China Is Creating Biologically-Enhanced Super Soldiers We See In Sci-Fi Movies

One of the top U.S intelligence officials said China was conducting human trials to test the possibility of making biologically-enhanced super soldiers.

The official in question, John Ratcliffe, is the director of national intelligence and he said in an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal that the East Asian country was a pre-eminent national security threat.

According to Ratcliffe, China realized no ethical boundaries in its pursuit of power. He, his office, and the CIA didn’t answer when they were questioned about whether China was working on the super-soldiers like the ones portrayed in “Universal Soldier,” “Bloodshot,” or “Caption America.”

In 2019, two U.S scholars made public a paper on the ambition of China to use biotechnology in wars. They also pointed out signs that the country had its eyes on the gene-editing technology to enhance humans, or soldiers’, performance.

The paper talked about the research involving the CRISPR gene-editing tool (stand for clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) of China. CRISPR has been used to modify plants and treat genetic disorders but the majority of Western scientists think it is unethical to use the tool on healthy humans to enhance them.

The two scholars, Wilson VornDick – a former Navy officer and a consultant on matters relating to China, and Elsa Kania - Center for a New American Security’s expert on the defense technology of China, said in the paper that while CRISPR as a tool to give humans more abilities remained a hypothetical possibility, there were signs that China was exploring the tech’s potentials on battlefields.

The scholars quoted an article wrote in 2015 and published in a military newspaper, saying that Chinese strategists and military scientists had repeatedly mentioned biotechnology as “new strategic commanding heights” of Military Affairs.

They said a Chinese general, in 2017, said that modern biotechnology, paired with nanotechnology, would revolutionize equipment, weapons, warfare form, combat spaces, and even military theories.

In a telephone interview, Wilson VornDick said he was more concerned about the consequences of messing with human genes than the advantages the practice would bring to battlefields. He remarked that playing with genes could bring unforeseen consequences.

Representatives of the government of China have not commented anything on the claim.

However, the genetically-enhanced soldier part isn’t the point Ratcliffe was trying to make, but it was actually the claim that the East Asian country was a threat to the U.S’s national and economic security.

He wrote that China was a threat to the US as well as to freedom and democracy worldwide since WWII. He also said Beijing was trying to dominate the world technologically, economically, and militarily.

While whether China is truly testing with biologically-enhanced soldiers is still up to debate, the possibility of super-humans have been around for ages and the concerns over it echo what we are so familiar with now: whether it is cheating to use Ritalin in academia, whether athletes’ health will be negatively affected by using anabolic steroids, whether people with a loner life span will bankrupt the pension plans, and so on. However, there are new worries as well.

There are standards established to govern the ethics and research stage of these enhancements; some of them are the Declaration of Helsinki and the Nuremberg Code. However, the military necessity or the urgent needs of wars can, in many situations, permit actions that otherwise not allowed, for example, the need to obtain the consent of the subject.

So there are a few pressing questions that need to be answered, like should military enhancements be made reversible or they can last forever? Or what are the needed safety protocols for long-term enhancements, and whether a soldier can be commanded to take an unproven or risky enhancement?

As we have learned from history, many soldiers will come back to civilian life at some point. So if the enhancements are permanent, would it be safe for them to carry the super-human abilities back to society?

China has a huge military force, accounting for a significant part of the population, so some of them return and have gone through operations that subdue their emotions, would it be a problem for them to fit in the civilian life again?

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