From: Eugene Leitl (eugene@liposome.genebee.msu.su)
Date: Sat Feb 28 1998 - 06:51:20 MST
On Fri, 27 Feb 1998, Randall R Randall wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Feb 1998 19:25:54 -0800 Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> writes:
> >Which will be widely available first, personal nukes, or personal
> >nuclear defense?
Unless you are a massive, unstructured superalloy sphere you won't survive
a nuke fireball from a few m distance virtually unscathed. As has been
discussed on this list long ago, nukes are pretty useless in space,
especially against rad-shielded floating and underground habitats. Spatial
redundancy (=networked distributed system) is nicely complementary to site
hardening.
What we should worry right now are not nukes nor nerve agents, but
engineered bioweapons (mostly viruses, not bacteriological bioweapons).
Not many can now live sustainably in full biocontainment habitats. Also,
the suits tend to get pretty smelly with time.
> Well, personal nukes are available now, if somewhat hard to
> actually *buy*...
>
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