And if youw ant to be scared by the directing 'brains' rather than mere weaponry, the scary disregard of the military industrial complex and its architects then read 'The Closed World, which is heavy going at times but very worrying to read as you come to realise tyat supposedly intelligent, clever peoplef the ruling class seem to lack a large helping of common sense and street smarts.
I'll have to check that out:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262550288/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20
Especially because it's from MIT Press who also did this outstanding book I own about the
tremendous amount of computing advances owed to military research:
From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262182017/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20
Check out also 'War and Peace in the Nuclear Age' its a bit out of date now as it stops at the Reagan era and SDI but its also illuminating to see how often the West was completely wrong footed and wrong headed ithroigh most of the cold war and how nuclear weapons races lead to destabilisation rather than deterrence.
Nuclear weapons
races were destabilizing, but human nature being what it is and always has been, were the entirely predictable result once the nuclear weapon was developed. Based upon historical data, we'd probably have had at least one more
world war by now if it hadn't been for MAD. The main destabilization within the nuclear race was and is from MIRVs which give a first strike advantage to anyone with them. Because of the inherent, insurmountable flaws of rocket-based ABM systems, countermeasures will always be vastly cheaper to implement than counter-countermeasures. Only
rapid fire directed energy weapons can act as an effective shield against large attacks and SDI gave the industry a taste of how very,
very difficult that was and
is. Every time I see bragging from the DoD about some new laser weapon test shown on YouTube, I point out the obvious flaws and easy countermeasures. We still aren't even
remotely close to a directed energy ABM shield, the
only thing that has even a chance of being effective against a large attack.
We, luckily, survived the early stages of nuclear weaponry and now I believe that the world is so economically intertwined that any nuclear exchange between major players is
far less likely than in the past. All of this Ukraine stuff is merely posturing and, BTW, the result of the US (aka "NATO") rapidly pushing NATO membership to the Russian border. There are certainly no angels on either side of this issue,
as usual, but how would we like it if the Warsaw Pact still existed and they grew to include Mexico... and Cuba. Cuban Missile Crisis?
BTW, I'm not saying I
like the nuclear arms race which, by the way, the US led for decades before the USSR caught up, but it was predictable and anyone who doesn't believe that
far too many of "those in charge" are brilliant at nothing more than rising up the career ladder via political means is a fool.