In Social Implications of Technology I talk about how expensive technologies are tools for the rich and cheap technologies are tools for the poor. And as technologies fall in price from infinity to expensive then society regresses, then as they fall further in price to cheap then society progresses. I alluded to killing technologies but I never made a complete analysis of it.
Military technology seems to follow the same rules as all other technology. When it goes from infinite to expensive, it makes conflicts bigger (the tommy gun was two year's wages) and when it goes from expensive to cheap (the nuclear bomb) then war suddenly becomes too scary to engage in. We don't want poor people killing rich people after all, do we? Poor people killing each other only at the direction of rich people, now that's fine.
A nuclear sub with one or two dozen missiles each with a dozen warheads costs about a billion. If we assume it kills 100 million people then that's 10$ per life extinguished. An AK47 at 100-1000$ will kill how many? Hmm. But we don't have to guess. We can simply look up How Much A Nuclear Bomb Costs. So actually, nuclear weapons are pretty damn cost effective. They're cheaper than bullets assuming that you successfully kill one person per bullet!
Scary isn't it? How after you factor out emotion / childrearing mode, and pure raw techno-economics, there's pretty much absolutely nothing to human will. And you know, when you think about it, THIS MAKES SENSE! Because 99% of the human population are slaves, either submissive (90%) or passive (9%). They are such slaves that they seriously consider aggressive people to have high willpower! How fucking revolting and pathetic!
So yeah, in a world completely dominated by slaves, the ONLY thing that matters to human history is raw emotion (which coordinates the masses of slaves in language primitive enough to unite them) and the economics of the technology they have available to them. And that's it.
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