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Comment by Klinky | Hacker News Reader

We already have nukes, and you can still do ethnic cleansing most cheaply with conventional weapons and impotent nation states, no need for Super CRISPR.

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Nukes have signatures. This does not. Just a little aerosol in your general vicinity would likely do the job and you'd never be the wiser. Besides that it is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to do this than build a nuke once you can mail order for genetic sequences delivered to your door.

The Problems with Bioweapons (and you need bio here, either a bacteria or virus that delivers the crispr genedrive, a single spray won't be enough), is that they evolve.

Your super virus that you developed to only kill people living in southern florida? Yeah, that now developed to also kill people in new york. And now it's the whole world.

That's not how it works.

It would work like this: you'd design a bioweapon to hit the Jewish people exclusively (they're the punchball of history, forgive me using them again as an example but I think it is a likely occurrence if this sort of thing is to happen). Then it will may evolve to hit others.

Sorry but I don’t understand how your point differs? I think the gist was that it’s weaponized for a certain group and then evolves to target a much wider group. Isn’t that the same thing as you mentioned?

I purposely didn't select any specific ethnicity or other genetic factor to avoid tapping into stereotypes or causing offence (except to people living in Florida, sorry but not sorry).

Genetic weapons will use genetic factors.

Correct but nobody has proved that new yorkers don't have a common mutation that forces them to live in that city.

You don't need to prove nonsense. You also can't prove the absence of nonsense.

Correct, but I can substitute potentially offensive or offputting labels with nonsense to get a point across.

But if one wanted to, bioengineering ethnic cleansing (or whatever section of genome you're targeting) can be done with a couple thousand dollars worth of supplies in a garage, no nuclear or conventional arsenal required. The point of importance is the barrier to entry is so much lower.

DEFCON talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY (DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome)

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349202

> The point of importance is the barrier to entry is so much lower.

This is the key point.

No, the creation of antidotes is feasible for government labs but there's no purely defensive countermeasure against nuclear weapons.

I hear you, a nuke is the ultimate tool for implementing widespread death. But I don't worry about getting nuked because to build something requires a lot of money, expertise, and parts that are closely monitored. Then you have to figure out how to transport and deliver the damn thing. Not a huge problem if you're a nation-state but bigger for individual actors and their followers.

A CRISPR based biological attack however is something you can pull off with lab equipment you can buy anywhere in the world. For an amount of money that can be acquired much more easily. The risk to the perpetrators has always been that they would screw up and die of their own plague.

The ability to create more precisely targeted biological attacks means that a person who is working on such an attack and doesn't have the necessary genetic makeup for what ever virus vector is being used to transmit it, can do so with much less fear of their own demise. While creating something that can be transported in disguise without being easily detected.

Perhaps an analogy would work.

My kids never had to worry about European teenagers bullying them, but today's kids have contacts all over the world on social networks some of whom can be quite hurtful. There is bullying that happens because the perpetrator "knows" that the target is so far away they are unlikely to be able to cause repercussions. Thus the 'risk' of bullying is lower, and in my estimation happens more frequently.

>I hear you, a nuke is the ultimate tool for implementing widespread death.

That's not my point. I agree that the barriers to entry for biotech are lower.

My point is that whereas the only 'defence' against nuclear weapons is deterrence, i.e more nukes, it is possible to defend against biotech weapons without starting an arms race. This would consist of ongoing, costly research of antidotes by government and university labs (with a high barrier to entry).

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