Duplicating everything

I read this in Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants:

The only worldwide relinquishment that seems to be working is the reduction of the nuclear weapon stockpile, which peaked at 65,000 units in 1986 and is now at 20,000. At the same time, the number of countries capable of making a nuclear weapon is increasing.

And I thought, how much of humanity is spent just duplicating things. How to make a nuclear bomb is not something that is readily available. The same work that the US did, the Russians did as well, as did the Indians.

So much of our time and effort is spent fighting, making the same things again. In an alternate earth, we could have had three different countries work on different things entirely, which could have let us make things more quickly. Or perform more complex discoveries.

Alas, we are stuck in this cycle of never ending duplications. See Deepsek, OpenAI, Google, Amazon all building the same LLMs hoping to find their moat. There is no moat!