The argument the person was saying is that we already have big bombs that do catastrophic damage, the R&D is how do you make those bombs more targeted so they have less collateral damage.

Now whether that will actually lead to less deaths or will just cause the bombs to be used in places they otherwise wouldn’t be used with the same amount of collateral damage is unknown.

But it brings up a bit of a utilitarian dilemma of “is it ethical to work on weapons if it leads to an overall reduction of collateral damage to civilians”

It doesn’t have a necessarily correct answer