If you are smart enough to work on projects like that you should be putting your efforts to the benefits of humanity, not helping regimes build weapons of mass destruction. We need to end this madness we call the "arms race". This threat is greater than global warming.
The arms race was the main driver of progress in the 20th century, with countless civilian applications, including the Internet. We could use a good old fashioned arms race nowadays. It creates demand for top notch science and engineering like nothing else.
And you could argue this benefits humanity, too, even besides the technology transfer. There hasn't been a world war since 1945, and the only real reason for that is that it would end really badly for everyone involved.
Did someone measure that claim? There was a lot of progress in 20th century. Calling arms race a main driver is a pretty wild claim but seems to be repeated all the time by geopolitics and army experts. That doesn't make it true though.
Development of internet was by no means a single source event. That is case for most of technology also and main driving force for progress of internet was definitely market incentive.
Imagine how much we could have progressed if we just focused on progress rather than acquiring power through intimidation in some artificial zero sum game.
Yeah, I'm trying to imagine that, but then I remember that we live in the real world here, with finite resources, and thousands of years of history, not in some utopia where everyone sings kumbaya and dances merrily around a campfire.
To what end, fistfucker3000? How do you convince people to spend unlimited amounts of money other than by convincing them that their very survival depends on it? And the threat needs to be acute, too: this is what they're trying to do with climate change now, but nobody really gives a shit about something that may or may not happen 50 years from now.
In Russia, after seeing the nuclear weapon the Party realized that the Marxism-Leninism alone is not going to produce such a weapon and had allowed and forced real sciences to be taught in schools. Likewise, the "Sputnik moment" in the US resulted in massive education improvements, e.g. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/10/how-sputnik-c...
It’s too bad that such brilliant innovators as Turing and Von Neumann wasted their careers trying to compete in an arms race against Nazi Germany when they could have been designing better ways to deliver targeted advertising or something useful like that, isn’t it?