Comments by "Snack Plissken" (@snackplissken8192) on "The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About" video.

This is the price you pay for trying to develop weapons powerful enough to allow you to draw down troop levels and save money on war matériel. The US gambled on nukes as a way to avoid committing unpopular levels of funding and manpower to fighting the Soviets after WWII. The fact that Russia just kidnapped more German scientists than we did and paid traitors for weapons technology ensured that the benefits were short-lived. The Cold War only ended when America used a combination of military spending and outright bluffs about space based weapons to tip the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. Evolutionarily, weapons are a hard-to-spoof show of the relative health and strength of an organism. In nature, an organism with a smaller weapon will yield to a similar organism with a larger weapon rather than risk death fighting. Modern weaponry has proven to be a poor proxy of strength, since the countries that display weapons now are mostly free riders from countries that paid for the research and development and many modern armies are like bucks with hollow horns that will shatter on impact. This is bad because it is an honest measurement of relative strength that keeps fights between unequal opponents from happening. WWII happened because the Axis Powers underestimated the industrial power of the Allies, and a similar argument could be made of the Cold War. They thought they legitimately had much bigger horns and picked what they thought would be an easy fight that ended up costing everybody dearly.
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