Widespread access to atomically precise manufacturing could lead to widespread ability to unilaterally produce things as destructive as nuclear weapons.
See below an excerpt from the atomically precise manufacturing (APM) section of Michael Aird’s shallow review of tech developments that could increase risks from nuclear weapons (link):
The concern related to nuclear risk is that APM could potentially make proliferation and/or huge nuclear arsenal sizes much more likely. Specifically:
APM could make it much harder to monitor/control who has nuclear weapons, including even non-state groups or perhaps individuals.
APM could make it much more likely that non-state groups or individuals would not only attain one or a few but rather many nuclear weapons.
This could land us in the very risky-seeming “easy nukes” scenario described in Bostrom’s (2019) The Vulnerable World Hypothesis paper.
APM could make it so that nuclear-armed states can more cheaply, easily, and quickly build hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of nuclear weapons.
The enhanced ease and speed of doing this could undermine arms race stability.
This might also mean that even just the perception of APM being on the horizon could undermine strategic stability, even before APM has arrived.
And nuclear conflicts involving huge numbers of warheads are much more likely to cause an existential catastrophe, or otherwise increase existential risk, than nuclear conflicts involving the tens, hundreds, or thousands of nuclear weapons each nuclear-armed state currently has.
A counterpoint is that at least some nuclear-armed states already have the physical capacity to make many more nuclear warheads than they do (given enough time to build up nuclear manufacturing infrastructure), but having many more warheads doesn’t appear to be what these states are aiming for. This is some evidence that nuclear weapon production being easier to make might not result in huge arsenal sizes. But:
This is only some evidence.
And some nuclear-armed states (e.g., North Korea, Pakistan, and maybe India) may be developing nuclear weapons about as fast as they reasonably can, given their economies. As such, perhaps having access to APM would be likely to substantially affect at least their arsenal sizes.
(Note that we haven’t spent much time thinking about these points, nor seen much prior discussion of them, so this should all be taken as tentative and speculative.)
See below an excerpt from the atomically precise manufacturing (APM) section of Michael Aird’s shallow review of tech developments that could increase risks from nuclear weapons (link):