the state of the mine but also the state of the town. 

“A return of mining to Creede would bring back a solid year-around economy, families with kids to fill the school, and the characters that make a mining town great,” he said.

As mining declined and then ceased, Creede’s population shrank — today, there are just 700 residents. The town shifted to arts, theater and outdoor tourism to survive, meaning it is now home to a mix of people who’ve been around since the mining days and those who were attracted to its new offerings. The different groups are learning to coexist, Brophy says. If the Bulldog reopens, they may have to find a new equilibrium.

“Mining is our roots,” Brophy said. “It's what we came from. Without mining, this place never would have existed.” 

Anyone who likes Creede’s repertory theater and art, in other words, really has the town’s dirty, dangerous business of the past to thank. And they may have a modern version to thank for the town’s future.

Hecla’s re-exploration of this former boom site seems to mirror other efforts in the American West. Idaho’s aptly named Silver Valley is home to mines owned by Hecla and by a company called Sunshine Silver Mining and Refining that has gobbled up tens of thousands acres of mineral rights in the area. One patch includes the Sunshine Silver Mine that began in the 1800s and closed in 2001. In 1972, the mine was the site of one of the worst mining disasters in history, when a fire broke out underground. Sunshine Silver declined to comment for this story, stating that while it was exploring, it wasn’t actively mining.

In the small, adjacent towns of Silver Cliff and Westcliffe, Colorado, meanwhile, a Canadian company called Viscount Mining has been digging around old mining areas. These locales, along with nearby ghost towns, once hosted one of the biggest silver booms in the state. 

Silver Cliff was the third largest Colorado city in the late 1800s, as prospectors and miners flocked to the high-altitude valley, flanked by two mountain ranges. In the 2020 census, it had just around 600 residents. Westcliffe had 435.

The holes and mine-waste — loose piles of rocky leftovers (called tailings) that lay fan-shaped over mountainsides — that this silver boom left behind remain, easily visible on a drive through town. Both also appear in the deep woods on hikes. Today, the downtown area shared by the two towns is a bit bigger than Creede’s, and it also has live theater, art galleries and many burger joints for hungry climbers who probably failed to get to the top of the 14,000-foot peaks that point to the sky above town.

Like Creede, Silver Cliff hasn’t made much silver since those very early days. But that past is not so distant: When the dirt roads in town get graded, you can find miners’ abandoned tin cans or the occasional century-plus-old belt buckle. Decrepit wooden structures loom around the landscape, alongside badlanded tailings piles, all begging for photographs — and, apparently, begging at least one company to plumb their depths.

Viscount, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has invested in two silver exploration projects, both of which sit on 19th century boom spots. The company’s website has a gallery of images, showing two wooden structures left to decay and collapse, along with an old claim boundary, carved into rock, from the initial discoverer. It looks like a tombstone.

These modern explorers, currently drilling for samples, have at their fingertips tools that were unimaginable back during Silver Cliff’s previous boom, like surveying instruments that can provide a picture of what lies 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) or more underneath the shoes of the surveyor.

With this data in hand, the company suggests its Silver Cliff property could be home to one of the largest silver deposits in the entire U.S. 

If that’s the case, life in Silver Cliff, like life in Creede, could someday shift, looping back on itself like a time machine.

A new-old industry in towns like these could be an ultimate good: more jobs, more money, more renown. And getting silver from towns like these could, counterintuitively, be an ultimate good for the environment. If the silver has to come from somewhere, it might as well be a place with a number of environmental restrictions, controls and regulations — along with the current administration’s proposal to reform and improve policies that are already on the books.

For its part, Hecla claims to have the lowest carbon emissions in the industry per dollar of revenue. Most of the electricity it uses comes from hydropower, and it sucks out less water to produce an ounce of silver than the average person uses in a day. Mining in general is notorious for its water usage, accounting for 1% of all water usage in the United States. Hecla also generally backfills areas it mines — taking the waste that, in the past, might just have ended up stranded on a hillside, combining it with cement and filling up the empty, extracted places. That shore-up means that the land won’t collapse or be dotted by the abandoned pits that are so ubiquitous in the American West.

But Hecla has caused plenty of harm, too. In 2011, it paid $263 million to the federal government, the Coeur d’Alene tribe and the state of Idaho to settle a Superfund lawsuit about historical waste that its operations had discharged into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, causing harm to the water itself, fish and birds. In 2015, it paid $600,000 in fines after releasing heavy metals, in addition to other pollution, into the same river. Although no environmental fees have been levied against Hecla since then, the company has had more than a dozen workplace safety or health violations, for issues like using equipment beyond the capacity it was designed for or not correcting safety-relevant defects in machinery in a timely way.

Nevertheless, mining is safer and more friendly to the ground, water, animals and humans near its operations than it used to be.

Not everyone wants a mine in their backyard or as their employer. But as the final exhibit in the Creede Underground Mining Museum points out, it’s not so simple as yelling, “not in my backyard!”

If you like phones, and solar panels, and electric cars, the material that goes into them has to come from below someone’s backyard. “Since minerals exist randomly throughout the world, we do not always have the simple choice to mine or not to mine at home,” read the museum’s final panels.

But nor do people watching a potentially impending silver boom just have to sit back and let it happen, as it happens. Public information and engagement can make the industry better. It was agitation from the public, the museum’s signs point out, that helped usher in American environmental reforms that companies like Hecla and Viscount now have to abide by. Though companies in any industry can sometimes consider federal fines to be the cost of doing business, the Environmental Protection Agency can criminally prosecute, and jail, those who they can prove knowingly broke the rules.

For now, here in Creede, Hecla is waiting for the economics to tip in its favor, as they keep Bulldog’s underground infrastructure pumped free of the water that builds up underground and analyze how best to dig into the metal in the future. 

Brophy is ready for the next chapter of her town’s complicated industry — a potential resurrection of the town as it used to be, mixed with the way it has become. A condition that might be more accurately described as reincarnation.

“Mining is our past,” said Brophy. “And we hope that it's our future.”

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It also hosts Kansas State University, where Hensley — who has studied some of the world’s scariest diseases — was going to speak. At the time, Hensley was part of the leadership at the National Institutes of Health. While she was visiting campus, she heard about a new, gigantic high-security lab called the National Bio and Agro-defense Facility, or NBAF for short, that was going to be built adjacent to K-State. There, scientists working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) would study very contagious, and often fatal, diseases that affect animals and humans.

Around that time, construction on the 48-acre, 1.25-billion-dollar campus was just beginning. “I saw the pictures of the facilities and I was like, ‘Oh, that would be a really cool place to work,’” Hensley said.

Years later, a colleague called her with what sounded like a perfect opportunity: NBAF, whose construction finished earlier this year, was looking for someone to head up its Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research Unit. That group would study existing high-consequence (read: dangerous) diseases that spread between humans and animals and those that are just beginning to rear their germy heads into existence or prominence on this planet. Scientists across NBAF would study foot-and-mouth disease, classical and African swine fevers, Rift Valley fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Japanese encephalitis and Nipah virus. These diseases affect animals like cattle, pigs, birds, bats, snakes and frogs, and also Homo sapiens.

The gig did sound perfect. Hensley’s son even thought it was a good idea, although he’d have to leave his friends in Maryland for this version of Manhattan.

NBAF officials apparently thought Hensley sounded pretty good, too: They hired her to lead the new team. “I think we could use a little adventure,” Hensley’s son told her.

The pair arrived in Kansas in August 2022, not long after the facility’s commissioning started. It had been under construction since 2015, and Manhattan had been chosen as the site in 2009 (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has managed the construction, but the USDA will run the facility). That’s a long time to have a mere paper-and-scaffolding lab, but the timeline makes sense because NBAF is a fundamentally new kind of project for the U.S. It’s subject to the highest safety protocols, a set of standards for “biosafety level 4,” or BSL-4, labs. These labs have to decontaminate everything before it goes out. They have dedicated air supply and exhaust systems and maintain negative air pressure, meaning physics dictates that air (and the pathogens wafting within it) only flows in, not out. People working inside, meanwhile, wear full-body, positive-pressure suits, so that air and particles from the lab can’t get in. Doing their work, they resemble badly-outfitted astronauts.

The BSL-4 designation and its attendant restrictions are reserved for places where scientists work with life-threatening, highly transmissible diseases for which there are usually no treatments or cures. And NBAF will be the first BSL-4 facility in the country that can handle large livestock. If you’ve ever tried to deal with a cow, you know that’s not easy even in a BSL-0 situation.

But it’s necessary if NBAF is to fulfill its mission of studying diseases that affect both humans and animals (zoonotic illnesses), deadly and currently untreatable diseases that affect animals abroad but haven’t yet crossed U.S. borders and related illnesses that are just popping up in nature. The average person is perhaps more familiar with the last category, nearly three years into a pandemic caused by a shiny new virus. 

Scientists like those on Hensley’s team will work to understand germs’ fundamentals and determine how to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics. NBAF is replacing an aging facility in New York, called the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which couldn’t host large animals or diseases as dire as those NBAF will. Plum Island was only a BSL-3 lab.

Officials picked Manhattan as Plum Island’s successor in part because of the density of animal health companies in the area, as well as the scientific expertise found at K-State and its Biosecurity Research Institute. All of that exists, of course, because lots of livestock live nearby, and agriculture is a big part of the state’s economy.

But those are precisely some of the reasons critics, and conspiracists, have historically opposed the facility. Should there be a leak or an accident, a pathogen could find many unwitting animal hosts. University campuses like the one on which NBAF sits host academics flitting in and out (as Hensley did on her lecture visit), potentially taking pathogens with them. Those are grounded concerns, but more conspiratorially, some have called NBAF a bioweapons lab.

In high-containment biology labs like NBAF, though, the line between antagonistic misinformation and grounded concern is thin. And that means NBAF has to balance (at least) three things: the value of its research, the real risks of keeping big-time germs around and public concerns, both real and imagined.

The value of the work that Hensley and others will do within NBAF’s 574,000 square feet is clear: The World Health Organization estimates that around three-quarters of new diseases are zoonotic. And if a bunch of livestock came down with an exponentially spreading illness, it could devastate food supplies, economies and obviously the lives of the animals themselves.

That last part is important to Hensley. “What became really clear to me over the last few years is there was a lot of attention to, and we're all very good now at understanding, how viruses will jump from animals to people and the impact that that can have,” she said. “But we're not thinking a lot about what happens when that virus jumps back into animals, or when it goes from one animal species to another.” And that does happen: SARS-CoV-2, for instance, seems to have hopped from humans to mink. The virus has flamed through mink farms, killing thousands. Farmers have “culled” millions more in response.

Every time such a species jump happens, Hensley said, the virus gets a fresh chance to change and evolve — to get better at, say, spreading or becoming more virulent. In her unit of the lab, Hensley hopes to spot, and respond to, shifts like that as they happen. In these early stages, before the lab is actually open, she’s been setting up projects with partners abroad, in part to help them watch for new or jumping germs. After all, inevitably, those pathogens won’t stay in their countries of origin. “Ideally, when things do change, or there are new viruses, we will pick them up earlier and earlier,” she said.

That on-the-spot reaction has been Hensley’s catalyst since she became a scientist, which she did in part because of her father, who has the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia and is also a clinician.

One day when Hensley was home on a visit from college, her father took her to a medical conference he was attending. Outside the venue stood a number of protesters: They were fighting back against the lack of treatments available for HIV positive people or those with AIDS.

That struggle was personal for Hensley’s father, and soon became personal for her, too. Hemophilia interventions at the time involved giving patients a soup of concentrated blood “product,” cooked from the fluids of hundreds of different people. Sometimes — a lot of times, actually — that aggregate blood contained HIV. In the early 1980s, contaminated blood gave the fatal virus to about half of the 16,000 American hemophiliacs and 12,000 others who received blood transfusions, according to the 1995 Institute of Medicine (US) Committee to Study HIV Transmission Through Blood and Blood Product.

“On the way home, I asked my dad if he had been tested for HIV,” Hensley said.

He had not, he said. He and her mother had both determined that ignorance was bliss because the only treatment available was a problematic drug with lots of side effects. If a better drug came along, he said, sure, he’d get tested. But for now, he’d rather not know. “It was what I always call a moment of impact,’” she said, in almost startup-founder language. “You're sitting there and this realization becomes personal.”

Hensley’s realization took the form of a question: How many people might still be alive if scientists had been more proactive about the HIV epidemic and acted earlier to, for instance, protect the blood supply?

Maybe, she thought, she could be part of that preemptive action in the future. When she went back to school, she changed her major. “I wanted to study how viruses jumped species and try to get ahead of the next pandemic,” she said.

After Hensley finished her schooling, she went to work for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases — USAMRIID, a place immortalized in “The Hot Zone,” a book by Richard Preston. There, Hensley dealt with all the bloody diseases you never want to get, like Ebola, Marburg virus and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

For that research, Hensley toiled in the literal hot zone, donning an astronaut-esque BSL-4 getup. Some of her experience there is actually included in a different Richard Preston book: “The Demon in the Freezer.” One chapter focuses on Hensley, describing an accident she had. One day, sick with a cold, she cut herself with scissors, while in the presence of the often-fatal Ebola virus.

She didn’t end up falling ill, but it had been a close, scary call. "I think you need to suck it up and get back in there and finish your experiment,” her father told her when they first spoke after the accident, according to “The Demon in the Freezer.” If she didn’t get right back on that horse, she might not ever saddle up again.

Clearly, she’s stayed in the rodeo ring for a long time. And now she will be working alongside some of the animals you’d actually find in one.

Accidents like Hensley’s nevertheless highlight the kinds of things that worry people near BSL-4 facilities like NBAF (and, as the spread of SARS-CoV-2 shows us, everywhere in the world is effectively “nearby”). If a researcher infects themselves, or pathogenic particles otherwise escape, it’s possible for a disease to spread beyond the confines of the lab. In Kansas, for instance, the Kansas Cattlemen’s Association long opposed NBAF’s construction, in part fearing that an accidental outbreak would infect livestock and spread like prairie fire.

It would be easy to just tell concerned residents they were overreacting. After all, “BSL-4” doesn’t mean “dangerous research level 4.” It’s not itself an indicator of how risky the work is: It’s a measure of how safe the researchers and the facility need to be, and are designed to be.

Perhaps the biggest way labs like NBAF mitigate against risk is redundancy. “They actually think through how the initial containment might fail and then have containment for containment,” said Scott Hanton, editorial director at Lab Manager, which provides resources to researchers to run their facilities more effectively and safely. The idea is to account for the fact that systems sometimes fail and sometimes multiple things can go wrong at once. “In the lab environment, we're pretty good at dealing with a single failure,” Hanton said, “but in my experience, injuries come from two or more failures happening at the same time.”

As such, BSL-4 facilities like NBAF think about risk like a bunch of Swiss cheese, Jonathan Klane, Hanton’s coworker and senior safety editor at the publication, said. If you stack a bunch of Swiss slices, their holes often don’t line up. The stacked cheese is functionally solid. But if you stack the cheese enough times…“Probability, right?” Klane said. “Eventually, those holes — and those holes are gaps in our protective measures — do line up.” High-containment labs have to account for those gappy situations, even if they’re statistically unlikely.

And that’s to benefit everyone. “This BSL-4 facility isn't just designed to protect the scientists who work in it,” Hanton said. “It's also designed to protect the community in which it is placed.”

In this case, that means Manhattan and its residents, animal and human. The people of that community are right to have concerns and ask questions: Paranoid-sounding fears aren’t as far away from the actual risks as experts might like. In the U.K., for example, foot-and-mouth disease escaped a Surrey lab and infected cows at four nearby farms in 2007. NBAF’s own environmental impact statement has a whole appendix of "biocontainment lapses and laboratory-acquired infections." It details a significant one from the 1970s, when its predecessor facility, Plum Island, allowed foot-and-mouth disease to sneak out. “Cattle outside of the laboratory facility were found to be infected,” the document reads. “...All animals on the island were euthanized and incinerated. The virus outbreak was limited to the island.”

NBAF officials don’t want anything like that to happen and are aiming to make the facility a “high-reliability organization” — a kind of formalism that UC Berkeley researchers began to come up with in the late 1980s to describe companies that have managed to do their thing without big accidents, despite operating in environments where accidents could be expected, like nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. “We're building a culture from the ground up,” Katherine Pawlosky, a USDA public affairs specialist, said. “This is a brand-new facility, so we have the opportunity to start with the best culture possible, rather than try to have to fix it.”

Still, the “what ifs” aren’t hype-y: They’re reasonable, and over the years of NBAF’s development, USDA and Department of Homeland Security officials had heard many of them and considered many of them themselves — for example, “What if a big tornado blows through?”

But they hadn’t seen anything quite like the April 2021 livestream of a Manhattan city commission meeting. NBAF wasn’t even on the meeting’s agenda, but as officials spoke, nearly 2,000 comments appeared beside the Facebook Live video (compared to a normal 10 or so), almost all about the BSL-4 facility. A sample:

“Who thought putting such a dangerous lab in the middle of our food supply was a great idea! 'Mistakes' happen all the time! Get this out of here! Put it on a remote island!”

“WHY would a Level 4 Lab be located in the middle of our BEEF supply in the heartland of our FOOD PRODUCTION?!!! This sounds intentionally criminal.”

“It’s all about the $$$. So sick of you all sacrificing the people, our food supply, our land and our health...for YOUR greed!”

“Tax $$$ should NOT be used against us to experiment on our food supply. Don’t play with fire.”

“Wuhan mutant cold viruses coming to central USA....Who wants another muti-year lockdown? Only this time with no food.....”

“They are planning the next great pandemic that can grow their pockets further”

According to a report in the Mercury, the town newspaper, these commenters — who came from all over the country and the internet — may have been spurred partly by a conservative podcaster who’d recently released an episode and written an article about NBAF. The episode’s description read: “A chilling show on bio weapons, level 4 labs, and using famine as a weapon. A history of forced industrialization and shortages. Population safety concerns are mostly a PR effort. …Why Kansas? America's beef belt is vulnerable. Attacking food resources is an ancient evil.”

The difference between “I don’t want my cattle to get sick because of an accident” and “they are planning the next great pandemic” illustrates the difference between a worry grounded in reality and conspiracy, misinformation and disinformation. In this realm, you tend to step into dubious territory when you start accusing people of lying or hiding things, particularly if you’re taking one small data point and extrapolating it into a broader coverup. “There is this kernel of truth, you know?” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King's College London, said. “There is something to build on, which is how disinformation works anyway. You pick on this kernel of truth, and then you just build elaborate lies around that.”

To combat that construction, Lentzos said, the best thing BSL-4 facilities can do is to be transparent about the goings-on among their secluded HVAC systems. “You have to engage with your local community and talk about what it is that you're doing,” she said.

“If there's a void of information people make up their own, for sure,” Pawlosky admitted.

NBAF officials are trying to fill that void. “From our knowledge, we are the first USDA laboratory facility to have its own communications unit on the ground floor,” Pawlosky said. Representatives from the lab talk into microphones monthly for a local radio show and occasionally pen articles in the local newspaper. Last fiscal year, the lab did more than 200 outreach activities, like making presentations to community groups. They try, Pawlosky said, “to educate the community, to partner with the community, to make sure that NBAF isn't just this place that sits over by the Kansas State football stadium that nobody knows anything about.”

But, actually, if people want information about BSL-4 labs in general, there is no great place for them to go. That’s something Lentzos noticed as the Covid pandemic was lassoing the world. Then, as now, people voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a BSL-4 facility, could be the source of the pandemic. This provenance got labeled a conspiracy, but the idea that a pathogen might escape, accidentally, from a lab is not in itself outrageous or conspiratorial. As scrutiny bore down on the lab, people started asking Lentzos about other such facilities. “So where's the list of these labs?” she recalled them saying. “How many are there?”

There isn’t a list, she told them. Aside from the one on Wikipedia.

Those questions ringing her ears, she and her colleague Gregory Koblentz, director of George Mason University’s biodefense program, decided to make their own list and began to scour the world virtually for BSL-4 labs.

On some parts of the planet, it’s fairly apparent — in that labs aren’t actively hidden. But it’s rarely easy. “Even in the U.S., you don't have a sense of exactly how many you have,” Lentzos said. There’s no central register, no DMV of BSL-4s.

In the end, though, they found more than 60, with 14 in North America, and set up the website Globalbiolabs.org to display the results. On the site, a Cartesian map of the planet is dotted north, south, east and west with yellow biohazard symbols, their spidery arms reaching toward each other, denoting the locations of known labs.

NBAF is already on there, and if you click on its icon, the map will jump to a satellite view of the K-State campus. An informational box will pop up, showing the Global Health Security Index ranking of the U.S. (“high”) and linking to its Biological Weapons Convention declarations, which contain information about labs, research programs, vaccine production and outbreaks, among other things. A little flower overlaid on the image denotes the Kansas State University Gardens nearby.

In the second phase of Lentzos and Koblentz’s project, they hope to learn more about the regulations and oversight that fence in each facility, which differ from nation to nation. There is no international body that has a mandate to keep track of or oversee pathogen labs or high-consequence biological research. “You can't collate up the information to see bigger trends and patterns in, for example, typical accidents or typical challenges,” Lentzos said. 

What Lentzos would like to see is the life sciences equivalent of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversees nuclear goings-on across the world. After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, people could see the potential fallout of unchecked proliferation. They also realized that no matter which country was undertaking atomic development, the consequences wouldn’t heed borders. “Biology has never had that security moment that nuclear physicists had when the bombs went off,” Lentzos said. “So the biological community, life science community, has remained naive in many ways to the potential security implications of their work.”

But both biologists and the general public are likely more acutely aware of how disruptive, disturbing and dangerous an invisibly small pathogen can be now than they were just a few years ago. That awareness also means that more people have likely heard the term “BSL” than ever before. Hensley finds the new public familiarity to be a positive thing.

When she first started donning BSL-4 suits, her family thought her work was interesting. “Almost like it's cute,” she said. Things first started to change after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed: People became aware of the idea of “biodefense.” “I would say it's the first shift,” she said.

More recently, since Covid came along, people know more about viruses’ ability to hop species. They are also painfully knowledgeable about the havoc that hopping can have on society, and, Hensley said, “just how vulnerable we are.”

In this pandemic, then, Hensley has seen a second shift, toward a broader appreciation of public health and the importance of early detection and intervention — the kinds of things that have been shaping her career since she watched the protestors with her father. “It makes my life easier, I'll be honest,” she said, “that people better appreciate what I do, and are more receptive to the laboratories and to the work and in general are just much more supportive of what we're doing.”

Her son hasn’t wavered in his support. And now, when they go about their lives in the Little Apple and pass some sign related to Covid, he likes to remind her of something. “This is why you're here,” he tells her.

Because if it’s not HIV, it’s anthrax. And if it’s not anthrax, it’s SARS-CoV-2. And if it’s not SARS-CoV-2, it’s whatever is coming for us, and our livestock, next.

The post The future home of the world’s most dangerous pathogens appeared first on Coda Story.