I appreciate your points, and objectively you are right. I think the place where we are diverging are in how we slice the history/pie. At this point, at least for me, our discussion is becoming extremely interesting and I'm thinking/learning more in the process.

Would you mind humoring me?

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For me, this is the fruit of a tree and a part of a long chain of causality. We start with von Neumann fiddling with machines at Los Alamos and wind up at the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative from the 90s https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44974/ and then fast forward to the excascale program in the early-to-mid 2010s.

I am not a professional, but this is an area of interest for me. And I've been tracking it for some time, and in the earlier communications, the ORNL etc seemed to be fairly clear on who was cutting the checks, from 2013,

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have awarded $25.4 million in research and development contracts to five leading companies in high-performance computing (HPC) to accelerate the development of next-generation supercomputers.

Under DOE’s new DesignForward initiative, AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel Federal and NVIDIA will work to advance extreme-scale, on the path to exascale, computing technology that is vital to national security, scientific research, energy security and the nation's economic competitiveness.

“Exascale computing is key to NNSA’s capability of ensuring the safety and security of our nuclear stockpile without returning to underground testing,” said Robert Meisner, director of the NNSA Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing program. “The resulting simulation capabilities will also serve as valuable tools to address nonproliferation and counterterrorism issues, as well as informing other national security decisions.”

From: https://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/nersc-news/nersc-cen...

The program was funded fully in 2016 after many years of partial funding, ORNL's report,

The mission of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is the accelerated delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem to provide breakthrough solutions addressing our most critical challenges in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security.

As a multi-lab effort, sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration, the ECP is chartered with the following tasks:

Developing exascale-ready applications and solutions that address currently intractable problems of strategic importance and national interest.
Creating and deploying an expanded and vertically integrated software stack on DOE HPC pre-exascale and exascale systems.
Delivering US HPC vendor technology advances and deploying ECP products to DOE HPC pre-exascale and exascale systems.
Delivering exascale simulation and data science innovations and solutions to national problems that enhance US economic competitiveness, change our quality of life, and strengthen our national security.

From: https://www.ornl.gov/content/about-ecp

I think the other applications are far more important than the weapons research, fwiw. Just as ARPA-net and the internet it spawned ended up being far more valuable than their initial strategic use case. Even if the important stuff is a side project, just like fusion as an eventual source of energy seems to be for NIF, it's great that it's happening at all.

Hope this makes sense!

Thanks!