They've been saying it since 1949. Now China is the world's second (first on some measures) largest economy, and they sent a rover to Mars and are building a space station.

I had occasion to read some New York Times newspapers from 1917 and 1918, and they were filled with stories about how Mr. Lenine's (sic) government was about to fall if not already in flight. Off the mark by 70 years or so, and Russia is still run by former CP nomenklatura.

Not used to hacker news commenters being quite so mask-off, but I suppose it was only a matter of time

Not to be too tinfoil-hatty, but why wouldn't we at least consider the possibility of this kind of "warfare"? We accept the possibility of physical, nuclear, cyber, cultural, chemical and "deadly" bio warfare. But not soft, malicious and below the radar bio warfare that this could be? Is it because they "released" it in their own country supposedly?

Anywho, I've long since realized that it's all too-easy to do both sabotage, terrorism and other evil things very easily without being caught. The fact that it doesn't happen fairly regularly on a grand scale that brings society to a halt though makes we wonder if there are an appreciable amount of such evil people that are willing or incentivized to do those evil acts. A sort of "Drake equation" look at it, I guess.

At some point in the future it might become possible to design viruses that target human genotypes with great selectivity, and at that point this will become a risk. But we are a long, long way from that future, and even then most people's circle of concern includes significant genetic variation, so very few people could release a virus designed to kill, say, all Slavic people, without killing at least a few of their own close friends and family members.

Historically, biological warfare research has focused on pathogens like anthrax that have very low human-to-human transmission risk, for two reasons. One is that, if your germ-warfare bomb starts an epidemic, it barely matters which sides of the battle lines it falls on; if it thins your own ranks less than those of the enemy, it's only because your troops (and their families dying back home) are in better condition or have better sanitary measures in place. The other is that, if you can't stop the deaths when the enemy surrenders, the germ-warfare bomb doesn't give the enemy any incentive to surrender.

Evil things do happen fairly regularly on a grand scale. But doing things on a grand scale has historically required a centralized government to organize them. That's still true for a little while longer.