[rtpg]

Part of the reason so much stuff comes out of military research is simply that the military has such a huge budget it can spend it on R&D.

There are definitely useful dual use technologies. But there's also a lot of military research that is almost strictly for military. Nuclear weapons research goes beyond the stuff needed for power generation, for example. Money that could have went into research in more stable, safer power generation instead went into how to make nukes small enough to be used by infantry on the battlefield

The military helps a lot by being a huge customer for a lot of this tech, but we can also cut out the middle man and just spend on r&d directly in some cases!

By discussing the morality of weapons research in a world where we already have civilization-ending technology ,we can maybe reorient ourselves to spending directly on progress in more cases. Without needing to have a military application to justify it.

This happened in the past with the neutron bomb, perhaps it can happen again with tech that could be used to help solidify a police state