Here is the interview, as promised, between David Shankbone of Wikipedia News and Israeli President Shimon Peres:

David Shankbone: One of your big initiatives in technology has been nanotechnology.

President Shimon Peres: Yes.
DS: What made you focus on nanotechnology as a sector for Israeli investment?

SP: Well, nanotechnology is not a vocation but a dimension. It’s a new dimension and it concerns all walks of life, not limited to one, from the military to the civilian. Everywhere you turn around you can see the eventual effect of nano. It also raises some of the most complicated moral issues because until now the human race knew how to build. It didn’t know how to grow. What we did is collected wood and stones and steel and glass and we built from up to down. Structure. Now, what is common to both building a structure is the smallest particular, the nanometer. The minute you can manage it, you can begin to make things grow. And that’s a tremendous change; it is also a tremendous dilemma for humanity. Now actually, like on many other occasions, we discover the nano from the negative side. The bomb.

DS: The bomb?

SP: Yes. The nuclear bomb. The nuclear bomb was to release the hidden powers of a combination or dispersion of nanostructures. The minute you dismantle an existing structure, then you create a lot of energy and you create new dimensions and new measurements. I mean the size has nothing to do with power. You can, say, take a nuclear bomb where the core is six or seven kilos of plutonium and you can destroy a city. Why can’t you build a city with the six kilos? Same story. And the answer is clear. It was easier to destroy because then you don’t have to control the nanostructure. It’s simple when you want explosions; then, fission or fusion does not matter. The minute you want to build, you have to control the nano, and for a very long time we couldn’t, we weren’t able to see the nano, it is so small. No microscope could grasp it. The size of a nano is like 1/100th of a single hair, which is unbelievable. Or if you want to, to compare the nanometer with the meter is to compare an orange to the globe. Same proportion. That’s nothing. And the minute they discovered the microscope, the electronic microscope that can see the nanostructure, we can begin to build. And to build with materials and powers and combinations that we weren’t aware of. And then you can create a lot of things, like I said, on the military side. But it doesn’t make sense to chase it in modern warfare. It’s not armies against armies. It’s strength against, the strength of a collective army against the strength of an individual terrorist. It does not make sense to take an F-16 that costs $40-50 million and chase a terrorist. Nano enables you to miniaturize everything.
DS: To miniaturize?

SP: Yes. And from the beginning you can create invisible sensors that will inform you about every movement in armies all over the world. Then you can hand over the soldier, a new uniform made of nano which is immune against cartridges, against biology and chemical warfare. It’s a strong material because the nano material is 100 times stronger than steel and it weighs only 1/6 of it. It can warm up the soldier in cold weather; cool him in the warm weather. It enhances his strength 3 times; he can lift 120 kilos with one hand. And then you can go on and say not only to protect the protector but as well to create robots as in planes without pilots and military units without soldiers. You don’t need a soldier; you can run it by proxy. Small weapons, small robots that can penetrate or perform in conditions that a human being cannot. He is too large, too inflexible.
DS: That’s amazing.

SP: Then take the nano in medicine. You can produce the smallest instruments that you don’t have to invade the body. You can do it from the outside control, with such tiny little instruments.
DS: Are you satisfied with the progress in the nanotechnology sector here in Israel?

SP: Look, I started it 5 or 6 years ago to explain to the people the importance of it, then I was instrumental in collecting several hundred million dollars that was given to the universities and the research institutes. As a result, we have a very good group of nano experts, you see, all of the best, and now they are working with me voluntarily. I have 30 top scientists in Israel who have developed different ideas in the domain. This type of research can be applied to whatever you want: Alternative energy, because if you want to have solar energy, you need very large equipment. With nano you can condense it. The same is true about desalinization. It can replace the uniform of humankind. In the future ladies will have a dress. You can press a button and it will change the color. The nano has what has been called the lotus effect. Lotus is a flower that keeps cleaning itself. And so is a nano so it doesn’t shrink, doesn’t get dirty.

for the rest of the extensive interview go here…

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