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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