It may be worth the risk but that doesn't change the fact that what you refer to as "Chicken Littles" represent power players in an intractable political dynamic. The only way this kind of cooperation happens is when humans move past current notions of nation states and begin to think strategically as a species.
Not if an independent organization (think a Corp, not a gov) is the party responsable. They would have no incentive to do such a thing, in fact they would have a negative incentive.
Too bad nuclear tech is basically too regulated for any non governmental organization to experiment inexpensively, not to mention the other nontechnical issues.
MongoDB is In-Q-Tel backed - so by that sensationalized metric - anyone who runs a MEAN stack is thus "CIA Backed" as well. Hilarious to see the kneejerky lack of intellectual rigor around HN these days.
Almost as hilarious as your strawman argument. Palantir was started with the explicit mission of aiding the surveillance-industrial complex. Mongo Inc was started with explicit mission of selling cloud databases(PaaS) to the general public.
“Basically,” Thiel explains, “I thought that some of the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud”—which at one point posed an existential threat to PayPal—“could be extended into other contexts, like fighting terrorism.”