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It depends on your aims, and willingness to accept the consequences of potential mutations. Eventually the requirements to engineer and produce a plague will be

It depends on your aims, and willingness to accept the consequences of potential mutations. Eventually the requirements to engineer and produce a plague will become something that can be done in a garage, and without the fundamental limits of something like a nuclear bomb for which plutonium is a required. At that point, I suspect aggressive deterrence will be the only viable option.

DuskStar 8y ago
Of course, it's also possible that by the point genetic engineering is sufficiently well understood and accessible to the public that someone could create a doomsday plague in their garage we'll have medical technology sufficient to deal with the threat. We've sort of followed that trajectory with computer viruses, after all. This still doesn't say good things about the survivability of the 3rd world, though. Even though modern server, desktop and handheld devices (let's call these "people with high-tier healthcare") are rather well hardened, older systems (people without that healthcare) and IoT devices (pets/farm animals/crops/nature) are notoriously vulnerable.