Animal Weapons

by Douglas J. Emlen

  * * *

  On that November day when life on our planet nearly ended I was in high school in Ithaca, New York, focused on an experiment for my biology class that wasn’t working and memorizing a handful of lines for my role in that year’s school play; I’d been cast as the nerdy valedictorian in the musical Grease. I was oblivious to the imminence of my near annihilation. We all were.

  My future father-in-law had just retired as the director of operations at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, home of Titan II nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. You’d think that he, at least, would have been aware. He was not. In fact, it wasn’t until two years after the fact, when KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky defected and related the full story to British intelligence, that anybody outside of the Soviet Union learned just how close we’d all come to nuclear war. Now, with the declassification of Cold War documents, the full story has started to emerge,2 and the lesson is terrifying indeed. For a second time—the first being the Cuban missile crisis—humanity teetered on the brink.

  It’s probably not an exaggeration to say we all owe our lives to a handful of people in a Soviet war room. Somehow, the leaders managed to make the right decision that day. Despite a string of close calls, repeated provocation, political turmoil from the absence of their leader, and inaccurate information, they did not launch their missiles, opting instead to hold their breath and watch as the deadliest waiting game in the history of the planet unfolded.

  As suddenly as the buildup started, it ended. Leaders came out of their bunkers, and bases resumed normal activity. NATO hadn’t actually been at DEFCON 1. They’d been conducting a military exercise—a simulated state of nuclear attack—called Operation Able Archer 83. The United States had launched a massive, coordinated, military “dry run” of a full nuclear first strike.3 They just hadn’t bothered to tell the Soviets, and nobody realized they nearly precipitated Armageddon. The most horrifying fact of the Able Archer 83 crisis was that NATO wasn’t even aware it existed.

  * * *

  I’m no expert in geopolitics or national security. This should be self-evident, since I work on beetles. But I’ve come this far comparing arms races of animals and people, so it seems only prudent to reflect for a moment on the Cold War and its legacy. What can animal weapons teach us about the world we live in today?

  Many feel we survived the Cold War because of deterrence, and after researching this book I’m inclined to agree. We escaped two extremely dangerous near misses, but in the end deterrence prevailed. The threat of total destruction prevented either superpower from launching, and it kept all the other states at bay in the process.

  It’s been more than two decades since the Cold War ended. During that time, the United States has reigned as the sole superpower. The United States has larger arsenals, a bigger navy, and better air forces than any other state, and we spend billions of dollars yearly to keep it that way. We’re the biggest crab left on the beach, and we have fantastic weapons. Are we safer as a result?

  In some ways, we probably are. Modern conventional weapons appear to behave just like animal weapons. State-of-the-art supersonic, supermaneuverable fighters, brand-new Gerald R. Ford–class supercarriers (due to arrive in 2015), and unprecedented satellite surveillance systems and intelligence-gathering supercomputers all cost a fortune to design, build, and maintain. These are weapons technologies only the richest states can afford, and they confer a pronounced advantage in battle. As with the largest, most expensive animal weapons, our conventional forces no doubt deter rival states from initiating unrestricted war against us.

  Just as the unchallenged supremacy of the Roman army and the British navy each resulted in episodes of relative peace (the Pax Romana and Pax Britannica, respectively), so some have argued that U.S. military dominance has ushered in a “Pax Americana.”4 Until another state can match us militarily and economically, the risk of an outright conventional attack on our forces is small. With full-scale war off the table, the only options left to our rivals are asymmetric—sneaky tactics that break the rules.

  States that could never attack us outright snipe incessantly at our soldiers and our will to fight with guerrilla tactics. Suicide bombs, car bombs, and IEDs undermine the effectiveness of our conventional weapons. These attacks are irritating, and deadly to a few, but none directly threaten the sovereignty of the United States or the security of the vast majority of its inhabitants. On the surface, then, deterrence appears to be working just fine, and comparisons with animal weapons suggest the extreme cost of our modern arsenals may be justifiable.

  The problem is weapons of mass destruction.

  * * *

  The sad fact is the Cold War arms race left us with weapons unlike any that have ever existed, placing us in uncharted and dangerous territory. Modern nuclear and biological weapons are unfathomably destructive. It’s tough to imagine the sudden death of billions of people. What would that postapocalyptic planet look like? Climate, crops, forests, food—all would be irrevocably altered in ways catastrophic to humankind. Biodiversity: gutted; ecosystems: shattered; basically, every aspect of life as we know it, including all the people we know and care for, as well as all the others we’ve never heard of, would be ashes and dust.

  This sounds like the stuff of Hollywood, but it’s not fiction.5 Collateral damage from weapons of mass destruction is likely to be staggering, and this changes the stakes of conflict. Weapons of mass destruction are so deadly that any use of them at all could threaten our very existence. Like it or not, this places us in an age where our only option is deterrence—anything else would be suicide. But deterrence has its limits, and we may be facing those limits now.

  In crabs, beetles, flies, and caribou—indeed, in all animals with extreme weapons—deterrence works for very good reasons, and it works only when specific conditions are met. It boils down to choosing battles wisely. It never pays to shy from a fight you might win, but it often pays to walk away from the ones you’re likely to lose. The trick lies in predicting the outcome beforehand. In order to do this, potential combatants must have a reliable method for evaluating each other’s fighting ability.

  When honest signals are present, males with smaller weapons usually walk away. Power discrepancies are obvious because weapon size tracks the health, body size, nutritional reserves, and status of each male—all the factors that matter for predicting the outcome of battle. For these animals, waving weapons works.

  When honest signals are lacking, on the other hand, there is no safe way to predict the winner beforehand. Males who walk away now may be skipping battles they could win, sacrificing critical opportunities to mate. In animals, at least, when honest signals are missing, contests become sudden and dangerous, and very often deadly. If we’re to take our lessons from crabs and caribou, then the prerequisite for peace is weapons that function as honest signals of fighting ability. Are they?

  For animal weapons to be honest signals, they must be expensive—exorbitantly expensive. So expensive, in fact, that only the top-condition males can afford them. Costs keep signals honest. If anybody could afford big weapons, then all males would have them, and differences in weapon size would be meaningless. Only when most males cannot possibly afford them will big weapons provide reliable signals of fighting strength. Then, and only then, will it pay for males with small weapons to walk away.

  Early in the Cold War weapons of mass destruction met this requirement. They were prohibitively expensive, and only the richest two superpowers had nukes. But as the race progressed, warheads got cheaper. The cost of conventional weapons—submarines, fighters, and carriers, for example—soared, but the nuclear warheads themselves got smaller and cheaper. Pretty soon, England and France were testing nuclear warheads, then China and South Africa. By the 1970s India had successfully tested nuclear warheads, too, and by the 1990s so had Pakistan. Now, Israel and North Korea have them as well. The most important precondition for deterrence is disappearing.

  Biological weapons are even cheaper
. Research was well under way during WWII, and for decades both the United States and the Soviet Union aggressively pursued ways to weaponize deadly pathogens.6 Before the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention banned biological weapons research, the United States was spending $300 million per year developing deadly antihuman, antilivestock, and anticrop pathogens, even experimenting with using insects to deliver the pathogens to targets.7 Even after the ban, the Soviets strove onward, perfecting and stockpiling hundreds of tons of heat- and cold-resistant extra-deadly strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, botulism, smallpox, and Marburg virus.8

  Biological weapons weren’t very expensive to begin with, and in recent years their price has plummeted. Today, it’s possible to assemble perfect copies of the world’s most dangerous diseases—pathogens such as the 1918 strain of avian influenza, responsible for roughly one hundred million deaths—in a simple basement laboratory for a few thousand dollars. If anybody can make these weapons, then anybody can use them, and this throws the essential logic of deterrence out the window.

  * * *

  We are racing toward a world where lots of states possess weapons of mass destruction, regardless of the size and relative strength of their conventional fighting forces. Nuclear and biological weapons break the rules—they cheat—by providing states with few resources a means to bring down wealthier rivals. If history is any lesson here, then weapons of mass destruction are likely to erode the cost-effectiveness of expensive conventional forces. Just as longbows and muskets foretold the end of medieval armor, and exploding artillery the end for sailing warships and castles, so, too, may we be nearing the point where low-cost nuclear and biological weapons spell the end for expensive conventional military forces.

  But the bigger problem, as I see it, is the weapons themselves, and the collateral damage they stand to inflict. Even if deterrence does still work—which I’m not convinced it should—it doesn’t mean these weapons won’t ever be used; deterrence just means their use will be less likely. It may only be 1 out of 100 encounters or, as in caribou, 6 out of 11,600, but if animals teach us anything, it’s that conflicts eventually do escalate all the way to full-fledged battle. Before the Cold War this detail wouldn’t have mattered very much; now, because of weapons of mass destruction, it makes all the difference. The silver lining, I suppose, is that the conflicts most likely to spiral all the way to unrestricted war are predictable. They involve one-on-one duels between evenly matched rivals.

  The Cold War arms race revolved around just such a rivalry—the two biggest crabs on the beach. But it doesn’t have to be the big crabs. There are lots and lots of crabs on every beach, waving and pushing, sizing each other up, and any of these confrontations has the potential to escalate. A crab facing a much larger foe may opt to walk away, but he doesn’t just disappear into the sunset. He seeks out a better battle—one he is more likely to win. This time, he’ll approach a more evenly matched foe. When a midsized crab squares off against another midsized crab, early gestures fail to settle the dispute up front; push comes to shove, and both sides hold their ground; shoves intensify, turning into whacks and squeezes; finally, if neither backs down, the next step is inevitable: unrestricted war.

  On a beach, if two midsized crabs launch into full battle it’s not likely to matter much for everybody else. But we’re not on that beach. Weapons of mass destruction are cheap enough now that most midsized states have them, or if they don’t yet, they soon will, and the destructive power of these weapons is so great that their use anywhere, even once, has the potential to unravel civilization on a global scale. If weapons of mass destruction are part of the equation, then we can’t let any confrontation escalate. Ever. But stopping them all is a tall order. A mere glance at our present political map shows hot spots with deadly potential—rivalries poised and ready to flare into full war. North Korea versus South Korea; India versus Pakistan; Israel versus Iran—all of these nations stand toe-to-toe with equally matched rivals, and all either already have or will soon have weapons of mass destruction.

  * * *

  Where does this leave us? For fourteen chapters I’ve argued that our weapons and animal weapons are similar. But this is true only up to a point. The deadliest weapons of today have no precedent—never before has an animal wielded the capacity to destroy life on such a planetary scale, and never have there been weapons so dangerous they can never be used.

  Today’s world is a quagmire of rivalries and factions, ethnic disputes, and religious wars, and the last thing we need is for large and unknowable numbers of these players to be armed with weapons of mass destruction. Even when the safety of the world lay in the hands of just two governments—each a superpower acutely aware of the destructive consequences of their deadliest weapons, and each having layers of safeguards in place to prevent a misfire—we still almost escalated to nuclear war in at least two instances. Now, decisions of catastrophic life and death lie in the hands of many more governments and, in some cases, even in the hands of rogue individuals. Will all of them make the right decision every time?

  The picture gets even scarier when terrorist organizations are thrown into the mix. Thus far, terrorists have been armed only with conventional weapons. They may not fight “by the rules,” but the weapons they wield are still pulled from standard arsenals, and the damage they’re able to inflict relatively minor. What happens when one of these organizations gets their hands on a weapon of mass destruction?

  Writing this book has pulled me a long way from rainforests and beetles, mud, rain, and elk. I started this venture with stories to tell of the most magnificent animals in the world. Along the way I ventured deeper and deeper into human history, enthralled, and at times appalled, by what I learned about our past. I stand awed and shaken—thrilled by the parallels and, at the same time, terrified by the prospects. For me, the final message is clear. Weapons of mass destruction change the stakes, and the logic, of battle. We’re not likely to survive another arms race.

  Notes

  1. Camouflage and Armor

  1. Oliver Pearson and Anita Pearson, “Owl Predation in Pennsylvania, with Notes on the Small Mammals of Delaware County,” Journal of Mammology 28 (1947): 137–47; Charles Kirkpatrick and Clinton Conway, “The Winter Foods of Some Indiana Owls,” American Midland Naturalist 38 (1947): 755–66.

  2. Ibid.

  3. F. B. Sumner, “An Analysis of Geographic Variation in Mice of the Peromyscus polionotus Group from Florida and Alabama,” Journal of Mammology 7 (1926): 149–84; Sumner, “The Analysis of a Concrete Case of Intergradation Between Two Subspecies,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. 15 (1929): 110–20; Sumner, “The Analysis of a Concrete Case of Intergradation Between Two Subspecies. II. Additional Data and Interpretations,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. 15 (1929): 481–93; Sumner, “Genetic and Distributional Studies of Three Subspecies of Peromyscus,” Journal of Genetics 23 (1930): 275–376.

  4. Lynne Mullen and Hopi Hoekstra, “Natural Selection Along an Environmental Gradient: A Classic Cline in Mouse Pigmentation,” Evolution 62 (2008): 1555–70.

  5. F. B. Sumner and J. J. Karol, “Notes on the Burrowing Habits of Peromyscus polionotus,” Journal of Mammology 10 (1929): 213–15; Jesse Weber and Hopi Hoekstra, “The Evolution of Burrowing Behavior in Deer Mice (genus Peromyscus),” Animal Behavior 77 (2009): 603–9.

  6. Donald W. Kaufman, “Adaptive Coloration in Peromyscus polionotus: Experimental Selection by Owls,” Journal of Mammology 55 (1974): 271–83.

  7. Hopi Hoekstra and her colleagues have revealed how mutated versions of two genes arose and spread in the beach populations, causing animals in these areas to develop with white fur. Fur color in mice and other mammals is controlled through regulation of the synthesis of pigments. One of the molecules involved in this process is the melanocortin-1 receptor (Mc1r), a roughly corkscrew-shaped protein that loops like a sea serpent in and out of the surface membrane of pigment-producing cel
ls. Because folds of this protein extend all the way through the membrane, Mc1r can couple events happening on the outside of the cell with processes occurring on the inside.

  Mc1r acts like a switch because it flips between two alternative contortional states, and this change in shape alters the production of pigment. When Mc1r is twisted into one of its shapes it is relatively inactive, and pigment cells produce a pale yellow pigment called “phaeomelanin.” When it switches to its alternate and more active shape, then the cells begin producing a different pigment called melanin. Melanin is a deep, dark brown, and fur infused with melanin results in brown mice.

  Whether Mc1r triggers production of phaeomelanin or melanin depends, in part, on the presence of other molecules outside of the cell. For example, binding of an activator protein to one of its outer loops can switch Mc1r so that cells begin producing melanin, whereas binding of an inhibitory protein can block melanin synthesis, reverting cells to production of the paler phaeomelanin. Pigment cells are riddled with thousands of copies of Mc1r throughout their outer membranes, all triggering the production of either light or dark pigments inside the cell. The result is a blend of the two pigments, and a continuous range of possible fur darkness. When concentrations of the activator molecules are high, most copies of Mc1r are active and melanin synthesis predominates. When concentrations of inhibitors are high, melanin levels plummet. In this basic fashion, shifts in the levels of activators and inhibitors cause the color of fur to vary from hair to hair, and also from mouse to mouse.