I don’t know if I like either one of your points. For #2 you can find an analogy with nuclear weapons. It would seem trivially presently to use them while ignor

I don’t know if I like either one of your points. For #2 you can find an analogy with nuclear weapons. It would seem trivially presently to use them while ignoring how hard it was to invent and produce them. What if the risk of allowing another alien species to progress is so absurdly high that vast resources are allocated to create WMD to annihilate them. Then it does become trivially easy unless there’s a MAD/detente system. That’s pretty much the point of the book.