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Comment by tredre3 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you emphasize rogue and non-state actors. It seems equally likely to me that it would be done by America. America is the only country who deployed nukes (Japan) and chemical weapons (Vietnam) on massive scales.

I can agree that access to bioengineering tooling is easier and cheaper than ever, and thus eventually it stands to reason that a nobody in his basement could engineer a lethal novel virus and lose control of it.

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1) The US is not the only country to deploy chemical weapons. Are you forgetting all of WW1? It's the whole reason chemical weapons are a no-no now.

2) The US didn't use chemicals weapons in Vietnam. Agent Orange was used to kill off foliage, not as a weapon against people, and the side effects were unintentional and affected US troops as much as Vietnamese.

Edit: I originally noted WW2, but I was thinking of WW1's widespread use of things like mustard gas, and the resulting Geneva agreements.

WW2 is notable for not seeing widespread deployment of chemical weapons. Hitler had been subject to gas attacks as a foot soldier in WW1 and forbade the use of chemical weapons as inhumane.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chemical_warfare#Wo... this (a) overlooks the widespread use of chemical weapons in the Pacific theater, and (b) ascribes the non-use by Germany to humanitarian reasons, which is largely speculative. Actual quotes from officers discuss far more practical reasons: Germany feared chemical retaliation, and the horses relied upon for logistics could not be outfitted with sufficiently performant gas masks.

> Hitler had been subject to gas attacks as a foot soldier in WW1 and forbade the use of chemical weapons as inhumane.

He didn’t seem to have a problem using them against civilian targets.

Exactly, watching an episode of dad's army where they are all mumbling with gasmasks on… just pretend soldiers I guess

Entirely untrue in the Pacific theatre, with the Japanese doing human experiments both with germ and chemical agents. The largest scale use I remember was where they released infected rats (forget where) in a certain Chinese city to cause a plague.

Well and the Germans did use gas… in the camps…

"no see they didn't use it to give people cancer, they merely wanted to make the land they lived in so uninhabitable and devoid of life that staying there would mean death either by starvation or bombing"

War crime apologists are always funny

I'm not sure what you're responding to. If you are making the claim that Agent Orange was indeed a chemical weapon, I'd disagree, but I think either perspective has points.

2 - is a little pedantic, they used agent orange to kill foliage to kill people...

They didn't gas people with chlorine or mustard, but they mass destroyed crops and foliage, to kill people.

And "affected US troops as much as Vietnamese" is just completely incorrect, US covered a nation in herbicide, went home, got cancer. Is completely different then having your soil destroyed for decades.

> is a little pedantic, they used agent orange to kill foliage to kill people...

Is a wheel a weapon because a tank uses it? I wouldn't consider the difference pedantry.

It does look like the general consensus is agent orange is not a chemical weapon, or at least was not used as one.

tanks have very much run over people to kill them. a wheel can very much be used as a weapon.

"Can be used as a weapon" applies to nearly everything, and ceases to have any meaning. Even on a tank, they aren't considered a weapon, only the whole take together is the weapon, or the cannon alone.

2) Unintentional side-effect affecting millions of Vietnamese people? Hundreds od thousands of children born with birth defects.

Is your argument that the resulting birth defects were intentional? If not, I'm not sure where you're going with your response.

The civilian cost was intentionally not part of the equation. The toxic effects were known and the numbers show that it was not a few isolated accidents but a intentional disregard for the human cost.

The toxic effects also impacted the area where I grew up here in the Southern US - there’s a road that’s known locally as “Chemical Ranch Rd” where there’s a ~100 acre property that was used for testing Agent Orange.

Chemical weapons didn't work well in WW1. The reason we don't see any chemical weapons around is because they are not really effective. Germans accidentally gassed a bunch of their own guys, while failing to use chemical weapons to achieve anything in the war.

I feel like today's Pentagon would be fine with gassing our own troops to achieve nothing.

"No Tab Pete" has no regard for servicemembers, or previous expertise. Only your testosterone levels, ability to not eat, and blind loyalty to serve political party over country and constitution.

I emphasize rogue and non-state actors because they're more likely to be accelerated/enabled by LLMs. Large states like the USA already have access to modern bioweapon technology (and have a longer track record of not deploying them).

There aren't many situations where biological weapons are useful to nation states, especially ones with global economic and military footprint like the US, because it isn't selective enough about who it targets.

State actors already have the resources to do this. The disruption is from actors where the normal deterrence ladders don’t apply.

Because we’re the “good guys.”

We're not there quite yet, but I think within the decade at this pace it may be possible to create targeted bioweapons for purposes of targeted assassination or genocide. It's horrifying, but a world in which everyone has a superintelligence is a world where that will sometimes happen.

Either everyone can afford it, or no one can. Choose well.

> It's horrifying, but a world in which everyone has a superintelligence is a world where that will sometimes happen.

It's horrifying, but a world in which only few have superintelligence is a world where that will happen all the time.

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