Via @[1523737329:2048:Alyssa Vance]
"One lesson I like to hammer home when talking to people about this sort of thing is that in theory, nuclear weapons should be really easy to control. Their production is entirely dependent on large stocks of a single element that is not used for too much else (uranium, which is at the beginning of any fuel or enrichment cycle), they require (even in this age of centrifuges) reasonably large facilities with detectable profiles, requires participation from lots of different kinds of experts to pull it off (you need people with a lot of different skill sets), and they are the sort of thing that generate enough of a known threat that people are willing to go to fairly extreme measures to prevent others from getting them. And yet, we have not the greatest track record (but also not the worst) at controlling them, because they are very attractive to states. I think the prospects of controlling biological threats — or nanotechnological threats, once those get going — are very slim. I find the progress in synthetic biology very troubling for this reason. Within the next four decades or so, every university bio lab in the country (and soon after, the world) is probably going to have the capability to make customized flus, plagues, and other nasties. Yes, they might also be able to make cures for them (so the proponents say), but I see no reason to assume that the balance between offense and defense is going to be any more a parity in this field than it is in every other one (where offense usually has a steep advantage). Bottom line: We’re used to thinking of the bomb as the hard case. It’s actually the easy case. Everything gets a lot harder from here on out."
"One lesson I like to hammer home when talking to people about this sort of thing is that in theory, nuclear weapons should be really easy to control. Their production is entirely dependent on large stocks of a single element that is not used for too much else (uranium, which is at the beginning of any fuel or enrichment cycle), they require (even in this age of centrifuges) reasonably large facilities with detectable profiles, requires participation from lots of different kinds of experts to pull it off (you need people with a lot of different skill sets), and they are the sort of thing that generate enough of a known threat that people are willing to go to fairly extreme measures to prevent others from getting them. And yet, we have not the greatest track record (but also not the worst) at controlling them, because they are very attractive to states. I think the prospects of controlling biological threats — or nanotechnological threats, once those get going — are very slim. I find the progress in synthetic biology very troubling for this reason. Within the next four decades or so, every university bio lab in the country (and soon after, the world) is probably going to have the capability to make customized flus, plagues, and other nasties. Yes, they might also be able to make cures for them (so the proponents say), but I see no reason to assume that the balance between offense and defense is going to be any more a parity in this field than it is in every other one (where offense usually has a steep advantage). Bottom line: We’re used to thinking of the bomb as the hard case. It’s actually the easy case. Everything gets a lot harder from here on out."