Not when you are in control of the manufacturing process yourself. I know several pcb assemblers here in China that could start mass producing ASICs tomorrow and you'd never hear a thing about it.
If such entities existed they would already be selling ASICs and raking in tons of cash, no?
The cash value of BTC would drop very fast if that happens, too fast to sell enough BTC an the existing, super bottlenecky exchanges. A government, mainly the Chinese or US government, could prepare and execute such an attack, but that would only serve to destroy BTC, not to make money.
However it remains a fact that scrypt coins are more resistant to this type of attack. In a year or two, Asics will be so common that a secret ASIC attack will no longer be realistic but for the time being, during the transition from GPU to Asic, the risk exists.
btw time it takes to drop a bunker buster tomahawk on Butterfly labs. A button push away. And alot of missle guidance systems still have Celeron processors in them. Imagine that Celeron destroying the asic. Its really not a currency war, its the battle of old and new hardware. I don't support Bitcoin. Only scrypt based coins. 
