"I am more impressed with another of his oracles: the 1945 essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” in which Orwell more or less anticipates the geopolitical shape of the world for the next half-century. “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make,” he explains, “will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance ... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”
Prophetic is the word for Orwell. Think about the power of the simple AK-47 and how it fueled a half century of chaos in the 3rd world and compare it to the discipline enforced by the possibility of nuclear annihilation in the developed world.