What are you advocating? Arming governments with autonomous killer drones in order to "protect democracy"? Because the world is a "dangerous place"? I don't even...
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.
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.
So, in the universe you are writing from, the Kargil War would have been an impossibility?
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...)
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.
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.)
100 nukes is powerful enough.
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?
The CIA could most certainly help you answer that quite quantitatively.
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...
Some might say this is the purpose of the second amendment.
Well no, that's just one aspect of democracy that can't even remotely serve as a sufficient condition for democracy.
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.
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?
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.
And when was the last time the US actually defended its own territory instead of invading somone elses?