Weatherlawyer wrote:

[building nukes]

(It was such a vast amount that the economy, already devastated by WW
2, took much longer to recover than the rest of western Europe where
the Nazis had stripped it of all they could loot and eradicated vast
sections of the population either in death camps and forced labour, or
to other casualties of war.)

You mean, like France ? France has a huge number of nuclear power
stations. Somehow they managed to build those, AND things like the TGV,
AND do post-war reconstruction too. What am I missing ?