Nuclear war turns the alternative---it prevents any possibility of re-tasking expenditure.
Allan Stoekl 7, professor emeritus of French and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University, “Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability,” University of Minnesota Press, Chapter 5, p. 117
As we have seen, Bataille touched on the same theme, but his emphasis was a bit different. He foresaw not Orwell’s mournful future in which great wealth, the product of ever more sophisticated technology, was wasted in endless war and repression, but rather a glorious future in which industrial societies would give each other gifts, not least the gift of extravagant consumption. The only problem, as Bataille saw it, was that the other future, not that of drab police state repression but of nuclear annihilation, was also a possibility. Either glorious excess, then, or nothing. A more exhilarating future, but also a more terrifying one, than that foreseen by Orwell.