Well "governments" already have nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, drones and what have you. It's not some new concept. You can take it as given that regimes you will never want to live under will be putting their best people in using AI for military purposes.

It's dangerous to imagine one is sitting on some moral high ground by refusing to work for the military. We all owe our freedom to previous generations of scientists and engineers who worked for the military, sometimes inspite of strong ethical concerns.

If we already have nukes, why would we need anything else?

Nukes prevent any war from happening between any powerful nation.

The only use for the other types of weapons is to participate in some other civil war in another country that we shouldn't be in.

So no, I don't care if we "fall behind" because we still have nukes and those are enough to protect us in the conflicts that matter.

Nukes are an instrument of last resort, but you don't want to get to the point where that is your only option. And it is possible that technical advances in missile defence may blunt this advantage.

Being able to prevent friendly (and even neutral) countries from being bullied or going over to the dark side is also important because ultimately the best defence against rising autocratic forces is to ensure a broad alliance of friendly, democratic countries who are secure against interference by unfriendly regimes.

If a country like the USA can have its elections manipulated, how vulnerable might smaller democracies be?

> If a country like the USA can have its elections manipulated, how vulnerable might smaller democracies be?

The CIA could most certainly help you answer that quite quantitatively.

> If a country like the USA can have its elections manipulated, how vulnerable might smaller democracies be?

This has to be a joke, right? The USA has been responsible for undermining democracy all over the world more than any other country.

This is a just a partial list that we are aware of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

It is also implicated (though not directly proved), that USA was responsible for Arab spring.

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-USA-behind-the-Arab-Spring-upr...

> Nukes prevent any war from happening between any powerful nation.

So, in the universe you are writing from, the Kargil War would have been an impossibility?

India and Pakistan aren't really powerful nations in the nuclear sense that the US and Russia are. I assume the person you are replying means powerful nation as "nation with a lot of nukes", which is pretty much only the US and Russia.

US Nukes: 7300

Russia Nukes: 8000

India Nukes: 90-100

Pakistan nukes: 100-120

Everyone except the US and Russia nukes: ~1100

(source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/nine-nations-have-n...)

Even if you restrict it to the US and USSR (and later Russia) there have been direct armed conflict, including both being on opposing sides in war (notably, but not exclusively, both Korea and Vietnam during the Soviet period, but also extending into the current war in Syria), though there have been political cover done to limit risk of escalation (e.g., Soviet Air Force flying NK-badged fighters and, initially, prohibiting use of Russian over the radio in Korea; Russian forces on the ground fighting, sometimes directly against US forces, being the “Wagner PMC”—a GRU-backed notionally-private group.) op

The US and USSR/Russia did fight a good number of proxy wars throughout the cold war and beyond but those are distinctly different than the kind of all out war I think the original poster was referring to.

There's a reason they were all proxy wars and they never escalated into direct conflict on the scale of WWII (or beyond), and that reason is nuclear deterrence.

> The US and USSR/Russia did fight a good number of proxy wars throughout the cold war and beyond but those are distinctly different than the kind of all out war I think the original poster was referring to. But they did fight them, including direct conflict with eachother. Which answers the upthread comment “If you have nuclear, why do you need anything else?” which was supported with the claim “Nukes prevent any war from happening between any powerful nation.”

Nukes don't prevent “any war” from happening between powerful nations, though they do seem to have some utility in restricting the escalation of such conflicts.

(Now, you could argue that unilateral conventional disarmament would leave no choice but to escalate to nuclear war, which would improve deterrence and prevent even small scale conventional, politically-covered attacks, but that argument would be highly speculative.)

> India and Pakistan aren't really powerful nations in the nuclear sense that the US and Russia are.

100 nukes is powerful enough.

Considering that democracy means people choosing their government, the power would need to be in the hands of the people, not the government, to protect democracy. What will the population do if the government goes rogue and imposes autocracy?

Some might say this is the purpose of the second amendment.

> Considering that democracy means people choosing their government

Well no, that's just one aspect of democracy that can't even remotely serve as a sufficient condition for democracy.

If we refuse to develop the technology, our enemies will anyway. Imagine a world where Nazi Germany developed nuclear weapons.

Ah yes, the "I have to do evil things because if I didn't, someone else would" argument...

Just think about what you wrote: "our enemies". Why do you (whichever country you are from) have enemies in the first place? What did your country do to make others hate it? A lot of people seem to focus on how to defend against "those who hate us" without spending a passing thought on the why of it.

Solving "why" also solves the "how", but those who profit from conflict have no interest in the former, as their livelihood depends on the latter.

War is not primarily about hatred. It's about irreconcilable differences, where the calculated risk and cost of war is preferred to losing some perceived national interest. Your sweet sentiment that we should all just act nicely and get along does not survive serious contemplation of the incentive structures that drive nations (or individuals, for that matter), or the thousands of years of human history marked by pervasive warfare.

Philosophically, it is strange to make agreeableness the standard for the behavior of nations. Being good is much more than being nice, and any thoughtful conception of moral goodness will sometimes require actions that upset others.

And finally, you seem to be assuming that my country is the only possible bad actor. But of course, that’s not true. My country could do everything “right”, only for someone else to start a war.

>Why do you (whichever country you are from) have enemies in the first place? What did your country do to make others hate it? A lot of people seem to focus on how to defend against "those who hate us" without spending a passing thought on the why of it.

Are you really arguing that it's Poland's fault for having a country in the same place that Hitler wanted lebensraum?

> What did your country do to make others hate it?

You have a very simplistic view of geopolitics.

What did Poland do to Germany in 1939 to make Germany hate it? What did the Jews do to the Nazis to make them hate them so much?

Wars get started for all kinds of reasons, some predictable, others not. It's a simple matter of survival to equip yourself as best you can to defend yourself.

> It's a simple matter of survival to equip yourself as best you can to defend yourself.

And when was the last time the US actually defended its own territory instead of invading somone elses?

How is that a strawman? You said "it's a matter of survival" to "defend yourself" and I'm saying that's not really a valid argument for the country in the article.

> Hegemonic stability theory (HST) is a theory of international relations, rooted in research from the fields of political science, economics, and history. HST indicates that the international system is more likely to remain stable when a single nation-state is the dominant world power, or hegemon.

Not that I explicitly agree, but there is some theory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory

I like your idealism. But there's often not a why. And if there is, it's not necessarily 'what they did' but rather 'what they have', like water or land or whatever.