THE SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL

With his unruly hair and wild beard, he doesn't look like someone you'd expect to see in charge of any country's nuclear policy.

"And yet, here we are," he says, as we tour through his department's newest nuclear warhead storage facility. He freely admits that the nation's new policy of exponential nuclear proliferation is troubling.

But, he insists, we really have no choice in the matter.

I'll give it to you straight. Right now, we're the only country with reps. But that ain't gonna last. Even if our border security measures hold, and no rep ever escapes this country, our monopoly on replicators can't last forever.

Basically, we're looking at this situation the same way we were looking at the nuclear arsenal problem in the 20th century. It took a while, but other countries—including shithole backwaters like North Korea—were eventually able to build nukes. So we should expect that they'll eventually figure out the underlying mechanics of replicators.

And once they do, they're going to build not just reps, but industrial reps. Pretty quickly after that, everybody is gonna have way, way more nukes in their arsenal than would've otherwise been conceivable.

We ought to know. The U.S. military is using industrial reps to print out nukes by the hundreds, right this moment. It took us decades to really scale up our nuclear arsenal, but any country with an industrial replicator can print out 10,000 nukes within a week.

And by the way, it's not just the countries that already have nukes that you have to worry about. There's still not too many of those. Just Canada, Russia, England, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, and us. But if any one of those countries doesn't secure their arsenal, somebody could scan a nuke and save the file to a thumb drive, for use on any old industrial rep.

The story of the 20th century was about nuclear containment. The story of the 21st will be about replicator containment. We failed at nuclear containment, and eventually we'll fail with the reps, too. But we're gonna hold on as long as we fucking can.