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Nuclear advancements slowed down due to PR problems from clear and sometimes catastrophic failure of commercial power plants (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) and the vastly higher costs associated with building safer plants.

If anything the weapons kept the industry trucking on - if you want to develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal then a commercial nuclear power industry is very helpful.

Nuclear energy hasn't been slowed down much, let alone stopped. China has been building new reactors every year for more than a decade and there are >30 ones under construction.

The same will go with AI, btw. Westerners' pearl clenching about AI guardrails won't stop China from doing anything.

They copied LLMs from the west. the more the west does the more they have.

> Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons.

you mean like the tens of billions poured into fusion research?

It's a path we should have never started going down.