I agree with your sentiment, but it's plain ignorance to believe that those "war simulations" or any other software developed by the military is always intended to raise the kill count and not prevent casualties. To make my point, I would bet the invention of C made the military more effective in some fashion or other, but that's only a consequence of solving the more basic problems C was intended to address. I think it's hard to argue that the problems IBM was solving, or those that the military solves, are really any different in that respect. They solve one problem and then the solution can and will be adapted for other purposes, and it's often hard to judge whether that's a net good or not.

The mathematicians, physicists, and engineers of that era helped to preserve the survival of our civilization so you could have the luxury of being an idealistic pacifist.

I think the early, mid 90's were a lot more interesting time to be a programmer than now, just before the Internet explosion. Back then, a bigger percentage of the focus was on using computers to do something, solve a problem directly (as opposed to implicitly) and the computers were actually getting powerful enough to do things on a cheap basis.

People's cat pictures were a vanishingly small portion of the landscape.

As an example, cheap computing power is one of the reasons that while at the beginning of the 90's, nuclear power was considered a money losing proposition by electric utilities and everyone was trying to get out from under them but by the end of the decade, all the utilities were hanging on to their nukes for dear life and trying to figure out how to extend their licenses/service life.

Now, a much bigger percentage of the focus is simply getting information out of one spot, tranporting it to another, dolling it up w/some marketing glitz.

That's not to say that the cool stuff isn't still going on, but that it is a smaller percentage and the profession has been dumbed down significantly (hence brogrammers and all).

Where do you think most of the research funding an AI and ML came from?

At my first job we did some work in expert systems and Ai(applying it to engineering problems) and one guy moved from those projects because of his concerns sbout the source of the funding.