Jae Knowlton

Nuclear weapons entail specialized knowledge, are hard to assemble, and require access to uranium or plutonium. Chemical weapons are comparably easy to make; I’ll bet you’ve got at least some of the ingredients to build something harmful with the cleaning products underneath your kitchen sink. But the effectiveness of those weapons is also limited by their tendency to disperse; wind can mitigate the effects of a chemical weapon, or even blow it back toward the side that used it. But biological weapons . . . because viruses and bacteria are living things and multiply, they can spread.

Canada consistently is one of our top two trading partners. Total U.S.-Canada trade was $872.3 billion in 2025; the total U.S. economy size that year was $30 trillion. It is difficult to argue that getting American goods onto Canadian shelves to reach Canadian consumers is a major obstacle to U.S. economic growth. It’s not nearly as big a problem as, say, high gas prices, or the likelihood of the most expensive national average for gasoline in the month of August ever.