[mettamage]

Armchair general here, I've never been in any war. The biggest highlight of my general career was tower defence rushing unsuspecting human players in Warcraft 3 with orcs.

With that said: I think that whenever a human or organization has a stable situation with their current affairs, they can afford to take more risk. Attacking weapons don't necessarily make a situation stable, they simply give an edge when you have them. However, when you're the only one that has them and are stable enough, then you might be able to annihilate entire civilizations (e.g. the Aztecs versus a few hundred Spanish people). But when more people have them, then they can point them at you, making your own situation more unstable if you provoke those people.

[vagrantJin]

But this assumes the enemy is not knowledgable/simple, which is no longer the case.