"Balance of Terror"

Bigwig ponders why, if the federation was so smart, do the Klingons and Romulans have cloaking and they don't.

I posted the following:

I suppose its a reflection on 1950s-60s paranoia about the US/USSR space race. They got in space first. They got a man in space first. They had space ICBM while we only as atmospheric weapons.

Sometimes totalitarian, marshall societies can have technological developments above free ones, but those accomplishments are esoteric, fleeting, and only for show. It takes businessmen to take byzantine scientific knowledge and present it to society at large in paltable, useful forms.