From here [1]
> Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[1] and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol,[2] is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war.
There's a whole list of similar incidents (and I'm pretty sure not all of them have been officially reported). Personally I care more about the feelings of communities that don't bring us one button-push away from annihilating us as a species.
Program cost: 37.30 billion
Unit cost: 12.998 billion
Something like that?
Or 12 new Columbia-class Sub's?
109.8 billion
You see those 'lots' of resources should be cut somewhere else.
I am in the same boat as you, more precisely I was, especially after reading guys like Jacques Ellul who had written against this particular project since back in the '80s.
But then I started thinking that keeping that many smart and motivated people busy working on stuff that will not be as societally disruptive as the work of many past great scientists is not the worst thing in the world, so I personally see those billions of euros as an acceptable opportunity cost that gives us the chance not to be the direct contemporaries of a nuclear weapons race like back in the '60s or the early '80s (because back then the "best" way to keep those scientists busy was to ask them to build bigger nuclear bombs and bigger rockets).
Incidentally I see the anti-competitive stance of the FAANG companies when it comes to their employees in the same vein. Better for a very smart engineer to spend his/her life doing menial work inside one of those companies than for him/her to build the next AI startup which in the wrong hands will not be good for society as a whole. And that type of technology always ends up in the "wrong" hands.