There's a difference. Building a nuke is actually really easy [1]. The hard part is getting and enriching uranium. For the bio stuff, you only need some lab equipment, where there's no reason why it wouldn't get really cheap and easy to procure.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science

But it still took the best physicists in the world with unlimited resources almost a decade to do so...

That article is a nice thought experiment, but they didn't actually build it.

Like many things, doing something for the first time with no proven blueprint is a lot harder than re-creating a process that you know works. And there's plenty of leaked/released information out there that a sufficiently interested party would very easily be able to obtain most of the steps/schematics necessary.

It's a little outdated at this point, but McPhee's 'The Curve of Binding Energy' is a fascinating read on this topic

> The hard part is getting and enriching uranium.

That is an important part though.

Which was exactly my point: you can't argue that "wide access to biotechnology will do no harm, after all, people haven't started building nukes in their back yard".

I think that's the point they were making.

building your own nuke (at least from scratch) requires orders of magnitude more industrial might than biohacking