A famous philosophy professor from a major U.S. University gave a lecture in 1950 proclaiming philosophy was dead, because of the invention of nuclear weapons. He reasoned since no philosopher could come up with a philosophy that would end war forever the world was doomed, because it is inevitable these weapons will be used some day.
Mankind crossed a dangerous threshold at the end of World War II, when the U.S. military dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a moral and conscious world there would have been, from every corner of the globe, a hue and cry protesting the use, indeed the invention, of such hideous weapons.
Instead the world rejoiced the end of the long war, and the new prosperity ushered in by the first new level of technology, which nuclear weapons were only a part. Television, jet propulsion aircraft, and satellites made the entire planet accessible, opening whole new vistas of prosperity. Millions of people and markets were brought into the world economy.
In a moral and conscious world the prosperity from the new technology would have been used to alleviate the suffering in the world caused by poverty and oppression. Peace and harmony would have been brought to the world at last.
The prosperity was squandered on, what President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell speech, the military/industrial complex. The military and arms industry joined forces politically, and campaigned to convince the public and lawmakers a new threat to world peace existed in Communism and a major new military buildup was required using tax dollars. The military leaders wanted the prestige that they only get in war time, and industrial leaders wanted to gouge the U.S. budget.
They built a network of military bases around the world, armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads targeting major cities. This was purportedly to keep peace in the world, and was euphemistically called a nuclear umbrella.
All this was at a great expense and absorbed the new prosperity that could have been used to bring loving solutions. Today nuclear weapons have proliferated beyond anyone’s imagination or expectations, and have become the single biggest threat to the survival of our planet.
The Cold War was fought at a great cost to the American taxpayers. The Nuclear Arms Race drove the Soviet Union to economic collapse, forcing them to spend more on guns than on butter.
There was also a conventional arms race; the U.S. armed rebel groups in countries with communist China or Soviet Union backed governments, and China and Russia armed rebel groups in countries with U.S. backed governments.
When the Cold War was over it left warlords and dictators in control of large caches of armaments. The result was civil war, oppression, refugees, and starvation; in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the Balkans, in Cambodia in Southeast Asia, in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Somalia in Africa, in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Chile in Central and South America, and Afghanistan in Asia.