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Comment by SmellyGeekBoy | Hacker News Reader

Not really. If they want to build something in their own country and run it how they choose then that's up to them. Why is it a problem? Even if they refuse the share any science with the rest of the world we're no worse off than we were before.

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Hopefully they do share though, we might be slightly worse off if they lure away scientists that otherwise would have working in a more open system. But it seems unlikely to be an issue, I'm sure the people working on the cutting edge would like to publish and get the results known everywhere.

When the world went from no country having nuclear weapons to one country having nuclear weapons, was the rest of the world not worse off than before?

Probably not. We're doing a lot better than we were 100 years ago, and nuclear weapons have been a great deterrent to stop many countries from engaging in wars that they might have been more tempted to if at least one of the parties didn't have nuclear weapons.

We've had almost constant small-scale proxy wars instead, and the arms industry isn't exactly going through hard times.

More realistically, we got lucky and barely dodged the armageddon bullet on a number of occasions.

Are you implying that a particle accelerator can be weaponized?

Who knows what it could lead to. But no I'm not implying that there is any great danger from this project, but I'm objecting to the idea that one party gaining exclusive information somehow leaves the other parties in an unchanged situation.

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