Nukes, Bugs, and Trump’s Theatre of Righteousness By Brian Simpson

 Donald Trump's speech to the UN General Assembly this week was a made-for-headlines moment: a U.S. president calling not just for tighter safeguards, but for the total abolition of biological weapons. He denounced "reckless experiments" and promised an AI-verified global treaty to keep "man-made pathogens" from ever again causing a catastrophe like COVID-19.

On its face, the rhetoric lands like a statesman's moral epiphany. In the same breath, though, Trump has been publicly edging the United States toward a far more combustible confrontation with Russia, one in which nuclear weapons are not an abstract horror but a live strategic variable. If we take both positions seriously, the contrast borders on absurd: banning engineered microbes while stoking a conflict that could end with the flash of a thermonuclear sunrise.

Trump's proposal strikes a chord because the world of "dual use" research is indeed troubling. Gain-of-function (GOF) experiments, tweaking pathogens to study how they might evolve, have produced viruses that are both scientific tools and potential bioweapons. The 2011 H5N1 bird-flu transmissibility studies, the controversial EcoHealth projects in Wuhan, and the still-unresolved origins of COVID-19, show how thin the firewall can be between defensive science and offensive capability.

An enforceable ban is therefore attractive. But even if every nation signed on, verifying compliance would be daunting. Biology is cheap and decentralised. A single well-funded lab, or a small team of PhDs, can manipulate genomes with off-the-shelf equipment. The "AI verification system" Trump floated sounds like science fiction: we don't yet have an algorithmic panopticon capable of tracking every pipette in every lab.

And Trump's own claim that a lab leak caused the pandemic, while now considered plausible by some U.S. agencies, remains officially "low-confidence," not an established fact. The speech simplifies a debate that scientists continue to hash out with far more caution.

While urging the world to put down its Petri dishes, Trump has also signalled a more hawkish stance on Ukraine, speaking of helping Kyiv "get that land back" and musing that there will be "no peace with Russia." Moscow's military doctrine explicitly allows for limited nuclear use if the state's survival is at risk. Russian strategists such as Sergei Karaganov have spoken openly about the "moral duty" to consider tactical nuclear weapons in the face of Western pressure.

Even without intent, the logic of deterrence is a hair-trigger system. Misread a radar blip, miscalculate a conventional strike, and you could trigger the very mushroom clouds Trump warns would leave "no United Nations to be talking about."

Both biological weapons and nuclear arms are mass-casualty nightmares, but they differ in scale and tempo. A successful bioweapon release can be devastating, yet might unfold over weeks or months; a nuclear exchange kills cities in minutes. If the goal is to protect humanity from existential threats, then steering the world toward a potential nuclear confrontation while preaching about lab-engineered pathogens is cognitive dissonance at best, political theatre at worst.

It is like banning cigarettes in a house already soaked in gasoline while striking matches for fun.

Part of the answer lies in politics. Calling for a global ban on bioweapons costs little domestically: it aligns with public fear of pandemics and positions Trump as a defender of ordinary citizens against shadowy scientists. By contrast, posturing against Russia feeds a different constituency, the hawkish mood among key allies and segments of the U.S. political class that equate toughness with credibility.

Trump's speech inadvertently highlights a larger truth: human extinction risks are not neatly separable. We cannot meaningfully champion biological disarmament while tolerating or even encouraging nuclear brinkmanship. Both are products of the same technological hubris and the same political incentives to posture first and calculate later.

If the world ends in fire or in fever, the dead will not care whether the cause was a spliced genome or a MIRVed warhead. The challenge is not to pick which doomsday to prevent; it is to cultivate the kind of sober, cooperative politics that can reduce all of them. That requires more than a dramatic UN soundbite, it requires consistency, restraint, and a vision that sees beyond the next headline, something Trump, ever the showman, sorely lacks.

https://jonfleetwood.substack.com/p/trump-asks-world-to-end-bioweapons