It’s possible to create simple chemical weapons fairly easily with the resources of a high-school chemistry lab; that’s about as dual-use as it gets. Nerve agents and the like are more complicated, but still feasible without exotic infrastructure if you can get your hands on the precursors.
The problem is more that they don’t actually work all that well; the de-facto moratorium on their use has as much to do with practical problems as moral. Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, for example, caused about the casualties of a small to medium-sized bombing and took far more coordination and technical expertise.
Biological weapons hitherto have been in a different category, but that might not last as cheap bioengineering tools become available; I don’t know enough about that field to comment authoritatively, though. On the other hand, I expect nuclear technology to grow less dual-use in the near future, as more reactor designs come online that require less fuel enrichment and don’t generate plutonium.
It’s possible to create simple chemical weapons fairly easily with the resources of a high-school chemistry lab; that’s about as dual-use as it gets. Nerve agents and the like are more complicated, but still feasible without exotic infrastructure if you can get your hands on the precursors.
The problem is more that they don’t actually work all that well; the de-facto moratorium on their use has as much to do with practical problems as moral. Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, for example, caused about the casualties of a small to medium-sized bombing and took far more coordination and technical expertise.
Biological weapons hitherto have been in a different category, but that might not last as cheap bioengineering tools become available; I don’t know enough about that field to comment authoritatively, though. On the other hand, I expect nuclear technology to grow less dual-use in the near future, as more reactor designs come online that require less fuel enrichment and don’t generate plutonium.