And in the end no one bombed North Korea, because saying something is an act of war doesn’t imply automatic war anyway, it’s subtler than that. Honestly in the hypothetical “no GPUs” world you’d probably have all the major States agreeing it’s a danger to them and begrudgingly cooperating on those lines, and the occasional pathetic attempt by some rogue actor with nothing to lose might be nipped in the bud via sanctions or threats. The big question really is how detectable such attempts would be compared to developing e.g. bacteriological weapons. But if tomorrow we found out that North Korea is developing Super Smallpox and plans to release it, what would we do? We are already in a similar world, we just don’t think much about it because we’ve gotten used to this being the precarious equilibrium we exist in.
And in the end no one bombed North Korea, because saying something is an act of war doesn’t imply automatic war anyway, it’s subtler than that. Honestly in the hypothetical “no GPUs” world you’d probably have all the major States agreeing it’s a danger to them and begrudgingly cooperating on those lines, and the occasional pathetic attempt by some rogue actor with nothing to lose might be nipped in the bud via sanctions or threats. The big question really is how detectable such attempts would be compared to developing e.g. bacteriological weapons. But if tomorrow we found out that North Korea is developing Super Smallpox and plans to release it, what would we do? We are already in a similar world, we just don’t think much about it because we’ve gotten used to this being the precarious equilibrium we exist in.