These are controversial statements to make about the Cold War, and even more controversial to make about the War on Terror which a lot of people still remember firsthand a good deal less rosily than you seem to.

What I keep seeing is that it seems overwhelmingly based on firsthand experience with open, transparent organizations, even though most of the relevant decisions are made by closed, nontransparent orgs like tech companies and military-minded, nationalistic governments.

It's quite natural that you can't see the nontransparent engagements of the people with whom you are talking. Eliezer did speak about his experiences with being invited to military planning exercises in the past. 

Organisations like MIRI and other EA organizations that get a good portion of their budget from billionaires are well connected to speak to influential people behind closed doors. 

Meanwhile, the emergence of intense cybersecurity competition has made chipmaking and computer software more opaque than ever, and there is plenty of room for it to be strangled further, merely by the threat of individual hackers (let alone individual Manhattan-projects).

While the threat is high it still hasn't made the NSA privot from being more interested in defense and getting companies to fix vulnerabilities then it's interested in exploiting those vulnerabilities.

Also, the publicly known history of nuclear weapons isn't all that terrible. According to Thomas Schelling's foundational book Arms and Influence (1966), nuclear escalations are effectively two nuclear powers playing a game of chicken, ramping up the odds of nuclear war until one of the sides folds.

Thomas Schelling didn't know that if Arkhipov wouldn't have stopped the submarine commander from launching nuclear weapons, that those would have actually be used in the cuban missle crisis.

When it comes to understand our current capability regarding nuclear weapons Dominic Cummings who did have inside insight summaries the current state in the UK in his substack:

If you think I’m probably too pessimistic, then ponder this comment by Professor Allison who has spent half a century in these circles: ‘Over the past decade, I have yet to meet a senior member of the US national security team who had so much as read the official national security strategies’ (emphasis added). NB. he is referring to reading the official strategies, not the explanations of why they are partly flawed!

Even if you think we weren't just lucky with nuclear safety it's quite different then AGI risk. 

Biosafety seems more similar. We are two years into a pandemic that likely exists because of people screweing up biosafety and there a lot of publish pressure against stating it as a basic fact. In a world where it's hard to admit basic facts, there's we lack the political will to shut down other gain-of-function research. 

Shutting down gain-of-function research after a catastroph that made us all suffer looks like a problem that would be comparably easier than regulating AGI but powerful forces are not coordinating to make that happen.

If you change the analogy to developing nuclear weapons instead of launching them, the picture becomes much grimmer.

(this post is empty, which I think might be a bug. When I dig into the version-history with my admin-powers I see it was recently updated to delete all content, and want to doublecheck if that was intentional)