It's pretty clear that without those brilliant minds that invented nukes we'd be at WW4 or 5 by now.
Then again it might have been less obvious if the USA didn’t push its military alliance towards the east contrary to the opinions of its own diplomats for the past thirty years at the expense of its stated goal of furthering peace and been consistently working on disturbing the balance with projects like the BMD.
So actually it’s not pretty clear at all.
For a start, it was an excuse for WWII ("we don't want to invade Czechoslovakia but we've been pushed to it by the iniquity of Versailles"). And then the nuclear arms race on both sides ("we're only building missiles because you are"). And Afghanistan/Iraq ("you left us no choice/this is for your own benefit").
When you're getting into a war it's usually a good idea for a leader to blame the other guy for the cost and damage.
It doesn't make it right, it's just that along with "nuh uh not touching you", "they started it" and "stop hitting yourself", it's a common pattern to see.
- NATO countries have nukes, therefore they don't get invaded
- Russia has nukes, therefore they don't get invaded
- Ukraine does not have nukes, therefore despite the non-proliferation and Russian friendship treaties which guarantee not being invaded, they got invaded anyway because they have no deterrent and nobody gives a fuck
It's really as simple as that.
In the same way, I believe that Russia should bear the long term consequences of the war but that the constant delivery of advanced weapons without pushing Ukraine and Russia to negotiate ending the conflict is mostly a cynical geopolitical play allowing the USA to weaken one of his opponent at the expense of foreign lives.
The world is not black and white and standing on the side which seems morally right doesn’t mean you are not exposed yourself to propaganda.
You don't have to be a Russian to understand that. You just have to be willing to look for yourself and see America's war victims, the endless streams of refugees it has created around the world, the piles of human waste that were created for the sake of America's warmonger industries.
This is a deep and important misunderstanding of weapons.
According to this argument, the uncountable trillions spent of the US nuclear arsenal was wasted, since it was never used.
In reality the main use for most weapons is deterrent!! If you have enough weapons standing around, you can avoid war, and the weapons have produced life!
All those brilliant people making deadlier weapons are saving lives by making non-violent conflict cheaper and better than violent conflict.
I'm not disputing that things come out of war, it's just not an especially great ROI.
The medical advances of military spending alone are breathtaking.
There is still a gigantic opportunity cost of bringing together resources to produce an explosion rather then something more useful.
The old 'its going back into the economy' is some sneaky Keynsian language that only applies in certain macro economic situation and even that was mostly wrong and a misunderstanding of economic theory in the late 30s.
You can fund medical research without spending a million dollars sending a man to a desert, having his legs blown off, and flying him home. Hell, the US especially could actually use that research on civilians without bankrupting them!
And what about rebuilding bombed out cities? Is there so little else to improve?
It’s also a sociological trick. Societies support massive military R&D in ways that are impossible for public projects. We could wish upon a star that humans weren’t as we are. Or we can work with reality.
Military innovation is also historically a jobs program.
Check out how many states & companies are part of R&D/Manufacturing for the F-35.
ARPANET was military in origin, but "the Internet" happened at CERN, a civilian project.
The ROI on CERN then, is astronomical, as it only cost a few billion. Less than a month of a war in a desert that achieved...what?
And if ARPANET hadn't happened (because the US wasn't worried about having a chunk of comms destroyed in a nuclear war), the NPL in the UK was also working on packet switching networking in the 60s, and that was a civilian-industrial thing. So something roughly Internet-shaped would probably have happened anyway.
While on the subject of the NPL, they also developed the first atomic clock. So then GPS also has a non-military underpinning.
The web happened at CERN, not the internet.
Ukraine wishes they had our defenses. As do many states.
Our military expenditures keep not only ourselves safe, but also our allies and trade partners.
The default for all evolved life on this planet is to harness the energy of other systems. Humans are no different. Pretending the world was ever or will ever be at peace is a self-delusion.
Strength keeps aggressors at bay. Nature naturally evolves along these lines.
So to answer your question, Google makes making spookie systems cool and profitable. Without them, the spookie systems would need to be built and deployed by 3 letter 'alphabet' type agencies and your local area geek may not be able to handle that much cognitive dissonance.
Bonus points if his manager is someone like Boris Johnson.
Put the assholes together and let them fight it out uselessly. They probably won't be able to agree whose name goes at the top of the table, let alone figure out to rocketry.
Pardon me if burning a good propertion of the brainpower of the species on killing each other seems wasteful.
Obviously you can't actually do that because that's basically a prisoners' dilemma with bombs.
It is also probably the case that our brainpower didn't invent warfare, and that this phenomenon isn't unique to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
But could you imagine if we could spend all those trillions on something good (enabled by the other guys doing the same). I know, impossible. But still, imagine.
Wolves would eat every deer if they could. They don't not because they think it's a bad idea, but because either they can't because the deer are good at not being eaten, or when they get too close to that goal, they run out of deer and starve into a smaller population that lets the deer recover.
Any creature that "wins" the "arms race" against its prey either finds new prey or goes extinct. And species that loses the arms race better hope their predators have no other prey and starve to extinction before they all get eaten, or go extinct themselves.
The only reason there's a predator-prey balance at all is a kind of survivor bias: anything not in balance is already filtered out.
Not all balanced relationships are predator-prey. Viruses aren't really predators as such, but they still evolve to a balance against immune systems. If they get too good, they burn out their host populations and go extinct (SARS, say, though there have surely been countless natural examples over history). If they don't adapt in time to better immune systems, again, curtains. You could say smallpox as an example, though the last step in the arms race was an Outside Context Problem[1] from the virus's perspective.
Similarly, any overly-large step in weaponry can be just as deadly as not enough: working Star Wars missile defense could easily have resulted in the end of the world, as would not keeping up with the Soviets. That shaky balance is partly deliberate, and, if you're into the anthropic principle, partly also survivorship bias.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Pr...
I cannot imagine because you haven’t said anything different than history and the current state of the world. Trillions are being spent on what a people think is good for them. But you don’t think it’s good what the trillions are being spent on. And so it goes.
Though, before we do it, let's take a moment to consider most people do not look good at all in leather trenchcoats.
It would be fabulous if we could be more like chimps than we have been recently, but of course we have the potential to be much better than chimps. Actually most humans are much better than chimps. It is we Americans (and Russians, and Ethiopians, and whoever else is currently fighting wars voluntarily) who should be better.
If only we could just agree to staff military research on all sides with the biggest wasters and toxic personalities and let the rest of the world get on with something that doesn't leave other humans splattered across some battlefield.