报告作者：Anne Clunan, Ph.D.Naval Postgraduate School；Kirsten Rodine-Hardy, Ph.D. Northeastern University
报告摘要：
Nanotechnologies are enabling, dual-use technologies with the potential to alter the modern world significantly, from fields as wide-ranging as warfare to industrial design to medicine to social and human engineering. Seizing the technological lead in nanotech is often viewed as an imperative for both 21st century defense and global competitiveness. Only revolutionary technologies are believed to allow a country to take advantage of its relative backwardness—in the sense of its lack of commitment to existing, incremental technologies—and leap ahead of existing technological leaders in developing and deploying a revolutionary new technology. New technologies, however, are only
likely truly to revolutionize an economy and society if there is a broader national base that allows a new technology to spread and transform from its initial niche application, whether civilian or military, and if society is willing to adopt the technology in question. Globally, there is significant belief in the revolutionary potential of nanotechnology, not only to transform warfare, economy and society, but also the international geopolitical hierarchy. Between 2001 and 2014, over sixty countries followed the United States and established nanotechnology initiatives. These countries range from advanced industrial countries in Europe to Japan to the emerging markets of Russia, China, Brazil, and India to developing countries such as Nepal and Pakistan.
In order to understand the risks associated with nanotechnology with respect to U.S. national security and leadership and means for managing them, the report begins with an examination of some of nanotech’s military applications, and interdisciplinary nature of nanotechnology. Definitional and data challenges make risk assessments of nanotech’s security, market, safety, health and environmental impacts difficult. This difficulty is reflected in the lack of multilateral and national efforts to govern nanotechnologies for security purposes. The report then sketches the global landscape of national nanotechnology efforts, with brief looks at Brazil, India and Russia, the European Union, Germany, and the United Kingdom and a portrait of China. In order to understand nanotechnology’s potential for technological surprise and disruption of the geopolitical
position of the United States, it examines these empirical results against the background of the factors shaping government control of technological superiority. The report then concludes with an initial assessment of whether nanotechnology is revolutionary, and presents its key findings and policy recommendations. The findings presented here should be considered as preliminary, in that the report highlights central definitional and data challenges. Such conditions are ripe for overselling or underestimating nanotechnology’s potential and prevent the provision of more definitive answers.
