Smaller, Cheaper, Better Doesn’t Apply to Nukes

by on October 13, 2006 · 12 comments

It occurs to me that there’s a broader lesson from the suitcase nuke story I linked to earlier. One of the things the article emphasizes is that a nuclear weapon isn’t something you can just type a password into and expect it to explode. It’s a big, complex piece of machinery that requires several people with specialized skills to detonate.

In August, I linked to an article making a similar point about the alleged threat of “binary liquids.” There, too, the threat is theoretically possible, but the obstacles look insurmountable. I’ve read similar critiques of biological weapons: that to acquire, weaponize, and deploy Anthrax, smallpox, and other biological weapons is far more difficult than people realize.

I think that our intuitions about what it’s feasible for a small terrorist band to accomplish are warped by the pace of progress in certain civilian high-tech industries. There were cell phones of a sort in the 1940s, but they were enormous, extremely expensive, and required a lot of specialized training to use. There were computers in the 1940s, but they filled a whole room, cost millions of dollars, and did less than a lot of calculators do today. The reason that today’s cell phones and computers are so much better is that American firms have invested hundreds of billions of dollars developing ways to make these devices smaller, cheaper, and more user friendly.

Fortunately, there hasn’t been any analogous development for nuclear weapons. Sure, governments have spent a lot of money building more powerful nukes, but making nukes smaller, cheaper, or more user friendly hasn’t been on the feature list. So nuclear weapons are probably nearly as big, expensive, and complex as they were in the 1940s.

The same is largely true for chemical and biological weapons. It’s true that private companies have invested a lot of money on new chemical and biological technologies. But the process of producing chemical and biological compounds has remained the domain of large companies. There hasn’t been any reason to invest resources making these devices small or cheap enough for individuals or small groups to obtain or use. Hence, despite the rapid pace of progress in consumer dominated industries like electronics, effective chemical and biological weapons remain nearly as difficult for individuals to obtain as they were 50 years ago.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • James Gattuso

    True enough. But difficult isn’t the same as impossible. And even one bulky, old-fashioned 1940s nuke could still ruin your day…

  • James Gattuso

    True enough. But difficult isn’t the same as impossible. And even one bulky, old-fashioned 1940s nuke could still ruin your day…

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    There hasn’t been any reason to invest resources making these devices small or cheap enough for individuals or small groups to obtain or use. Hence, despite the rapid pace of progress in consumer dominated industries like electronics, effective chemical and biological weapons remain nearly as difficult for individuals to obtain as they were 50 years ago.

    Absolutely NOT true, although I am very sorry to say this, as I you actually wish you were right, Tim.

    The very real likelihood that a biological agent could be engineered to create great damage by a small terrorist group (Or even conceivably by a single individual) has been accepted by all major anti-terrorist agencies. The USA is quite a long way behind the curve building a credible bio-defense system, and certain very reasonable programs, such as a national enhanced syndromic surveillance system, have languished, as I had noted in an article, Symdromic Surveillance, 21st Century Data Harvesting published over at freedom to tinker.

    I would especially refer you to an excellent talk by Drew Endy of MIT, during which he had identified the necessary components to synthesize DNA were availabe on eBay. His talk was not about bio-terrorism, but there were certain conclusions you could draw from his talk.

    Open Source Biology

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    There hasn’t been any reason to invest resources making these devices small or cheap enough for individuals or small groups to obtain or use. Hence, despite the rapid pace of progress in consumer dominated industries like electronics, effective chemical and biological weapons remain nearly as difficult for individuals to obtain as they were 50 years ago.

    Absolutely NOT true, although I am very sorry to say this, as I you actually wish you were right, Tim.

    The very real likelihood that a biological agent could be engineered to create great damage by a small terrorist group (Or even conceivably by a single individual) has been accepted by all major anti-terrorist agencies. The USA is quite a long way behind the curve building a credible bio-defense system, and certain very reasonable programs, such as a national enhanced syndromic surveillance system, have languished, as I had noted in an article, Symdromic Surveillance, 21st Century Data Harvesting published over at freedom to tinker.

    I would especially refer you to an excellent talk by Drew Endy of MIT, during which he had identified the necessary components to synthesize DNA were availabe on eBay. His talk was not about bio-terrorism, but there were certain conclusions you could draw from his talk.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    The link for the Drew Endy talk, referenced above:

    Open Source Biology

  • http://www.techliberation.com/ Tim

    Enigma, I can’t find the essays I remember reading about biological weapons, so certainly I might be wrong on that front. Thanks for the pointers.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com eee_eff

    There hasn’t been any reason to invest resources making these devices small or cheap enough for individuals or small groups to obtain or use. Hence, despite the rapid pace of progress in consumer dominated industries like electronics, effective chemical and biological weapons remain nearly as difficult for individuals to obtain as they were 50 years ago.


    Absolutely NOT true, although I am very sorry to say this, as I you actually wish you were right, Tim.


    The very real likelihood that a biological agent could be engineered to create great damage by a small terrorist group (Or even conceivably by a single individual) has been accepted by all major anti-terrorist agencies. The USA is quite a long way behind the curve building a credible bio-defense system, and certain very reasonable programs, such as a national enhanced syndromic surveillance system, have languished, as I had noted in an
    article, Symdromic Surveillance, 21st Century Data Harvesting
    published over at freedom to tinker.


    I would especially refer you to an excellent talk by Drew Endy of MIT, during which he had identified the necessary components to synthesize DNA were availabe on eBay. His talk was not about bio-terrorism, but there were certain conclusions you could draw from his talk.


    Open Source Biology

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com eee_eff

    There hasn’t been any reason to invest resources making these devices small or cheap enough for individuals or small groups to obtain or use. Hence, despite the rapid pace of progress in consumer dominated industries like electronics, effective chemical and biological weapons remain nearly as difficult for individuals to obtain as they were 50 years ago.


    Absolutely NOT true, although I am very sorry to say this, as I you actually wish you were right, Tim.


    The very real likelihood that a biological agent could be engineered to create great damage by a small terrorist group (Or even conceivably by a single individual) has been accepted by all major anti-terrorist agencies. The USA is quite a long way behind the curve building a credible bio-defense system, and certain very reasonable programs, such as a national enhanced syndromic surveillance system, have languished, as I had noted in an
    article, Symdromic Surveillance, 21st Century Data Harvesting
    published over at freedom to tinker.


    I would especially refer you to an excellent talk by Drew Endy of MIT, during which he had identified the necessary components to synthesize DNA were availabe on eBay. His talk was not about bio-terrorism, but there were certain conclusions you could draw from his talk.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com eee_eff

    The link for the Drew Endy talk, referenced above:

    Open Source Biology

  • http://www.techliberation.com/ Tim

    Enigma, I can’t find the essays I remember reading about biological weapons, so certainly I might be wrong on that front. Thanks for the pointers.

  • Anonymous

    You make an interesting point about the difficulty of using / transporting / detonating CBRN. Some of the worst terrorist attacks, like 9/11, were fairly simple to carry off. Regular looking folks armed with box cutters commandeered planes and crashed them into buildings. Not that tough. And Reid put a bomb in his shoe and was caught striking matches to cook it off.

    A lot of the fear about CBRNs in the hands of terrorists is probably unwarranted. Even a remote possibility, though, is worth a lot of pre-emptive action.

  • Anonymous

    You make an interesting point about the difficulty of using / transporting / detonating CBRN. Some of the worst terrorist attacks, like 9/11, were fairly simple to carry off. Regular looking folks armed with box cutters commandeered planes and crashed them into buildings. Not that tough. And Reid put a bomb in his shoe and was caught striking matches to cook it off.

    A lot of the fear about CBRNs in the hands of terrorists is probably unwarranted. Even a remote possibility, though, is worth a lot of pre-emptive action.

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