We Keep Building Better Ways to Kill. What If We Built Better Ways to Heal?

By Terry Loerch

There is something deeply wrong with a world where our technology is advancing faster than our humanity. On February 28, 2026, young girls were practicing volleyball inside a sports hall in Lamerd, Iran, when explosions tore through the area. Independent investigations later examined evidence suggesting that a new American Precision Strike Missile, known as the PrSM, may have been responsible for the destruction. U.S. Central Command has denied that American forces struck Lamerd, while weapons experts and investigations reviewed by the Associated Press have said the physical evidence is consistent with the new U.S. missile.

The disagreement over responsibility matters because facts and accountability matter, but there is a larger question that goes beyond which country launched which weapon. Why are we still investing so much intelligence, money, science and engineering into finding increasingly advanced ways to destroy the human body?

The PrSM represents extraordinary engineering. According to reporting reviewed by the Associated Press and research from Airwars, the weapon can detonate above an area and disperse enormous numbers of dense metal pellets at extremely high speeds. Investigators studying Lamerd documented damage extending far beyond the immediate point of detonation. It is an impressive piece of technology if the only measurement is whether human beings have become better at destroying a target.

That should disturb us.

Human beings spent years studying physics, metallurgy, propulsion, computers, guidance systems and engineering so that a machine could travel enormous distances and release lethal material with incredible efficiency. The scientists and engineers capable of building technology like this clearly possess remarkable intelligence. That is exactly why we should be asking why the same urgency, funding and political will are not being directed toward repairing spinal cords, reversing Alzheimer's disease, treating childhood cancer, developing artificial organs, restoring eyesight, creating advanced prosthetics and finding cures for diseases that continue to destroy millions of families.

Imagine what humanity could accomplish if the greatest technological race on Earth was not about which country could destroy a target from farther away, but which country could save a life everyone once believed was impossible to save. Imagine America competing with China to reverse paralysis, Europe racing Japan to develop replacement organs, Israel and Iran competing to eliminate childhood cancer, and universities around the world fighting for bragging rights over who restored the most people to health. That would be a competition worth celebrating.

Instead, global military spending reached approximately $2.887 trillion in 2025, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It was the eleventh consecutive year that worldwide military spending increased, and global military expenditures rose dramatically over the previous decade. Governments clearly have the ability to find extraordinary amounts of money when they decide something is a national priority.

Military budgets and medical research budgets are not directly interchangeable, and every country has legitimate responsibilities to protect its population. At the same time, the scale of military spending should force us to question what humanity chooses to value. We have proven that trillions of dollars can be found for defense, weapons systems and warfare. The question is whether we have the same determination when the mission is keeping human beings alive.

The girls playing volleyball in Lamerd did not design missiles or choose military targets. Children in Ukraine did not decide to invade another country. Children in Israel did not create decades of conflict. Children in Gaza did not write foreign policy. Children growing up in Russia, Iran, Sudan, Yemen or anywhere else are not sitting inside government war rooms making decisions about which buildings will be attacked.

Yet ordinary families repeatedly pay the price for decisions made by a very small number of powerful people. Political leaders, military officials and governments make decisions that can affect millions of people who had no role in making them. A mother identifying the body of her child does not care about geopolitical theories. A father standing beside the remains of his home does not care about military terminology. A child who loses a parent does not understand strategic objectives. They understand that someone they loved was alive yesterday and is gone today.

We have separated ourselves into nations, political systems, religions, alliances, borders and ideologies so completely that we sometimes forget the most basic truth about ourselves. Before we are Americans, Iranians, Russians, Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Chinese or anything else, we are human beings living on the same planet. We breathe the same air, love our children, fear losing the people closest to us and experience the same grief when someone is taken away.

Some of the greatest achievements in human history came from exactly the same abilities that make advanced weapons possible. Engineering put human beings on the Moon. Medicine developed vaccines that eliminated or dramatically reduced diseases that once killed millions. Scientists can now edit genes, doctors can perform procedures through tiny incisions, engineers are developing robotic limbs controlled by neural signals, and researchers are exploring technologies that may eventually restore movement after paralysis.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating drug discovery, medical imaging and scientific research. Human beings are capable of astonishing achievements when intelligence and resources are focused on solving a problem. That is why we should be questioning the direction of our innovation instead of simply celebrating every technological advance because it is new.

Progress should not simply mean that a missile travels farther or carries a more advanced warhead. Progress should mean fewer missiles are needed in the first place. It should mean fewer children die in wars they had nothing to do with, more diseases are cured, more people survive injuries that were once fatal, and more children who once would have died from cancer live long enough to grow old.

This issue is also much bigger than the United States. America builds weapons, but so do Russia, China, Iran, Israel, European nations, North Korea, India, Pakistan and many other countries. Every government has its justification, whether it is security, deterrence, defense, national survival or strategic advantage. Rival governments often use the same reasoning, creating a cycle where one country develops a more powerful weapon because another country possesses something dangerous, which then encourages that country to build something even more powerful.

Eventually everyone possesses more weapons and nobody necessarily feels safer.

That is why the world needs a different kind of technological competition. Let countries compete to cure Alzheimer's disease. Let governments compete to reverse paralysis, create artificial organs, eliminate childhood cancers and develop affordable clean energy. Let national pride come from how many lives a country's technology saves rather than how many targets its weapons can destroy.

None of this requires pretending that conflict will disappear tomorrow. Nations face real security threats and there will always be difficult debates about defense, deterrence and national security. But accepting those realities does not mean humanity has to accept permanent warfare as the natural condition of civilization.

We can demand stronger protection for civilians, greater transparency when weapons cause civilian casualties, more serious international arms-control agreements and dramatically larger investments in diplomacy, science and medicine. We can also begin questioning why the production of another weapon receives urgency and funding that medical researchers often spend years begging to receive.

Look at Earth from space and none of the things we kill one another over are visible. There are no borders painted across continents, no political parties floating above countries and no military alliances visible from orbit. There is one small planet carrying billions of human beings who are far more alike than our politics sometimes allows us to admit.

Every parent understands fear for a child. Every culture understands grief. Every child understands love and safety long before they understand politics, religion or nationality. When a little girl walks into volleyball practice, she should be thinking about her serve, her teammates, her homework, her friends and what she wants to become when she grows up. She should never become part of a weapons analysis or another statistic in an international conflict.

Whether the weapon comes from Washington, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, Jerusalem or somewhere else should not change our ability to recognize the tragedy. Human suffering does not become acceptable because we agree with the government launching the weapon, and it does not become more tragic simply because we oppose that government.

Humanity is intelligent enough to split the atom, reach another world, decode DNA and create machines capable of assisting with incredibly complex problems. Surely we are intelligent enough to begin building a future where our greatest inventions are designed to keep people alive instead of finding increasingly efficient ways to kill them.

The next generation of technology should be judged by more than its range, speed, accuracy or destructive power. We should also judge ourselves by how much effort we put into healing the people already here. If governments can mobilize billions for another missile system, humanity should be capable of showing that same determination when the mission is restoring a damaged spinal cord, saving a child from cancer or preventing another family from burying someone they love.

Someday, if humanity truly grows into the intelligence it already possesses, the weapons we build today may sit in museums as reminders of an era when we finally realized we could do something better with our knowledge. The greatest achievement of the future should not be building a weapon nobody can survive. It should be building a world where fewer people ever need to fear one.