Have a read through Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control by Jürgen Altmann. If you have 30 mins, maybe check out this tal

Have a read through Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control by Jürgen Altmann. If you have 30 mins, maybe check out this talk as an optional prelude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MANPyybo-dA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MANPyybo-dA I suspect that after reading you'll be convinced if you aren't already that in the realms of biological and chemical warfare (special cases of nanotech warfare) nature overwhelmingly favors offense. We've been able to worldwide keep research and development on those limited, and there's incentive to avoid it anyway since if word gets out others will start an arm's race so they can at least try and maybe get to a MAD equilibrium, but it's not nearly as stable as the one with nukes. An additional incentive against is that the only purpose of such weaponry is to annihilate rather than destroy enough to achieve a more reasonable military objective. But molecular nanotech is on a completely different playing field. Fortunately it's still far out, but as it becomes more feasible, there is a huge incentive to be the first entity to build and control a universal molecular assembler or in general self-replicating devices. Arms control over this seems unlikely. Giving everyone their own AGI is like giving everyone their own nation state, which implies being like giving everyone their own nuke plus the research personnel to develop awesome molecular nanotech which as a special case enables all the worst possibilities of biological and chemical and non-molecular-nanotech nanotech warfare, and then more with what you can do with self replication, most of which are graver existential threats than nukes. Absent a global authority or the most superintelligent Singleton to monitor everything that situation is in no way safe for long.